The mediated sequential juxtaposed images appearing in the Belgian comic "Suske and Wiske: Kaapse Kaalkoppen" (2004) react to and coalesce visually with a host of other typologies which inform particular and popular readings of Nelson Mandela within the wider discourse of tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation. To analyse "Kaapse Kaalkoppen" is therefore to enter a gigantic archive of perceptions, normative assumptions and stores of sense-making. The visuality of the comic genre makes it easier to unravel multiple and intersecting strands of visual and verbal expressions in order to throw some light on the uneven ways in which transnational collaborations make it on the one hand possible for everybody to admire Nelson Mandela, while on the other make it impossible to take the example he sets seriously.