Tag Archives: Craig Thompson

From Habibi to Tezuka, With Ono In Between

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It’s rare to get an invitation to complain about comics, so I’m going to jump in with enthusiasm, although I don’t intentionally try to read crappy comics so I can only pick out a few comics which disappointed me.

Although it’s already been dogpiled on Hooded Utilitarian, I want to talk first about Craig Thompson’s Habibi, one of the most frustrating books I’ve read in the past two years—partly because of its high level of artistic skill. It’s not that Thompson uses every cliché about Arabs and the Middle East (child marriage, prostitution, harems, slavery, despotism); this itself is par for the course in Western pop culture, just a difference of degree, not essential type, from thousands of representations including Christopher Nolan’s terrorism-themed Batman trilogy with its civilization-hating, don’t-call-them-Muslims League of Shadows. What’s frustrating about Habibi, instead, is its relentlessly pedagogical nature, alternating these stereotypical representations with its “real” storybook-Bible lessons about the Quran and the Arabic language. On the one hand Wanatolia is an Orientalist fairytale land, and yet thanks to these lessons, it’s also the “real” Middle East—it’s like suddenly getting “educational” segments about Christianity in the middle of one of those fantasy manga set in an otherwise generic Medieval Europe, like Claymore or Berserk. Thompson is obviously attempting to use his positive book-larnin’ about Islam as a counter for the negative images of Arabs, but as a result, Habibi just falls into the tired idea that “Islam in the answer” to everything in the Middle East, a belief shared, ironically, by both right-wing Western Islamophobes and right-wing Muslims. Thompson does introduce a postcolonial element with the late-in-story discovery that evil white men are behind the evil powers of Wanatolia, but on the whole the series does nothing to counter stereotypes of the Middle East, even when Thompson’s trying to show the good side. People who think that “Arabs were savages before Islam” might find confirmation for their beliefs in Habibi. Even the supposedly uplifting idea that “Islam, Christianity & Judaism have the same roots” can’t be embraced by any really secular liberals or leftists, since it expels atheists, as well as members of every other religious tradition, from the common tree of humanity. In reality, Habibi, like Thompson’s other works that I’ve read, is more than anything about male sexuality. This is where it really succeeds in expressing its theme, although unlike in Blankets and Carnet de Voyage (the obvious prequel to Habibi with its sidelong sketches of veiled women in Morocco) there’s no one “Thompson” figure—rather there’s two, Zam and the Sultan.

It’s hard to think of a most overrated manga, because most manga gets no mainstream critical coverage and most manga fans are completely fine with that. One exception is Natsume Ono, who has received a lot of Western press for her minimalistic art style and indy-comix-ish stories. To her great credit, Ono has engaged with her overseas fans in return, appearing as a guest at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in 2011. Which makes it unfortunate that, beneath her breezy art, most of Ono’s stories are so conventional. Not Simple, her first work published in English and also set in America, is typical. Ian, the adult survivor of child abuse, is a bishonen Christ figure, giving his body up to the desires of evil men and deserving women without ever expressing any desires of his own, except for family (to find his sister). Some critics seem to have taken Ian’s childishly innocent demeanor as a serious depiction of the lack of affect suffered by abuse victims, but it’s really shojo-manga-esque wish fulfillment, a male figure who’s just a handsome doll who needs a hug. Even the conflation of the American setting with homosexuality and broken families follows a formula established in ’80s manga like Banana Fish and Cipher, where such hot-button issues are depicted as ‘Western’ ills. Ono’s fascination with nonthreatening guys is also evident in Ristorante Paradiso and its sequel Gente, about an Italian restaurant whose waitstaff is composed entirely of handsome, glasses-wearing men in their 50s and 60s. Nicoletta, the 21-year-old protagonist of Ristorante, gets a crush on Claudio, a sweet, gentlemanly 50ish divorcee, who’s too physically weak to resist her advances—if only he weren’t still pining for his ex-wife! Although Ono attempts to write some real character interaction between Nicoletta and her mother, the male characters in Ristorante all lack any inner life or any flaws (apart from ‘cute’ flaws). The result is lots of eye candy and dojinshi bait, but Ono’s resourcefulness in finding and exploiting the oyajicon/meganecon fetish market does not a great manga make. I simply haven’t read an Ono manga yet which believably depicts any serious emotion or character development, which is why my favorite Ono manga is her very first one, La Quinta Camera, a slight European apartment-complex comedy manga which can basically be summed up as Ristorante Paradiso without the romance; here, Ono’s whimsy and Western-exoticism is pleasantly on display, unburdened by attempting to get ‘serious.’

This writeup also wouldn’t be complete without critiquing the halo that perpetually surrounds the work of Osamu Tezuka. It’s not that Tezuka is bad; even his lesser manga, like Swallowing the Earth, The Book of Human Insects (a character portrait so sexist Dave Sim could have written it) or Message to Adolf, provide hours of entertainment, twisty storytelling and visual invention. (Incidentally, Tezuka feels like a strong influence on Thompson’s Habibi.) But, like the way that American comics critics used to deem Lone Wolf and Cub the only manga worthy of serious consideration, it’s frustrating to see the “God of Manga” get so much attention, and so many new translations, while so many other classic mangaka linger in obscurity. What about Leiji Matsumoto, Go Nagai, Riyoko Ikeda, George Akiyama, Sanpei Shirato, Shinji Wada? Yes, we now have translations of Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Kazuo Umezu, Hiroshi Hirata and Shigeru Mizuki, to the great praise of their publishers, but what about so many other classics, like the ones described in Takeo Udagawa’s Manga Zombie? Must Tezuka always be the William Shakespeare of manga, with everyone else from his period in his shadow? Does the Tezuka name really = reliable $$$ from manga buyers? Admittedly, one of the reasons publishers license Tezuka is that he liked to create self-contained works of only a few hundred pages, switching from project to project rather than the “draw the same comic for 20 years”, 1000+ page tactic of newspaper strip creators and many manga artists. Also, it’s a BIG help that Tezuka Productions, the rightsholders to Tezuka’s work, are very eager to work with licensors despite the small size of the American market; the extreme example of the opposite is Riyoko Ikeda’s famous Rose of Versailles, which, it’s an open secret in the manga industry, has never been licensed because Ikeda’s company wants a ridiculously large licensing fee. But my point is: I want to see more from other classic creators.

 

As for the mainstream comics industry, my biggest complaint about it is, of course, that it’s become nothing but a license farm for Hollywood, producing movie pitches in easily digestible comic form. This doesn’t just apply to Marvel and DC, but to all the companies trying to follow in their footsteps. The glut of miniseries, the desperate chase after movie options (which destroyed Tokyopop), the prevalence of noir and superhero themes…it all adds up to an incredibly boring comics market from which the real action has long ago moved on to Kickstarter and self-published webcomics. Convince me otherwise.

 

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Jason Thompson is the artist of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories and the author of King of RPGs (with Victor Hao). He also wrote Manga: The Complete Guide.

 

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Eddie Campbell on Persepolis and Habibi

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Eddie Campbell had a long comment in which he talked about Persepolis, Habibi, the relationship between art and writing, and other matters. It seemed a shame to leave it at the end of the comment thread, so I thought I’d highlight it here. (I’ve tweaked formatting on a couple of links, but otherwise it’s unedited.)

(in response to Mike)

Matthias wrote, in his opening paragraph : “one is perhaps fooled into believing that the form is finally receiving its due, that we have moved beyond the facile.. “story vs. drawing” discussions of yesteryear.”

And then you entered into a “story vs drawing discussion”.

Such a discussion belongs to the arena of comic books where the convention is that different tasks are assigned to different practitioners (you show that you still dwell in this arena when you refer to Ditko and Kirby). And even if they are not so assigned, this consideration of separateness is now ingrained. An aficionado of the comic books follows his favourite artist from one job to the next, hoping that he will occasionally be teamed with a partner worthy of him.

An essential demand of the newer kind of comics under discussion, in which a unified whole is presumed, is that we find a more apt way of talking about them. Satrapi’s Persepolis, when it opens, is the first person narrative of a ten year old girl. The drawing is perfectly right for the story; it expresses the world view of a ten year old girl living anywhere. Characters are simplified in a way that is charmingly naive and perspective is nearly non-existent. Whether Satrapi is capable of a different kind of drawing is not relevant to a discussion of the book. The artist is not a musician being hired by a symphony orchestra that expects her to be able to play the whole classical repertoire. She is giving us a record of her personal experience. She has a natural grasp of what is important in telling a story, which unfolds with simplicity. By the end of the first book we are surprised by how much information we have taken in, as we weren’t aware of taking it in. We thought we were listening to a child talking.

The authentic voice of the original can be appreciated by comparing it with the more professionally knowing treatment of the material in the animated movie parts of which are
excruciatingly embarrassing.

The professionals who worked on it will go onto their next gig and we may hope they will be teamed with material more suited to their outlook.

As to Habibi, Matthias shows that there is nothing in Thompson’s art that is not in the overall meaning of the book. To praise the art separately is the reflex of the critic who has unconsciously recognized the ‘generosity of intent’ that is all over the work and doesn’t want to end on a rude rebuke. That intent is as much the CONtent as anything in the book that appears to be about the Arabian world. Looking at it again two months after I first opened the work, what I see is a cartoon romantic fantasy. I’m incredulous that it has inspired so much argument, or that in a medium that produces a mountain of crap over and over every year anybody could think this is among the “worst” that comics has to offer in 2011.

As always, the criticism against Thompson is that he didn’t make the book that thinking folk wanted him to make. I recall that the title of the TCj review of Blankets in 2003 (2004?-Tcj is never timely) consisted of those words more or less (‘Why Blankets isn’t the book… ?) Here it’s that Habibi is not a complex poem about modern life as reflected in the travails of the middle east, and also he didn’t draw it more in the manner of Blutch.

I remain however dubious about the remark that there is an implicit assertion that the book is more than broad melodrama. I thought that Nadim’s observation that there was more of Disney’s Nights than Burton’s was apt. And the ecological message isn’t more profound than ‘we need to look after the world because it’s where we live’.

While the lavish attention to tangential information raised hope of profundity, some critics have had trouble with him breaking up the linearity of the story unnecessarily. But I see that as just a Tarantino thing. A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink. There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go. Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting. I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work. We are a society that is weary with it all. We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history. We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom. Lists. the Months of the calendar of pregnancy, the names of the rooms in the palace, the planets, the nights of Sheherezade, the walk-ons of the Cheshire cat, the ninjas of Frank Miller, the Goddess Bahuchara Mata. Witty juxtapostions: the prophet at the farthest limit of human understanding plays out over the slave putting a spanner in the works in the Rube-Goldbergian plumbing inside the heart of Wanatolia. it’s a play-bauble being turned around and viewed from every possible angle. It’s not the ink line that is the virtuoso show, but the cartoon invention, the prodigious flow of ideas. The ink line serves the demands of clarity, of the ‘control’ that has been discussed above, and it speeds in comparison to Blutch’s because that also is demanded of it. It is liquid, and the ideas run as though out of a tap that has been left on, spilling out the supply of water necessary to quench the thirst of a careening dash through this Arabian fantasy.

And as with Satrapi, that is why Thompson’s drawing is inseparable form everything else in the book. There is certainly much that I find odd in it, including a coy Middle American sense of humour, as in the farting little man in the palace. Isn’t farting viewed differently in Arabia? And the convoluted treatment of sex in Thompson’s work will certainly one day attract a separate study.

The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #26

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As I’ve mentioned, the last few issues of the Marston/Peter run have been tough going. Marston was, at this point in the series, very unfortunately dead, and it seems likely that at least some of the scripts were being ghosted. In any case, quality fell off something fierce.

I’m pleased to say that things have picked up somewhat with #26, though. The stories are not especially ambitious, but they do seem to be written by Marston, in all his loopy, kinky glory. Giant women enslaving their menfolk?
 

Check. Insane tiger-lady using pressure points to control men’s wills?
 

Yes. Evil treacherous green men attacking virtuous intergalactic golden policewomen?
 

Yay!
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So since Marston’s in his bonds and all is right with the world, I thought I might try using issue #26 to see if I couldn’t address some of the questions Matthias raises in this post about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Specifically, Matthias argued that critics need to address not only ideological issues, but also aesthetic ones — or, perhaps more accurately, that critics should address ideological issues through aesthetic ones.

Matthias approaches both issues of aesthetics and ideology in Thompson’s work through a metaphor of control. For Matthias, Thompson’s art is unsurprising, slick, and overly pat:

the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed.

Matthias adds:

Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

So above is Thompson’s mound of garbage. Let’s look, in contrast, at an image of Harry Peter’s from Wonder Woman #26.

To start with maybe the most obvious differences, Thompson’s mound of garbage is (as Matthias notes) much more carefully, and even classically composed than Peter’s scene of quasi-classically dressed women. Thompson makes careful use of negative space; the area in front of the garbage dump is blank, setting off the brick-a-brack. The grouping of man, woman, and boat is placed up to one side, isolating it dramatically. The arrangement comes across as painterly, or perhaps as dramatically awe-inspiring in the manner of Doré. The image seems frozen or posed; a dramatic landscape to be placed on a wall and (as Matthias says) admired.

Peter’s illustration is also stiff and still — the guards stand straight off to the side; Wonder Woman stands straight in the center, and the two giants also seem oddly rigid. However, the stiffness here isn’t painterly or dramatic; it’s awkward. The figures aren’t grouped to take advantage of negative space; instead, their just dropped against the disturbing pale green background. They end up looking like paper dolls; you almost want to get a scissors and cut them out. Where Thompson’s drawing seems elaborately finished, sufficient unto itself, Peter’s beckons you to take part — not least by presenting Wonder Woman herself as a puppet, literally manipulated by a cord attached to her neck.

These differences carry over to the use of line. As Matthias says, Thompson’s inking is so sure as to be almost diagrammatic, most noticeably in his calligraphy.

The image above is for the most part bilaterally symmetrical, and the repetition of shapes is careful and more than a little cold. This is miles away from the tradition of Japanese calligraphy, where imperfection — the sign of the writer’s hand — is such a central part of the aesthetic.

Zen Circle by Tanchu Tarayama

 
Peter is certainly capable of graceful lines (check out the eyebrows.)
 

But, as with the composition, he’s not afraid of awkwardness either. The clunky wire connecting the box to Wonder Woman’s neck manages to look so stiff and odd in part because Peter doesn’t keep the two lines forming it an even distance from each other; they bulge out and come together to make an organic metalness. Peter also uses inky blots and daubs almost at random. The patterns on the chief giant’s winged boots, for example, are so joyously messy that they almost fail to parse as feathers. Similarly, the motion lines by the ax are thick and juicy enough that the giant seems ready to grab them. If Thompson’s line is precise, creating a definite, calibrated world, Peter’s line is has a bulbous, erratic grace, which constantly threatening to pull his figures down into their constituent globs.
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I (still!) haven’t read Habibi, so I’m tentative about making wide statements about how the linework might relate to Thompson’s narrative themes and vice versa. So I’ll piggy back on Matthias’ insights, and point out some possible connections that he doesn’t quite tease out. For example, this from Matthias is suggestive:

In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

Matthias seems to see the obsessive sexual transgression as outside of, or opposed to the neatness of the surface…but in fact, I wonder if they’re not all of a piece. As anyone knows who has tried to read de Sade, sadism is really boring. It’s repetitive and obsessive and overly organized; counting whip strokes with the same kind of regular blandness with which Thompson makes pen strokes. Moreover, the very composedness of the junk pile, recalls Laura Mulvey’s comments about the pictorial autonomy of Hollywood cinema:

But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.

If Orientalism is a voyeuristic phantasy, Thompson’s self-sufficient style might be seen as a means to control and regiment that fantasy — a way to keep everything in its place.

Harry Peter’s art, on the other hand, is much less successful at creating an illusion of containment. Wonder Woman’s look over her shoulder seems deliberately to break the plane of the image just as the figures seem cut loose, floating in front of their own background. Power and hierarchy break apart into knowing glances and wiggling blobs; are these lines pretending to be women, or women pretending to be Peter’s? It all seems staged, not as an image for singular consumption, but as a dress up play in which each viewer and each line is invited to assist in limning each role. In its stiff, awkward way, Peter’s style embraces polymorphous perversion. His line encourages not (or not just) scopophilia, but a plethora of interrupted, indeterminate, pleasures of position and pretense. Aesthetically or ideologically, the line draws you in not as master, but as subject.
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Update: The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

DWYCK: Open Sesame

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The critical reception of Craig Thompson’s major new book Habibi has been somewhat dismaying. Sometimes, and — I am happy to say — more than occasionally these days, one reads comics criticism of such quality that one is perhaps fooled into believing that the form is finally receiving its due, that we have moved beyond the facile ideological critiques and “story vs. drawing” discussions of yesteryear. But then something like this book comes out and reality bites.

To start with the former issue, parts of the comics intelligentsia seem to be developing an unhealthy obsession with ideological readings of comics. To the extent where a given work is weighed entirely according to an ethical consensus and found wanting because of “problematic” content, most frequently of racist, sexist, or politically offensive nature. Anything else that the work might have to offer tends to be ignored and the notion that something might be good, even great, despite – or even because – of its problems seems inadmissible.

This site has become affected by such thinking in the last year or so to the extent that opening a random article will more likely than not bring the goods. Examples include the endless arguments over Robert Crumb’s racism (in which ‘satire’ has been held up as an inefficacious fig leaf by his defenders), the overblown accusations of sexism directed against Eddie Campbell in our roundtable on his work, the rather one-sided focus on Chester Brown’s choice to depersonalize the prostitutes he depicts in Paying for It, or most recently the discussion of Craig Thompson’s Orientalism in Habibi, which perhaps found its most vicious form in Suat’s review of the book.

I am not necessarily denying that the works in question, or indeed comics history more broadly, are haunted by such issues, nor am I arguing against choosing them as an avenue of criticism — Nadim Damluji’s examination of Habibi is a good example of a considerate approach, while Noah’s obliteration of certain recent DC books offers righteous polemic. The problem, rather, is that such criticism is often informed by a kind of ideological Puritanism that has gained traction in our current culture of taking offense — a Puritanism often blind to aesthetic quality, resistant to uncomfortable discourse, and prone to censorious action.

In the case of Habibi, it seems to me facile and unproductive to harp for too long on its sexism and Orientalism. Yes, it offers both and it suffers from it, but why does that have to be the full story? It is simultaneously, and obviously, a book so generous in intent and so voracious of ambition, that such criticism risks coming off as petty and, more importantly, ends up lacking in resonance.

Does Habibi successfully realize its sprawling ambition? No, it is a bit of mess, frankly, almost claustrophobic in its efforts to cram meaning into a formal structure unprepared for it. There is a distinct unease in the work between its conceptual and formal concerns, an attempt to stretch intellectually within a cartoon framework driven by stereotype and concerned with stylistic élan.

As was the case with Thompson’s paragon Will Eisner when he switched to graphic novel mode in the late seventies, Habibi is marked by an insistence on the value of the archetypes of traditional cartooning as a vehicle for the communication of sophisticated ideas. But where Eisner was suggesting untapped potential, Thompson’s cartooning is retrospective, barely transcending pastiche; where Eisner was concerned with paring down his visual storytelling to eliminate the kind of stylistic excess he had practiced in his classic Spirit strips, Thompson has his cake and wants to eat it too, letting his line run away with the narrative; most importantly however, Eisner’s mature cartooning, for all its faults, is animated by a genuine, mostly unpretentious effort to communicate truthfully, whereas with Thompson, whatever earnestness motivated him, the work smothered in conceptual intent.

Which brings me to the other issue I have with the critical reception of Habibi, and comics in general: the lack of sensitivity to how the visuals are integrally determinant of the work. Critics tend not to look beyond the surface qualities of the drawing in comics, and then proceed to discuss whatever conceptual issues are at stake without devoting much attention to how those issues are manifested visually. Even a cursory examination of the reviews published so far of Habibi should demonstrate this. Only a few have been entirely positive and several have been strongly negative in the conceptual assessment of the book and its ‘writing,’ but the majority of the reviewers have nevertheless taken time to commend the ‘art.’

Despite his strong misgivings, Damluji praises Thompson’s “stunning artwork,” and Fatemeh Fakhraie — while stating that she has no choice but to hate the book — “admits” that it is “beautifully drawn,” but does not engage that part of her experience much further. In their ambivalent takes at the Comics Journal Chris Mautner and Rob Clough both call the cartooning “visually stunning,” while the latter adds “amazingly beautiful” and praises Thompson’s “astonishing” attention to detail; Charles Hatfield, for his part, describes his drawing as “gorgeous” in his equally equivocal assessment in the same place.

In his notes on the book, Sean T. Collins isolates the “art” in one of fifteen bullet points, calling it “lush and lovely on a surface level,” and describing how Thompson’s line “swoops and curves in a fashion he’s explicitly compared to handwriting.” In her critical examination, Tansim Qutait also picks up on this, describing the book as a “…beautifully crafted volume, the ornately decorated pages broadening possibilities for expression in the graphic novel form, as the calligraphy adds an innovative third dimension to the duality of image/text,” without further detailing why or how that would be the case (calligraphy and comics have a long common history). And Michel Faber of The Guardian grandstands against a paper tiger that would have serious comics aesthetes scoff at technical chops, calling the book “an orgy of art for its own sake.”

You cannot argue with taste, but the uniformity of the reaction strikes me as notable. Belying Faber’s theory, comics have generally been and continue to be valued for the technical accomplishment of the art. Thompson is certainly technically accomplished, but these critics seem to overlook that his virtuosity “…is a conventional sort of virtuosity,” here used “in the service of a conventional exoticism,” as Robyn Creswell puts it in his New York Times review of the book. Or as Suat describes it more bluntly, it “…lacks the emotive and stylistic range to capture the pain and suffering he is depicting (almost everything takes on the sensibility of an exercise in virtuosity or an educational diagram).”

Rarely, if ever, does Thompson’s visualizations of his characters support the book’s implicit assertion that it is more than broad melodrama (which it nevertheless is, or could have been, but more on that presently). Wide-eyed Dodola alternates between wonder, despondency, anger, and bliss through the book, as if following Suat’s educational diagram.

The implied complexity of her emotion as she finally proposes a sexual union with her former charge Zam, after many years of separation, is for example undermined entirely by a banal progression from surprise to pity and doubt that simultaneously overstates and flattens the plea for redemption we are supposed to feel. Doughboy Zam’s evasive maneuvers and flitting baby eyes — supposedly a reckoning after years of denying his sexuality to the extent of self-castration — is not any more persuasive.

Secondary characters fare even worse: as several critics have noted, there is nothing to distinguish the sultan beyond central casting, which makes him hard to care about even as a villain. (This is emphatically not the case with the better of Thompson’s nineteenth-century models in Orientalism: compare for instance Delacroix’ chilling portrayal of the tyrant Sardanapalus). And the characterization of walk-on characters, such as the slaves encountered in the market by the fisherman Noah, is often embarrassingly rote, as if Thompson were not even trying.

As previously noted, I suppose he is following Eisner here, but his proposition that these stereotypes — the stuff of kitsch illustration — can carry his ambitious attempt at reconciling typology and psychological realism is unconvincing.


The same goes for his much praised ‘calligraphic’ line. His explication of the word ‘Bismillah’ in the Qu’uran for example is deftly wrought, but his examples sit uncomfortably on the page, one diagram after the next, rather than being woven together harmoniously the way one encounters in good calligraphy. And the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed. Compare Thompson’s other great paragon, Blutch, who for all his faults invariably retains a spontaneity of rendering, a reflexive laxity of control that enables surprise error and insight.

From Blutch's Le Petit Christian (collected 1998)

If this comparison with one of the masters seems unfair, one need look no further than a considerably less facile cartoonist than Thompson, who also just published a big book of comics (Big Questions): Anders Nilsen. Though less secure, often laborious, and marked by errors, his line moves with a nervous jumpiness that makes us wonder what meaning it holds, where it is going.

From Anders Nilsen's Big Questions (collected 2011)

Thompson’s range, similarly, is limited. He uses the same lines to delineate the curve of a sand dune and bodily effluvium.


Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

Also, Thompson’s depiction of the great modern metropolis of Wanatolia is bereft of the grimy presence he describes elsewhere, a lifeless construction, all unpacked from the same box: one might argue that this carries a conceptual point about the barrenness of Empire, but it still fails to evoke the environment our heroes will be moving through for the rest of the chapter. Blandness also requires suggestiveness to be recognized as such.

At the risk of repeating myself, my overarching point about comics criticism here is that if one wishes to criticize Habibi’s writing and subject matter, it seems a missed opportunity not to recognize that the problems identified inhere as much in the visuals as in anything else. Merely to describe the art as ‘beautiful’ and otherwise ignore its importance to the work is ultimately doing Thompson — and more fundamentally the comics form itself — a disservice.

Thompson’s deadening control of line and resort to stereotype are part and parcel of the deliberation he brings to his writing and conceptual presentation: everything is there for a reason and he makes sure we know it, even if we sometimes wonder whether that reason is particularly well digested. And in a way you cannot but admire Thompson for his ambition and efforts — Habibi is a smorgasbord of ideas, generously laid out for the reader by a highly talented cartoonist whose enthusiasm is certainly infectious but also, and ultimately, smothering.

Where the work really shines for me is in the passages marked less by overt intent and more by instinct, which was also the case in his previous, autobiographical book, Blankets, in which the uneasy and tentative, if also undeveloped, treatment of the author’s relationship with his brother was by far the most compelling aspect of the story. In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

In Blankets the same themes were treated much more timidly; here, there is a fascinating excess on display. This ties in to the very masculine display of Thompson’s brushwork — executed in what he has described as the “virile” tradition of Blutch and other European cartoonists, from Edmond Baudoin to Christophe Blain (more on that here) — and for which he has employed the tired metaphor of the mark as divine seed more than once, including at the beginning of Habibi. Importantly, it also energizes nervously Thompson’s patently male gaze. A more mature exploration of this tension — a tension fully worthy of his talent and aspiration — would seem to me a fruitful direction for his future work.
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Editor’s Note: This is part of an occasional roundtable on Orientalism and Habibi.

Update by Noah: I try to respond to some of Matthias’ points here.

A Conversation about Habibi’s Orientalism with Craig Thompson

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Around the time I was writing my critique of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi a strange thing happened: I got to know Craig Thompson. Through a mutual acquaintance and a series of chance convention run-ins at San Diego Comic Con and the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, we became casual acquaintances. While writing up my honest reaction to Habibi I decided to burden our new friendship with the weight of criticism by calling to ask him a few clarifying questions. The result expanded the scheduled ten minutes of chat time in to a much longer conversation about Orientalism, feminism, cultural appropriation, the burden of relationships, and the thematic successes of Habibi. The only thing I’d like to add before presenting our conversation is something that should become evident to you while reading it: Craig Thompson is a supreme class act. Not only did he take time out of an extraordinarily busy schedule to directly confront my criticism of a book he spent over seven years making, but he did it with an amount of grace and humility that I didn’t know was possible.

 

Nadim Damluji: I want to start by talking about Orientalism, which it appears you were conscious of during the process of making Habibi. During the creation process, did you ever second guess your ability the distinguish between using Orientalism as a playground versus simply reproducing it?

Craig Thompson: I don’t want to repeat myself, but I keep saying that the book was a conscious mash up between the sacred medium of holy books like the Qu’ran and the Bible and the trashy medium of Comic Books. And I was keeping in sight this sort of unpretentious, self-deprecating, low-brow, motivation of comics.

As for the charge of Orientalism, I knew it was going to come up no matter what, so why not embrace it? More broadly, I’ve always liked genres that have a degree of exploitation to them like horror films. They play on these really crass and appealing elements that also exist in 1,0001 Nights or French Orientalist paintings. It was fun to think of Orientalism as a sensationalized genre like Cowboys and Indians, which is a very poor representation of the reality of the American West, but fun to think of as a fantastical genre. And at this point in history, most people who watch things in the Cowboys and Indians genre totally realize it paints an inaccurate image of what the West was like … well actually you know there are people who watch cowboy films and think that’s what it must have been like. In fact, I’m pretty sure George W. Bush is one of those guys whose political beliefs are shaped by those films.

 

ND: I’m familiar with French Orientalist paintings and it feels that you are expanding on the snapshots those painting provide — like the scenes of Habibi that take place in the Slave Market or in the Sultan’s Palace — but those images are very loaded with this implicit “White Man’s Burden” element. In other words, we need to save the Arab women from the Arab men, and that’s how the French imagined “the Orient.” Did you ever fear that you were carrying the baggage of the medium by imitating that style? Specifically, I’m curious to know how you set a limit for yourself when sexualizing Dodola to avoid reducing her to simply another exotic Arab woman in Western literature?

CT: I wanted to sexualize Dodola, because I wanted the reader to experience her through the lustful gaze of all men, and primarily the gaze of Zam. Hopefully the lust of Zam is transmitted in those drawings, and maybe at times the reader identifies with it or other times feels disgusted by it or ashamed by it, which mirrors the experience Zam was having. Throughout the book even the Orientalism is a commentary on exoticization. Which isn’t just about any specific culture or ethnicity, but a stereotype of what men do in general or what a lot of people do in romantic relationships. I’m examining American guilt and I’m examining male guilt. In male guilt there is so much of this energy of objectification and idolatry and eroticization. When I think of those French paintings I don’t see the “White Man’s Burden” of the French needing to save the beautiful Arabic women from their oppressors, I see the opposite: French men swarming in a perverted sort of way and trying to make fantasy reproductions of what those ladies look like under their hijab. I don’t think it paints the colonists in a positive manner, it makes them seem like these creepy little voyeurs.

 

ND: Especially because so many of those paintings were created without the painters actually going to the Middle East…

CT: Yes, exactly.

ND: Which makes those paintings problematic because those landscapes are imagined but purporting to portray reality. You’ve talked previously about trusting your subconscious in the creative process to guide you in navigating taboo. That makes for two distinct parts of Habibi: the subconscious imagined landscapes element that is the bedrock of Zam and Dodola’s love story, which you’ve noted was created aware of Orientalism, and then the research heavy elements of the book which deal more with the Qur’an. What I’m afraid of is that readers will take the more imagined and playful parts and give them the same level of plausibility as the clearly research heavy sections of your book. Now obviously you can’t be responsible for all your readers…

CT: That’s an understandable concern. For me it seems, on some level, a little silly that people keep talking about and examining Habibi as if it were some academic book, which it definitely isn’t. I keep labeling it as a “fairy tale” because that is definitely my intent. As much as an artist I want to strive to create comics as art or as literature, I’m still at my core just a cartoonist. Cartoonists want to make these exaggerated caricatured playful ridiculous irreverent drawings in some ways. I do feel reverent and respectful to elements of Islamic faith, but through the whole book there is a sense of play and self-awareness around the fact it’s still just a comic book. It’s super heroes in some ways. It’s Star Wars. But maybe the energy to focus on Habibi as an academic text is coming from outside the comics medium, where people are surprised to see more mature elements in a comic. In some ways the dialogue should also revolve back to the medium itself, which still has a satiric intent. I hesitate to say that, because I don’t want to say that Habibi is satiric towards any faith or religion. But comics are this sort of a self-deprecating medium inherently.

 

ND: I can speak to the academic tendency! For me, a lot of that has to do with the packaging. It’s this big tome and it’s by “Craig Thompson, author of Blankets,” and it feels a lot more “literary” just by virtue of packaging and the Pantheon label than more crass comics do. Do you ever feel a burden as one of a very few comics artist that is sold in Barnes & Nobles as well as local independent comic shops? You have those two worlds of fans that you have to appease and respond to.

CT: I feel privileged to be in that position. Since I’ve started my career in comics I always wanted to extend to a broader audience. I always felt that comics as a medium was untapped in terms of audience potential and that I was being held back by a lot of the retailers, distributors, and the attitude of fans in the industry. I definitely wanted to embrace this little fad in publishing of “graphic novels” because it feels like a window to extend comics to a bigger audience. I was excited to bring comics outside of the weird collector’s world. You know there’s been these different explosions in comic’s history of interest in the medium, but they’ve always seemed real tied up with the speculator culture. For me the bookstore is taking it back to the mass arts roots, like the Daily Newspaper, something that a common reader has access too and stumbles on and not just sequestered to a little cult Indie following the way an obscure punk record store would be. And I love buying a lot of those “tome” like products…

 

ND: Me too! When you’ve talked previously about about the goal for Blankets being 500-pages before you even had the story, I get that as a collector and fan of books in general.

CT: But I would like to create more modest projects too. Maybe naturally Habibi had to be this kind of book as a follow up to Blankets, because there was so much expectation of this as my “sophomore effort.” I don’t know, I think it also happened because of the emotional space I was in at that point in my life. I was being reclusive and in my Salinger phase. It would have been strange to emerge from that with something less.

 

ND: You’ve mentioned Joe Sacco as an influence. I don’t know if you understood it this way, but I found a lot of the Qur’anic elements to be a more Sacco-like project that had you looking at the footnotes of Suras and Haddith to pull out a really interesting research thread. Those are the parts of Habibi that I felt were most in your voice. I wonder if you ever had more of a desire to work in that vein as opposed to fiction? And jumping off that, our mutual friend Edward Said writes about the need for authors to “catalogue personal inventory” which in a very basic sense is a call for the author to put themselves in relation to the text in writing which creates a space for readers to know where the author is coming from. This is especially crucial in writing about the “East” from the “West,” which Sacco seems aware of by putting himself in his comics with obscured glasses; he is drawing in his subject position. Have you ever thought more about if post-Habibi you’d attempt a project more explicitly like that?

CT: You know what they say about dream analysis is that every character in your dream is a role that is played by yourself. You have to look at your dreams like “why am I stabbing myself with a butcher knife?” and you can’t judge any character because they are all representations of you. I feel similar about fiction. I can see parts of myself in pretty much every character in Habibi, even the ugly ones. For example there is one of the eunuchs that is creepy, more bad cop hijra, and I tried to draw that as a gross drag version of myself. I thought, what would I look like if I was a hijra and I focused it on my features. So there you have a character who is supposed to be a ridiculous hijra version of myself. Elsewhere I certainly saw myself in the fisherman, Noah. The Sultan, a lot of my female readers are disturbed and disgusted by him, but most of my male readers think he’s hilarious and identify him as a caricature of male sexuality in general. I can see that. I was playing that up for laughs for myself, like this is the way guys think a lot of the time.

 

ND: It’s really illuminating to hear that. The Sultan’s one of the more problematic characters for me so it’s interesting to hear you recast him in that light. With the fisherman, and the recurring focus on the Abraham story from both the Bible and Qur’an, it seems that Habibi is a way for you to explore sacrifice and the role it plays in our lives. It might be hard to articulate, but why was that such an important thread for you at the time you were making Habibi? I mean the role of sacrifice in relationships must have been important if you agreed that you were going to spend 7 years on a project dwelling on it.

CT: Well that definitely coming from a more Christian angle. That’s something I was thinking about while working on the book. Other than obviously the core Abraham story, sacrifice overall is a bigger theme in Christianity and the shame and guilt associated with having someone sacrifice their life for you. But, personally at the inception of Habibi I was processing being a caretaker in a relationship. I was in a long romantic relationship where I was also a caretaker and those are conflicting roles: to be a parent and a lover simultaneously, which is what Dodola is to Zam. I’m getting off track… I was thinking a lot about how much these sort of guilt feelings that shape my spirituality are purely about coming from a Christian background. As I talked with a lot of Muslim friends I didn’t find they shared that same core guilt and shame and sense of martyrdom in their faith. Of course, if you look at Islamaphobic observations of Islam people think of suicide bombers and jihad. So there it becomes an idea of sacrifice and martyrdom.

 

ND: As a Muslim myself, I feel the Qur’an is more about exploring love than extreme sacrifice. Although, there is Ramadan. Either way, I do really like that thread and how you weave it throughout Habibi. I want to switch gears to talk about Wanatolia and the decision to make it a timeless city, and how that factors into the end of the comic. I was hoping you could articulate how you had the decision for Dodola and Zam to return to Wanatolia and the reveal that it is modern in the western conception, even though at the heart of it is this palace which is backwards.

CT: In earlier drafts of the Sultan’s palace, I was mediating on the Bush administration and feeling like it was this sort of clueless world that existed outside of our own society. That was in the aftermath of 9/11 when you would see Bush off golfing somewhere. And certainly some Sultans during the Ottoman Empire have been critiqued historically for being clueless what was happening in society. That’s how the Ottoman Empire fell, the Sultans were living in a hedonistic cushion. By hedonistic I don’t mean they were sleeping with all their courtesans … it’s just the role of Americans and rich people in general that are totally oblivious of the state of the world. In terms of that clashing of the new and old world, that exists everywhere. If you travel to a developing country, you see people living in incredible poverty and living very simple lifestyles similar to 100 years ago brushing up against modernity and global trade. You can see how obviously our consumerist society is feasting off of poverty in their countries and how all our waste is there. Here we just consume and produce a lot of waste and then it sort of disappears and we don’t have to deal with it precisely because we are heaping it on to other people. And that’s a reality… I’m doing a fairy tale or parable version of that, but I don’t feel like it’s dramatically abstracted from the world we live in.

 

ND: For me the way it does feel abstracted is that there are no time markers and there are key fairytale elements. But then there’s that page in the book where you write “The proximity of the site of both our separation and reunion disrupted the boundaries within me” when Dodola and Zam see the Sultan’s palace from their new makeshift condo. The problem I had with this moment is the extent to which the backwardness of the “timeless palace,” as a place where they are both slaves, and the spot of their freedom, evidenced by that moment when Dodola takes off her hijab, are so close; I find it somewhat disrupting. And you don’t have to account for why me or any reader should feel disrupted by this revelation, but it is a shocking thing to have a modern city fueled by such tremendous backwardness that I don’t see justified in the text. Hearing the George Bush analogy at least helps put Wanatolia in a better context.

 

CT: Being in a city is about being in America basically. Having all these creature comforts and material comforts, but Dodola and Zam are coming from a place where they are also aware of suffering elsewhere. Which is sort of an adult experience, becoming more aware of the privileges you have compared to the rest of the world. It’s developing a sense of how you’re a passive participant in taking advantage of other cultures. And someone else has brought up the hijab thing to me, and for me the only real moment Dodola removes her hijab is when she does it to wrap up and clothe this little child at the end. For me that’s the only real moment and any other moment is incidental. If she has a hijab in one panel and off in the next, it mostly has to do with the comfortable space between her and Zam.

 

ND: The scene I’m specifically referring to is when she sees the “modern women” shopping in the city and there is a moment she takes it off then she gets accosted by lustful men a page later and she puts it back on…

CT: For me that scene is not “Oh! I realize I can be free like this women,” but more that she wants to fit in in this new context. She feels like an outsider, which I think the reader will perceive the other women that way because they seem to be from another world. And she does cover herself up because of this male gaze.

 

ND: This brings us back to how Dodola’s body functions primarily as a commodity, how even when the resources run out her body remains a marketable asset. I’m curious about if you ever felt aware of the baggage of her being sexed the whole time, even if that is purposefully through Zam’s perspective. If you ever felt wary of the contradiction between putting a feminist character into a societal position where there is perpetual forced sexualization of her body. I understand you as a “feminist” by putting Dodola out there in a way readers can sympathize with her, but then there’s an aspect of some readers maybe living out their own perverse sexual fantasies through the ways she’s treated. Do you see a danger in that?

CT: I don’t see a danger in it, but I definitely see a contradiction in it. So when you define me as a feminist, I’m OKAY with that, but there’s an irony in men claiming to be feminist to some degree. You can be sort of intellectually feminist, or claim to be, but there’s still a more primal animal instinct. You know, it’s the irony that some men who claim to be so intellectually feminist are the exact same people who are womanizers. Every time I meet another sensitive male it just bores me. And there’s nothing more painful than hearing a guy say he’s a lesbian trapped in a male body. So I’m exploring that contradiction: any man claiming he’s feminist is bullshitting, because your still animalisticly male. Again, I’m talking about heterosexual desires, but this crosses over to all sexual genders from transsexual people to homosexuals. That’s what I was exploring in my own life, that your sex drive is in conflict sometimes with ethical beliefs and you have to recognize both energies. If you put all the negative aspects of your sexuality in the shadow, then you’re probably going to fuck up and make some sort of mistake in your life, the way that politicians and televangelists do when we hear about their sexually deviancy. It’s the classic Catholic Priest scenario: if you don’t own up to your own shadow elements then they’ll emerge anyways and much more destructively.

 

ND: Without a doubt that sounds like a contradiction worth exploring. The problem for me is that for much of Habibi we go for long stretches of only seeing the shadow and then it becomes an issue of who’s casting that perverse shadow. When I hear you talk about it it makes a lot more sense holistically, but when I’m reading it as a stand-alone piece there is this disembodied voice of the author that makes it harder to accept those narrative choices. I guess that you exploring your own sexual contradictions gives readers a space to explore that to and maybe what I’m responding to is how uncomfortable that makes me as a reader feel…

CT: GOOD! That makes me happy I think. Maybe not happy, but it means the art has done its job if it makes the reader uncomfortable.

 

ND: When I heard about the project of Habibi I was expecting maybe a lighter fairy tale, but then as a reader you get confronted with slavery and rape and it’s all at the service of this endearing love story, but it’s pretty jarring throughout.

CT: And when I think of fairytales I think of those dark elements. It seems that all the great nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and children’s stories are full of those exact same dark twisted elements. It’s the tradition of the genre. And I’m not speaking of 1,001 Nights even, but Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.

 

ND: Well to pick up on that it seems that in order for you to call it a fairy tale it has to have a more happy ending. And you provide that by having Dodola and Zam reunited and creating a safe space for a new child, but did you ever have the impulse for it not be happy at the end? To just be brutal?

CT: Oh yeah. Definitely. I never wanted the book to have a cinematic Hollywood ending, and I wrote variations that were more cynical, but ultimately the end that was the most truthful was the far more optimistic one. That said, people see what that they want to see in the endings. With both Blankets and Habibi I’ve heard people say both that they were either super depressing or super hopeful. I find it very interesting when the reader imposes their own experience onto the endings.

 

ND: In Habibi there are these moments were you get a completely new character, like Noah the Fisherman, that feel part of their own complete story. Was that a product of the amount of time you were spending on Habibi and needing a new narrative voice to take a break?

CT: Noah was there from the very first draft. As I was working on the book a lot of people wanted me to remove him. They felt he was too much of a total aside and irreverent basically. But I really enjoyed writing him for my own sake and felt he was a necessary dash of levity in the midst of all the darkness and heaviness. For me he made me laugh a lot and there’s a lot of pleasure writing that character even though there’s an intense sadness to him. I did want the chapters to feel like their own graphic novels to some degree. I was very aware that Zam and Dodola would be apart for hundreds of pages, I wanted it to feel that way almost to the point you forgot about the other character at times. They only existed in this idealized memory. I like that in books where things wander for quite a while and you lose site of where you began.

 

ND: It’s definitely a powerful element that they go through so much change on their own and have to reconcile that when they are reunited. I’m interested in your fan’s reaction to Habibi and what readers have said to you about Dodola and Zam. Are they taking to them the same way they do a cute Chunky Rice?

CT: I think so actually! Yeah! Which is the greatest compliment as an author. I felt really attached to them and they felt like real people to me and that is the sort of response I’m hearing from readers.

 

ND: So if this book is coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt, which I interpret as Islamaphobia in the US, then do you think that Dodola and Zam were the direct product of that? 

CT: No no no! They are unrelated to it at all. They don’t even seem like they’re created. They just kind of arrived from the subconscious fully realized. And they predate anything else in the book. They’re of their own making. Laughs.

 

ND: So they came with their geography and their own history?

CT: I knew they were child slaves from the start, but I didn’t know what kind of world they inhabited. And my research of slavery and randomly reading books about slavery pointed me in the direction of the East African/Arab slave trade that predated the cross-Atlantic slave trade by 700 years. As I was reading some of those research books they eluded often to 1,001 Arabian Nights which drew me towards that, and while reading Nights I became aware of the Orientalism in the Richard Burton anthology. Around the same time I started studying Islamic Art. But I did attach myself fairly early on to the Arabian Nights landscape. Right away I could see it for both its strength and weaknesses, but I thought of it as a genre that would be fun to work in like Superheros, Science Fiction, or Noir.

 

ND: But is just such a loaded genre…

CT: Yeah! Bring it on, right!

 

ND: And I think that’s ultimately my response: it’s hard separating you as a creator who’s clearly very sympathetic and is so good at humanizing characters — which comes across so well in the Qur’anic parts — and the fact that you are swinging around in this playground that is so deeply tied up in a history of otherizing.

CT: And ultimately I like the conflict between those two elements.

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This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism.

Supermelodrama

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Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Orientalism, more or less focused on Habibi.
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Throughout high school, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the only comic book in my collection that people repeatedly asked to see and borrow. It’s telling that I didn’t technically own it, having borrowed it from another friend. I felt a little jealous on the part of the other comics I owned—Blankets was fantastic, but it became the only comic people asked about. My mom read it, and then our neighbors read it. People wanted to tell me that they had heard about this sophisticated ‘graphic novel.’ I chalked it up to a few things: its technical skill justified it as being art (wrongly), its length meant it was serious, and by this point, the name rang a bell. My friends and parents and parent’s friends were used to hearing me talk about comics as a serious form of expression, and now they heard Time or NPR bring up Blankets. I got sent newspaper clippings about it from relatives. People were curious, willing to spend time with the book, to be in the know about something critics declared both revolutionary and emotionally relevant. I was grateful, but again, a little jealous for all the other comics I was reading.

With Habibi on the horizon, I’d set my hopes on Craig Thompson championing virtuosity as a sophisticated and subtle storytelling vehicle, providing a powerful devil’s advocate to the linguistic or minimalist approaches to comics making that seemed, oftentimes, more effective. But I was anxious about the Orientalism foreshadowed by Thompson’s comments, or the remarks of better-informed friends.

A month ago, opening Habibi on the long bus ride back from SPX, I was more than baffled. It was, after all, an Orientalist book. But Habibi—even for a decades-spanning romantic epic—followed a shocking amount of familiar tropes from American melodrama. In fact, it perfectly enunciated not one but two different ‘cluster’ definitions of melodrama. (I had studied narrative at Carleton College, which, yep, I just graduated from.) Two foundational theorists, film scholars Linda Williams and Ben Singer, admit the impossibility of finding a melodramatic work that embodies every commonality they high-light, but Habibi comes pretty damn close.

Saying ‘melodrama’ on a crowded blog might be irresponsible—colloquially, the word is strictly pejorative, and engenders the bad taste of the Lichtenstein blondes that high-brow critics have reduced comics to for years (and while savvy critics now make exceptions, still do.) I’d rather approach Habibi through the lens of film and narrative study, where melodrama is less a genre than an evolving narrative structure or mode, and can be found across most genres and media—particularly in America. The essence of melodramatic storytelling lies in desperate situations of impossibly heightened stakes. When the risk appears ridiculous to its audience, and unworthy of the tears, grandiosity and suffering, melodrama loses its poignancy and becomes kitsch.

This approach comes from scholar Linda Williams, whose book Playing the Race Card and a few killer essays, trace the legacy of melodrama in America’s cultural and racial history — a history which Habibi is indisputably, if unconsciously, a part of. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to study melodrama as it’s commonly understood, as a historical mode that exploded and matured in American culture, petered out in the middle of the twentieth century, and stemmed from nineteenth century sentimentalism. Craig Thompson seems to have gone for this explicitly, judging by his mention of ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ This theory is forwarded by Ben Singer in his book Melodrama and Modernity.

I could draft a thesis on melodrama in Habibi, and have a ball bringing in related theories, especially those of Laura Mulvey and Clement Greenberg’s work on kitsch. That’s not what I’m prepared to post here. A survey of William’s and Singer’s points illuminate just how exemplary of a melodrama Habibi is, even where Thompson does subvert the mode in remarkable ways. However, this ‘melodramatism’ problematizes Habibi as an Orientalist and American “text,” and as a book that is slated to receive a fair amount of outside-comics attention.

Visual Excess and Violence, Realism and the Tableau

Formally, melodramas are marked by visual excess, manifesting in traits like overwrought expressions and gestures, thrilling chase scenes, ’swelling busts,’ musculature and gratuitous violence. Williams especially notes that this excess is accompanied by an obsession with realism—not realistic storytelling or behavior, but realistic effects that enhance the sensational thrill of the action. Reading Habibi’s virtousity as a kind of visual excess could confirm some of my worst fears about ‘pretty’ comics, which merits another post altogether. Thompson stirringly choreographs chase scenes, daring rescues, and death-bed hand wringing in the tradition of classic D. W. Griffith melodrama (a comparison already made by Corey Creekmur on this blog.) Habibi is also a remarkably violent work, particularly with Dodola, who we watch repeatedly raped and abused. The sensational visual of Dodola’s naked body also appears across the countless astral, psychedelic tableaus of Zam’s fantasies.


Still from the Perils of Pauline, 1914

The tableau, a melodramatic tendency to ‘freeze’ the action in an appealing and emotionally charged still, is featured prominently in Habibi. The narrative eventually breaks down into a slew of tableaus by the end.

To Habibi’s credit, Thompson does confront this visuality (and the male gaze) in Zam’s horror of it. Near the end, Dodola’s intuits that “a man’s inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it’s the narrative” (639). Habibi is both supervisual at its end (with the tableaus) and anti-visual, especially in the blank nine-by-nine grid of Orphan’s Prayer, where Zam confronts the blasphemy of visuality and image-making. Here his struggle with himself is echoed in Thompson’s, as creator. Zam forgives himself, and the image-making is again permitted, and for better or for worse, Dodola is returned to a visualized object of desire.

Insistence on Virtue, Rural Goodness and Exotic/Industrial Evil

Most, but not all melodramas insists on the virtue of the characters, who in the beginning are tainted by a ‘fall’ from grace and are forced to leave an earthly manifestation of paradise (often depicted as a rural home.) The plot then revolves around their eventual return to ‘home’—either by ascending to heaven through death, or withdrawing from society back to the countryside. The peak of melodrama’s popularity coincided with the rise of industrialism, and melodrama’s nostalgizing of rural living appealed to a increasingly urban population.


reprinted in Ben Singer Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama must simultaneously taint and preserve its protagonists’ virtue. This is commonly achieved through victimization, physical suffering, and occasionally self-mortification, often expressed as graphically as possible, but without showing actual genitalia. The protagonists’ virtue is further established by reducing the cast, good and bad guys alike, to morally dualistic psychic types, good and evil. ‘Corrupt society’ is often depicted as ‘anti-nature,’ a dirty and over-stimulating center of hedonism and crime, or an exotic location where brutality and taboo-breaking provide a implicit foil to the American rural homestead. The precedents for Dodola and Zam’s rural boat-house, the palace and urban Wanatolia, and even Habibi’s environmental metaphors of water and damming, can be found in Way Down East, the film Giant, and countless other pulps and melodramas– which also predict the ending where Dodola and Zam, orphan in hand, withdraw back to the desert.

Finally, melodrama’s classic emphasis on purity and taint is made explicitly in Habibi’s text and visuals. Dodola is told that the stain of her broken hymen “proves that she was pure” in the first few pages of the book (14). In Zam’s fever dreams during his lengthy, self-mutilating surgery, Zam calls to Dodola, “I’m pure again! Will you take me back?” Dodola replies, “The question is… am I pure enough for you…?” (p. 337). Its worth repeating that this doesn’t make Habibi bad per se; and I think Dodola’s ’de-flowering’ by her first husband is both human and highly nuanced. Similarly, the most powerful subversion Thompson provides is how he makes the issue of ‘purity’ and ‘taint’ irrelevant after The Orphan’s Prayer, even while most of Habibi’s melodramatic facets are restored or accentuated. Dodola goes full-on into sentimental mother mode, (having experienced a significant Scarlet O’Hara + Way Down East child-loss episode before,) and they return to the desert, “God’s Domain” (630).


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Non-Causal, Circular and Non-Traditional Storytelling—“Just in Time”

The ‘magical’ expunging of character’s taint through suffering highlights the most subtle, but perhaps most fundamental commonality of melodrama. Narratives are often called conservative, in that they don’t address the character’s conflict with society, (If X is so innocent, why is she suffering?) Melodramas often can’t arrive at logical conclusions—people either kiss and make up, or withdraw from society altogether, without the conflict ever being ‘solved.’ Melodramas compensate by making sense emotionally, where the audience vicariously experiences the progression of joy to suffering to despair to joy. The return to the rural home-space doubly asserts this circular structure. The extended periods of unremitting suffering and pathos often “burst” in scenes of recognition, (finally!) and rescue, (just in the nick of time!) and occasionally even more pathos (too late!) In either case, the moment of just-in-time/too-late signals the expelling of taint, where the characters are ready to return to paradise. Habibi’s plot is fueled with pathos, from the caravan rapes to palace intrigue, to Zam’s despair and near suicide at the cliff-hanger of Orphan’s Prayer. I’d like to repeat that for all its melodramatic trappings, HabibiTRULY subverts the use of suffering as a purifier, and makes noise in declaring its self-destructive futility. Yet Habibi’s cosmic self-forgiveness, expressed by the tableau of Zam walking home, and its substitution of the concern of purity with child- and motherhood, underlines how Habibirelies on a similar perspective shift as Griffith’s Way Down East and many other melodramas. Habibiending is more believable: no puriticanical foster-parent forgives a fallen woman because she nearly died in a blizzard. Habibi relocates the perspective-shift to the internality of the protagonist, making the victimization an issue of self-victimization. Unfortunately, this doesn’t restore the humanity of the oafish sultan, dwarf adviser or bland eunuch friends.

As a reader, you might say, ‘sure, you just described a lot of points that show ways in which Habibiis melodramatic, and a sophisticated example of one at that. We knew that.’ What is striking is that these are all the major components of two very different examinations of melodrama—and its very rare for one example to possess so many. Habibiis a super-melodrama, a balanced synthesis of the escapist, ‘blood-and-thunder’ serial with the American family epic—and with a good amount of Old South narrative thrown in. Habibiis truly Orientalist in that its not only a fantasy of the Middle East, but an imposition of an American story, involving American concerns of race, sexuality, and industrialization, on a foreign, if imaginary, culture. Thompson has explicitly stated that the project was to bridge Islamic and Christian faith, which he DOES execute with incredible poignancy in the stories of Genesis sprinkled throughout. The melodramatic framework that surrounds Dodola and Zam, and constitutes most of the book, works against his best intentions. Its hard not to read Dodola’s escape with baby Zam from the slave market as a direct homage to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s iconic flight of Eliza with child from slave-catchers. This homage doesn’t prove the universality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as an inability to look outside of American storytelling traditions to what is truly local to the Middle East.


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Habibiis otherwise subversive in several other places: Dodola spends very little time weeping or reflecting on her powerlessness—this soul-searching is left to Zam. But, why is it necessary for Zam to castrate himself, before being reunited sexually with Dodola? Is it just to “heighten the stakes,” to lead the reader to despair of their sexual union, only to reveal a joyous, unexpected solution? Previous melodramas provide troubling parallels with Habibi’s depiction of black male sexuality, which the robustness of Habibii’s melodrama make it hard to ignore.

So what? Habibi for better or worse, seems destined to join Blankets as a ‘Well-Known Graphic Novel,’ the kind your aunt sends you clippings on and seventy-year-old women ask about at baby showers (as happened to me last week.) There’s a chance that they’ll enjoy it—that they’ll be glad to indulge in a rollicking Cowboys and Indians story with enough sophisticated internality, visual reinvention, strong female characters and biracial coupling to qualify a subversion of the mode.

If the reviews in the Guardian and the NY Times are any indication, these aren’t favors the comics community can yet expect from a broader readership. I think the generosity of my reading comes from extensive study of the melodramatic structure—it might be easy to lose what makes Habibi a sophisticated example of Cowboys and Indians in, well, Cowboys and Indians. Let alone the fact that this American story is cloaked in Orientalist trappings, and created and published during our military’s continued involvement in the Middle East. Its hard to ignore that Habibi reflects an American solipsism in our occupation and imposition there, a wishful escape to the world of good-and-evil storytelling, and a refusal to confront really sticky issues of race in a contemporary, or responsible, manner. I’m playing the race card here, but even from my first read through of Habibi, it was hard to ignore. This issue will only be magnified when ‘outside-comics’ readers approach Habibi without any understanding of how innocent Thompson’s intentions were.

Why does lending out Habibi make me feel so much more anxious than lending Blankets did six years ago? Like I said, melodrama is a fascinating and contemporary narrative form, as valid as any other. I recommend melodramas all the time. Yet, how many comic books will a seventy-year-old woman read this year? One, maybe—and if it’s Habibi, I worry that its melodrama, picking up more themes than it can considerately deal with, drifting into kitsch (a term already associated with the comics medium) will represent the entire medium, unfairly, as a space of gratuitous visuality, over-wrought nostalgism, and bad taste.
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Kailyn Kent is an artist and one of the folks behind Carleton Graphic Press.

Caroline Small on Habibi, Said, and Heart of Darkness

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Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.

So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.

It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?

I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.