Craig Thompson is a comic book artist and writer who found success and huge critical acclaim in 2003 with his poignant and sensitive coming-of-age story “Blankets”. Now Thompson is ready to release his new comic, “Habibi”, which was seven years in the making. A fantastical love story set in a ‘landscape outside of time’, echoing the work of Arundhati Roy, Karen Armstrong, and Vladimir Nabokov, “Habibi” promises to be one of the unexpected highlights of the year.
First, could you talk a bit about Habibi?
That’s a big question! Let’s see…I guess for lack of a better description, Habibi is an Arabian Nights-esque epic about two escaped child slaves fighting for survival and growing up in the desert. It’s a fairy tale of sorts, but it draws from a lot of contemporary themes around religion, sex, and politics. That’s the short of it!
Could you elaborate a bit more on the themes?
It was born out of 9/11 in the sense that Islam was being vilified in the media, and I wanted to humanise it a bit and understand it, and focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic culture. My experience of speaking to Muslims was that they weren’t any different to the Christian communities I grew up in — they had the same morals and the same lifestyles, and the same stories that shaped their religions. Then also I got really inspired by the Islamic arts — Arabic calligraphy, geometric pattern and design, architecture, and a lot of those details infused the book.
How did you go about incorporating the Arabic calligraphy and geometric art into the comic book form?
More than anything I used ornamental pattern borders through the book, inspired by illuminated manuscripts. But also in comics the standard building block is a rectangle of the panelled frame, so I was experimenting with using different geometric shapes to see how that effected composition and the rhythm and movement of the pages. Arabic calligraphy is throughout the book too. There’s a description of it being like ‘music for the eyes’ and that was an idea that as a cartoonist really resonated because I think comic book creators are really trying to create a sort of visual music. It’s based so much on rhythm and beats and pacing.
From the advance pages I’ve seen, Habibi seems to be infused with some very interesting imagery – triangles interlocking into a star shape as two characters kiss for example. Is that something that runs throughout the book?
The structure of the book is based on a North African Arabic talisman which is the magic squares symbol. It’s essentially like Sudoku — it’s a three by three magic square with nine Arabic letters within the squares. So, that’s reflected in the structure of the book as there’s nine chapters, and each chapter is thematically based around an Arabic letter which also has a numerological component, and with that number is also a geometric component. The page you mentioned was from a chapter entitled ‘Ring of Solomon’ which is structured around a six-pointed star — a Star of David, or Solomon’s Seal. Every theme in that chapter also focuses on the prophet Solomon and the number six on that six-pointed star.
That’s really interesting as the comic is about Arabic and Islamic culture, yet the Star of David is a Jewish symbol, as well as having undertones of the Biblical Old Testament. Were you trying to draw the three religions together?
Oh definitely. A big part of it was to explore the connections between the three Abrahamic faiths, starting obviously with Abraham, being the connecting father of all three. Each chapter is also based on a prophet of Islam. There are 124,000 prophets in Islam, but the most important ones are the same Judeo-Christian characters we grow up with like Abraham, Moses, Noah, Solomon, and even Jesus. Jesus is the second most important prophet in Islam after Mohammed. So I focus on those characters. And when I say that, they’re just supplemental, the main narrative is a fractured love story between these two child slaves, Dodola and Zam, and all those other things are almost like decoration or extra layers of ornamentation.
What kind of artists were you looking at besides the Arab and Islamic influences for Habibi? You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that the impressionists inspire you. Was that a continuing influence, or were there others this time?
I love impressionists, but I was drawn to the era right before that of French Orientalist painting. That stuff, to me, is very self-aware of the racist and sexist quality of the paintings, which came out in the 1860s, by, say, Jean-Léon Gérôme. All that stuff is sort of bawdy and sensual. I look at it like you might look at an exploitation film. At least now we’re more self-aware and it seems very deliberately sensationalistic and fantastical, but there are still pleasures to have in it.
Edward Saïd talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre — they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. The main influences and inspirations though were Arabic calligraphy, geometric patterns, and ornamentation though.
Are comics being accepted in the literary world? There are still big prejudices against them, yet there’s this huge oeuvre of great comic literature which many people don’t know about, or aren’t interested in.
I think it’s changed a little bit, certainly because it seems like the publishing world has warmed up to the idea of graphic novels if only for crass commercial reasons. I don’t know if cartoonists are too worried about being canonised in some sort of academic fashion because I think we embrace being a bastardised art form. It’s like rock music or something like that — I think there’s a pride in the rawness and non-stuffiness of the medium.
Blankets is one of the comics which has helped begin to establish the comics medium as a literary force. What was it like having Time and the New York Times Book Review praise it so much?
It was amazing. It was overwhelming, and validating I suppose. I think it’s a different landscape now, seven years later. It’s not uncommon to see comics reviewed in Time Magazine and the New York Times Book Review.
What makes storytelling in comics unique?
There’s too many things to think of! Hopefully I illustrate some of them on the page. There’s definitely something you can do with time travelling, and leaps in narrative. If you can see those things side by side, you can do it more gracefully in comics than in prose or in film. In film it can be jarring because you can’t just take one step back to see it, although I guess you could rewind the DVD. In prose you don’t have the obvious visual cues that can make that jump more fluid. There’s a fluidity in having juxtaposed images on a page right next to each other.
Habibi is available for pre-order (£14.99) on Faber and Faber. A new hardcover edition of Blankets is out now (£29.99) on Top Shelf Productions. A fuller version of this interview is available here.
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