Review by New York Times Review
CRAIG THOMPSON'S "Habibi" is a work of fantasy about being ashamed of one's fantasies. This anxiety is native to comics, or at least to the broad strain of American comics written by white males. The work of R. Crumb, for example, is a gallery of self-loathing - portraits that register an artist's recoil from his own noxious imaginings. Thompson's work is much prettier than anything drawn by Crumb, but the anxieties are similar. If "Habibi" had been content to mine this narrow but rich vein of adolescent angst it might have been a comic's comic, or at least an instructive book for young adults. Instead, it aspires to address questions of spirituality, environmental degradation and religious pluralism. The result is frankly a mess, though it does include some arresting pictures. The scene is set in a fictional country loosely resembling Saudi Arabia - mostly sand, crisscrossed by large pipelines. The heroes are two children: plucky, big-eyed Dodola and her charge, the younger, dark-skinned Zam, whom she also calls "Habibi" (Arabic for "My Darling"). At the beginning of the tale, Dodola escapes with Zam from slave traders, and the pair find refuge in a boat, mysteriously beached in the middle of the desert. To while away the hours - they live on the boat for nine years - Dodola, who is a kind of Scheherazade, tells Zam stories from the Koran: Abraham's sacrifice, Solomon and Bilqis, the expulsion from Eden. But this idyll turns out to be a mirage. To procure food, Dodola prostitutes herself to passing caravans. One day, Zam follows her to a rendezvous and watches while she is raped. This scene, which Thompson lingers over for several pages (allowing us to note that the rapist has the telltale hairy legs of a Crumb villain), haunts Zam for the rest of the book. Not only because he failed to save Dodola, but because her ravishment becomes his own recurring fantasy. Soon afterward, Dodola is kidnapped by agents of the sultan of Wanatolia, a Mad Magazine version of King Shahryar from "The Thousand and One Nights," rendered here as a slavering, sex-crazed buffoon in a turban. Zam leaves the boat in search of Dodola, and the twists and turns of their rapprochement fill the next 300 pages. Wanatolia, where much of this action takes place, is a mash-up of Eastern genre scenes: the souk, the slave market, the harem, the women's baths. Human types are drawn from the same archive: nude concubines, glowering black eunuchs, hookah smokers, dwarves. Many of Thompson's cartoons quote explicitly from 19th-century Orientalist paintings, particularly those of Jean-Léon Gérôme. These larkish echoes are meant, I suppose, to remind us we're in a fantasy world. Thompson makes no pretension to realism. But the originals were fantasies too, and it's often hard to tell whether Thompson is making fun of Orientalism or indulging in it. When, in "Habibi," a slave trader lists for a prospective buyer all the hues for sale - "charcoal, cinnamon, shiny prune, chestnut" - and one of the slaves corrects him, "Actually, I'm closer to walnut," the joke is jejune at best. (It also undermines any investment we might have had in the scene.) In this sense, Thompson the illustrator is in the same situation as Zam: both are prisoners of their own fantasies, apparently unable to think of Dodola without disrobing her (she spends the book in various states of dishabille; by contrast, male nudity is rare). This similarity between creator and creation could have made for an interesting formal problem - we can imagine Zam looking outside the comic strip and asking, "Whose fantasies are these, anyway?" - though Thompson doesn't take it up. Sickened by his libido, Zam punishes himself in extraordinary fashion. But Thompson never considers equivalent strictures for his art. If anything, he seems enamored of his own technique, and not only in depicting Dodola. Many images are framed with arabesque filigree and filled with patterned rugs, wall tiles and Alhambra-like interiors. Compared with the flawed and fleshy realism of Joe Sacco, or the simplicity of Marjane Satrapi, Thompson's comics are relentlessly virtuosic. But it is a conventional sort of virtuosity, in the service of a conventional exoticism. Thompson's previous work, "Blankets" (2003), was a semiautobiographical story - the protagonist is named Craig - about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family in Wisconsin. "Blankets" ends with Craig moving away from the narrow faith of his parents, and on the evidence of Thompson's new work he has moved in the direction of New Ageism. Islam, in the fictional world of "Habibi," exists as a collection of stories - the ones Dodola tells Zam - but plays no part in the lives of anyone we meet. There are many slender minarets, but no one prays. The stories themselves are a hodgepodge of Koranic tales, mystical variants and even an ancient Chinese myth involving a giant turtle and the discovery of the so-called magic square. These scenes are illustrated in a lavish, psychedelic style: bare-chested men surrounded by mandalas of light, roosters floating in outer space, kabbalistic formulas. Thompson is obviously well intentioned. He weaves his stories together in an ecumenical spirit, noting the commonalities between Koranic and Old Testament tales. But such broad-mindedness leads to increasingly jumbled storytelling. (The same spirit of mix-and-match is found in the speech of his characters, in which Southern slang bumps up against jive talk and the slogans of black power - these last favored by a eunuch named Hyacinth.) Eventually, Dodola and Zam slip away from the sultan's palace and stray into recognizably contemporary territory. Outside the harem walls, Wanatolia is a modern place, with modern ailments. The landfills are full, immigrants are at the gates and evil overlords control the water supply. It's a tribute to Thompson's skill as a cartoonist that the transition from an old-fashioned Orient to modern Babylon leaves few visual seams. But it's hard to take seriously a fantasy world where there don't seem to be any rules. Maybe New Ageism, with its flexible physics, spiritual syncretism and self-help psychology, is the right religion for this world. But it isn't something adults should believe in. Thompson's fictional world is a mash-up of Eastern genre scenes: the souk, the slave market, the harem.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 16, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Thompson's follow-up to the landscape-altering Blankets (2003), one of the generous handful of important comics of the past decade, shows that he has done anything but rest on his laurels. At root, this is a love story about two have-nots in a desert society: Dodola, a young woman whose only currency is her body, and Zam, a slave boy she rescues and tries to shelter. Passages from the Qur'an provide reflection on Dodola's and Zam's lives as they connect, break apart, and find each other again. Arabic lettering and magic-square mysticism offer rich foundations of visual symbolism and theosophical inquiry. And, not least, the fictional state of Wanatolia, where you can travel in time thousands of years simply by stepping from the midden slums to the sultan's palaces to the rapid encroachment of high-rise development, provides a polarizing backdrop of social conflict. The character depth, plot complexity, and storytelling in this lyrical, sexual, and scholarly epic would make any novelist proud. But no graphic novel lives on narrative alone, and through it all, Thompson strings compositions that are often more tapestry than comics and that balance graphic design, illumination, calligraphy, and cartooning in steady alignment. It is unfair to expect two masterpieces in a row from anyone, but here Thompson sits securely in that rarefied air.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Thompson's (Blankets) first graphic novel in seven years is a lushly epic love story that's both inspiring and heartbreaking, intertwined with parables from both Islam and Christianity. Sold into marriage as a young girl, Dodola endures life as the wife of a scribe until she's captured by slave traders and brought to Wanatolia to be auctioned off. But before she can be sold again, she escapes, taking with her an abandoned toddler named Habibi. The pair runaway to the desert, taking refuge in an abandoned boat, where they survive for nine years, with Dodola teaching Zam the ways of the world through stories from the Qur'an and the Bible. When Zam is 12, he secretly follows Dodola and realizes that she has been prostituting herself to passing caravans in order to acquire food. They are separated when Dodola is taken against her will to become part of a sultan's harem, leaving Zam alone in the desert. Six long years pass as the two struggle to find their way back to each other and, overcoming enormous odds, eventually end up far from the ancient desert landscape in a contemporary metropolis that underscores Thompson's subtle ability to blend the timeless and the current. In addition to richly detailed story panels, the gorgeous Arabic ornamental calligraphy makes each page an individual work of art. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Swirling story and swirling Arabic calligraphy interweave in Thompson's masterly follow-up to his multi-award-winning Blankets (2003). Child bride Dolola is sold by her impoverished parents in the Middle East to a clumsy but well-meaning older man who teaches her to read and write. When slavers kill her husband and kidnap her, she manages to escape carrying the dark-skinned baby of another captive. She finds refuge in an abandoned ship stranded in the desert, where she raises little Zam to adolescence, telling him stories and teaching him literacy. Further adventures separate them but reunite them later. As escaped harem prostitute and escaped eunuch, they forge an intimate bond and move into the future. ("Habibi" means "my beloved.") Hopping back and forth in time through an epic landscape encompassing desert, harem, urban slums, and modern industrial clutter, the plot draws on and includes stories stemming from Islam, Judaism, and Christianity that evoke universal themes. Verdict The exquisite beauty and deep magic of this Arabian Nights-style love story cannot be overstated. More mature and psychologically nuanced than Blankets, it's a sure bet for as many awards. With extensive nudity and sexual themes, it is highly recommended for adult collections.-Martha Cornog, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Thompson (Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, 2006, etc.) returns after a five-year absence with a graphic novel that is sure to attract attentionand perhaps even controversy.Slavery exists in the modern world as much as in the ancient. As Thompson's long, carefully drawn narrative opens, we are in a time that seems faraway, even mythical: A 9-year-old girl is married off to a scribe who introduces her not just to sex but also to the mysteries of Arabic letters, which seem to take life on the page. "When God created the letters," Thompson writes, "He kept their secrets for Himself"though he shared them with Adam while keeping them from the angels, a source of considerable friction in the Muslim heaven. The scribe is killed, the young girl kidnapped, and from there the story opens into a world that might well have come from theTales of a Thousand and One Nights, if, that is, industrial machinery and the teeming ports of the Arabian peninsula are introduced into the backdrop. Dodola and Zam are two children, one Semitic, one black African, who brave a hostile world, taking up residence in a ship marooned in the desert sands, selling what they have and can in order to survive. As they grow older, they find themselves feeling things that are not quite appropriate for the siblings they seem to have become, and now their paths part, destined to cross again as sure as the letters loop over one another. Thompson draws on elements of classical Arabic mythology and, a touch dangerously, Islamic belief; he also takes the opportunity to address modern issues of ethnic tension, racism, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the clash of civilizations, sexism and other modern concerns. Though in the form of a comic book, Thompson's story is decidedly not for youngsters: Rape and murder figure in these pages, as does sex between minors.A maturein all its meaningsglimpse into a world few Westerners are at home with, and Thompson is respectful throughout.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
