Life, Love and Storytelling: Craig Thompson's 'Habibi'

Craig Thompson, follows his two critically-acclaimed graphic novels, Goodbye, Chunky Rice (1999), and the autobiographical and bestselling work, Blankets (2003), with the long-awaited Habibi, a 672 page epic love story. Written and drawn by Thompson, the book will be published by Pantheon later this month. The graphic novel will premier before its on-sale-date at this year’s Small Press Expo where 100 signed and numbered copies will be available to donors who contribute $100 or more to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at the show.

Habibi is the story of Dodola and Zam, two orphaned child slaves who find the meanings of life and love in each other throughout the course of their lives. Set in a sprawling, unnamed desert wasteland, a timeless place where the past and the present seem to coexist, Thompson’s story touches on themes of sexual abuse, socio-economic unrest, the mythic power of Islam and Christianity, industrialization, waste and ecological balance, and, most of all, the art and cultural power of storytelling.

PW Comics World spoke with Thompson on the phone from his Portland, Or. home on the themes and messages of Habibi, his influences and his creative process throughout the six years he spent working on Habibi.

PW Comics World: Why tell this particular story in this way? Why set it in an ambiguously modern time in an ambiguous middle east? Do you feel the story would have been as effective anywhere else?

Craig Thompson: Yeah, I think it could have taken place anywhere. There wasn’t an agenda to make a love story. That sort of emerged later. It was originally very much about the darkness of sexual trauma and for me there was a surprising turn that there was a place of healing for the characters. But as far as the landscape, I was borrowing from Arabian Nights as a genre. And I say genre in the same way that “cowboys and Indians” are sort of a fantastical representation of the American West. I liked all the tropes of that sort of fairy tale landscape of deserts and harems and genies. People work with all kinds of genres and I was excited to work with that one.

PWCW: Throughout the book you obviously reference stories of the Bible and the Quran, but in the notes in the back I noticed you also drew on many other texts in the background art throughout. How much research went into this book?

CT: Well I spent two years on the entire writing process before I actually dove into the drawing, the final drawing. So during those two years I sort of wandered off on many tangents in the same way that the book does. So the research and the writing were very integrated. But the sort of skeleton of the book sort of emerged right from the start subconsciously, and then was filled in by research.

PWCW: So after two years writing, how long did the art take?

CT: I got really bogged down and lost in the writing process. I finished the first draft in a year but then spent another year wrestling with it and editing it and finally just resolved to start drawing the pages even though I didn’t know how the book would end. So in the Fall of 2006 I sat down to draw the final art and then finished in fall of 2010. And so this last year has been the production and design and all the technical details of getting the book off to press.

PWCW: Obviously for anyone who has read Blankets, you had a very religious Christian upbringing. How much of your background informed your choices of how you portrayed the “different but the same” nature of Christianity and Islam in Habibi?

CT: Largely, because that was part of my message, that there really is no separation between the religions. Especially the Abrahamic faiths have more in common than they do that separate them. And as I worked on the book I opened up dialogue with Muslim acquaintances and friends and I realized really quickly that their faith was basically the same as the people I grew up with, as the community that I grew up with. Same morals, same lifestyles and then, obviously, the same stories that shape their religion.

PWCW: Arabic is a beautiful but very specific language. Did you already know the language before undertaking this project?

CT: I don’t know Arabic. I can’t speak or write it. So the Arabic calligraphy you see in the book is more of sort of a collage sampling. There were times I would write things out in English and then have it translated by a friend into Arabic, but even then I was sort of laying out the handwritten compositions with Text Edit on the computer, then light boxing and tracing those by hand. Because I can’t just write Arabic off the top of my head. So what you see in the book is more of a jumble of collage and translation I guess. And I tried to site in the back of the book some of the origins of some of those chunks of calligraphy. And it’s almost better to not see the words when you’re looking at them and you can just appreciate them for their visual aesthetic, rather than have the meaning of the words get in the way. Sometimes I would just have to create my own compositions and look up words in the dictionary. And then I would have to create my own calligraphic compositions, but then some of them are tributes to famous calligraphers whose calligraphic compositions were a big inspiration.

PWCW: If people could take one message away from reading Habibi, what would you like it to be?

CT: Oh no! I’m terrible at answering that question! Really I’d like the book to be able to speak for itself, and I don’t want to reveal any spoilers. I think there is a very clear message in the finale of the book. And hopefully people perceive it in a hopeful way.