In 2003, a previously obscure comics artist, Craig Thompson, published a graphic memoir called Blankets, in which he told the story of his evangelical Christian childhood, his conflicting feelings about the faith of his parents and how he fell in love for the first time. The book was a sensation, winning him half-a-dozen awards and a fan letter from the Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, because it pushed at the boundaries of what people thought comics could do.
Thompson's subject matter, his skilful use of flashback, his graceful drawings and the staggering length of his book – it came in at nearly 600 pages – contributed to a feeling that Blankets was a substantial piece of work as well as a beautiful one. A star was born.
Habibi is another big book and I think its effect on readers will be just as powerful. It's not only that it has at its heart a sweet and touching love story, nor is it that Thompson's drawings are as fluid and as acute as ever. It's his ambition that really amazes, the sheer chutzpah of it.
Into Habibi, Thompson has merrily thrown stories from the Bible and the Qur'an, elements of the Arabian Nights and the poems of Rumi and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the great Iraqi writer. He has also, having clearly spent some time studying them, made magnificent use of Arabic calligraphy and Islamic geometry.
What he seems to be saying – sometimes gently and sometimes with an edge of satire – is that the various people of the Book were once nourished by the same stories (and, in some quarters, still are). It is, then, a book of bridges and connections and long-buried memories: a carefully researched edifice that often teeters but somehow never falls to the ground.
Wanatolia, where the story is set, is a strange, timeless place: as voracious when it comes to water as any Gulf state, but presided over by a sultan who seems to belong to a more dusty time (his harem is guarded by eunuchs). There is a desert, on one of whose dunes is mysteriously stranded a boat, and there is a river, full to the brim with plastic bottles and old tyres.
Our heroes are Dodola and Zam, child slaves bound to each other by chance rather than blood. Dodola is a brilliant storyteller; Zam is her loyal younger brother-cum-child, whose happiness is shattered when he discovers just how it is that she puts food on their table.
Thompson moves this pair through time and an epic landscape with expert precision. Terrible things happen and good things, too. They are separated and reunited and separated again.
It's a wonderful, compelling tale, but also, in the scant space I have here, an indescribable one. For, hidden inside it are a thousand other stories. It's like a fabulous jewellery box and you will want to raid it again and again.
