New Dawns

These early days of the new year find me once again reading as many of the past year's comics as I can in feverish preparation for the decisions (both very easy and very hard) behind my annual Best of the Year post.

A large number of what I'm reading is from DC Comics this year as their New 52 reboot was one of the big news stories of 2o11 and a lot of the titles excited me but I burned myself out on their characters writing a long retrospective of the first 75 years of the publisher's characters that posted as the second month of the relaunch hit comics stores.

So here I am at the start of 2o12 reading the start of DC's new universe/status quo as well as many other comics I've never read or haven't read much of: "Spontaneous" from Oni Press, "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents" (which may or may not take place in the DCnU), and "Mudman" by Paul Grist.

2o11 was a strange year.

We saw DC claim they were about to become the new hotness then actually become the new hotness.
(Yeah. I just used 'the new hotness' to describe an American comics publisher. I'm a little bit embarrassed too. You can deal with it.)

We saw the return of Craig Thompson to the full-length graphic novel format in "Habibi".

We saw Ultimate Peter Parker die and be replaced as Spider-Man by a new multi-racial character.

We saw Batman dress up in a new costume for the start of "Justice League" #1 and then promptly get undressed in a semi-sexually explicit scene at the end of "Catwoman" #1.

And that just about all happened in or around September, folks!

DC Comics' share of the monthlies market nearly doubled in September 2o11 then actually grew in October, shocking us all. Unfortunately the high was not to last. November brought them down to a slim, slim margin above Marvel's share and last month's number sees the company returned to where they were before: below Marvel's percentage.

[see article with details by Nicholas Yanes (@NicholasYanes) here]

What will this mean for 2o12? What will this mean for my annual Best of the Year post?

Only time will tell.

~ @JonGorga

HABIBI

On Tuesday, the postman brought me a present. Since I preordered it, I knew it was coming. I hung out at the post office so long waiting for it that I was late for a shift; there was even a brief but excruciating period when I could see the box on the shelf, but, for lack of a slip, could not retrieve it. This was certainly a waste of time, but I've been waiting for Habibi for so long, since I read Blankets five years ago, that I did not really mind. And, because Craig Thompson told Bookslut in 2004 that he was aiming for completion in 2005, I figure I wasn't the only one.

I unboxed it as soon as I got my hands on it; the book itself is a work of delicate beauty, with inlaid gold color and intricate, presumably Islam influenced, designs. Be careful when you grab it: I've been carrying it around, and, apparently, I've been holding it with my thumb on the inlay, which has begun to rub off. The book looks just as nice on the outside as it does on the inside (and the ink on paper won't rub off!); everything we've come to expect from Thompson, the distinctively highly rendered cartoons, the visual puns, the gorgeously complicated splash pages, it's all there. If anything, the time that Thompson spent on Habibi means it looks better and more well thought-out than Blankets. I think part of what made the earlier book a work of sloppy genius is how accidental everything seems; Habibi is striking for the opposite reason, because every line and panel and every space where there is nothing, they all seem intentional.

So let's get one thing out of the way: despite the fact that it is clearly the work of Craig Thompson, Habibi is not Blankets. It doesn't have the same inherent gravity, and the book doesn't keep you as close. Although this fable comes close to the quality of Thompson's autobiographical impulse, it's too intentional, and, anyway, our expectations for it were almost certainly too high. There's no way that Habibi could be all the things I expected it to be, since my expectations were almost certainly unreasonable.

Let us, then, try to move Blankets and my high expectations for its follow-up out of the way, and try to evaluate this new work on its own terms.

Habibi is pretty great. It's flawed, for sure, but the sheer mass of great ideas outweighs the fact that the sprawling fable just feels too big, too spread out, and the strength of the characters is enough to drag you through a good deal of exposition dealing with Islamic theology, mysticism and science: at moments, the book feels like a half effective crash course in Islam. The point of this exposition is unclear to me; Thompson must mean the biblical stories to be allegorical for the events of the story, or maybe the other way around, but allegory and allusion don't work if you have to explain what it means, which is precisely what happens. When the stories do work, or at least when they work better, it's because they are being told in the context of the story itself, because they are stories within the story. The allegorical method might merely be that natural progression of Thompson's tendency towards nonlinear storytelling, his penchant for revealing things at the moment of their highest impact rather than at the moment of their actual happening.

Usually, this works like magic; sometimes, however, Habibi is just too sprawling. Revelations get lost at the moment when they would suddenly make sense, events are frustrating because they are too far separated from the revelations that give them meaning. Like the bits about the magic squares and the Arabic letters, some of which I could probably read a few more times and still not fully understand, the book's sheer size tends to slow its force as a narrative, which is exceedingly frustrating.

You also get the sense that the narrative isn't the point, not quite. There's a lot going on here, beyond the stories of Dodola and Zam, their separations, their reunions, and their love. On that level, the book is very much like Blankets, just significantly more complicated and not pulled together as tightly. On another level, I get the sense that the exposition about Islam is an attempt to soften perceptions about it; I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that this was part of the intention behind the new book, and I wonder about its efficacy, given that Thompson's audience is almost certainly playing the choir to his preacher. Above all that, though, Habibi is a story about stories and, more specifically, it is a story about stories told in both pictures and words: Habibi is, all the way up, a meditation about comics.

The way Arabic is written is a peculiarly situated way in to this contemplation: as a language that is recognizable yet illegible to most of the intended audience, it is possible for us to look at the calligraphy and both understand that it is words and see that it is also a picture. For someone who reads Arabic, though, the connection is more clear; as an illiterate, I understand that the pictures are words, but someone who reads Arabic understands both the word and the picture together. Thompson then pulls a brilliantly clever trick: in the penultimate chapter, he draws nothing but Arabic letters, English letters and panels-- nine equally shaped rectangles on the page. "Orphan's Prayer" is nothing but exposition, words (which we can understand to be pictures as well as words) strung together to make meaning placed within the traditional context of the comic-- the domain of the word and the picture. For Thompson, the word and the picture are one and the same, born separate, coming together, rent apart, and then coming together again, leaving behind the legacy in the form of an adopted child.

Habibi is, then, perhaps the most subtle in-medium defense of the medium of that I've ever read. It's mere existence is, of course, a testament to how far we've come in the battle to make people take comics seriously, but, even beyond that, Thompson made his book, which he knew people were going to read because it is his first major work since Blankets, which is partially responsible for the vanguard of comics intellectuals we now have fighting the good fight, the biggest weapon we have yet in that fight.

In this regard, Habibi may be proven to be even more important than Blankets, and I will be interested to see how, once the initial critical reaction passes, readers of comics, hopefully a larger group than before, consider them both together.

A Verifiable Classic

The new edition of Blankets, set on top of a copy of Habibi

The first time I read Blankets, I think I was a junior in high school. I know it must have been around then, anyway, because I discussed the book at length with my friend Lauren, and she and I got to know each other when she starred in a movie I made at the end of my sophomore year.

(The movie, if you're curious, was a "stranger comes to town" story, set in a high school. I wonder how it would hold up, if I were to watch it now. Luckily, it's either lost to time or buried under a pile in my closet, so I'll probably never have to find out.)

One day a week, I would walk from my high school, on the outskirts of what passes for a downtown in Chicago's north suburbs, to a tutoring appointment. The end of school and the beginning of the appointment were staggered by a couple of hours; this heartened me, insofar as it meant that I wasn't the only one getting help, but it also allowed me a weekly foray into Highland Park's public library. In a moment at which libraries are increasingly being threatened, I am continually grateful that this particular library continues to hold on, even though I haven't actually spent more than a few consecutive weeks at home in almost three years. Without that library and, in particular, a couple of shelves just the other side of the science fiction section, I'm not sure you would be reading these words right now. Without the Highland Park Public Library, without their ever growing collection of comics, a collection that now takes up several whole bookshelves, I'm not sure I would have discovered that there was more to the medium than four color caped crusaders, nor am I confident I would have eventually discovered Kirby, Moore or Gaiman.

To say that my visits to those shelves are an important part of who I am now is like saying that those tutoring sessions I was killing time before helped me get into college; that is, it would be nothing other than true, although I used to be loathe to admit it.

It was on one of those days that I discovered Blankets. I think it must have been winter. I think I must have slipped the book under my red parka to protect it from snow. I remember sitting in the waiting room at the tutoring center, and opening the book. I remember not getting any work done that night. I remember sitting down on my bed, and reading Craig Thompson's book all the way through.

Let's call that 2006. I've occasionally thought about buying a copy since then, but I never really saw the need: it was always at the library, after all, and I still go home for stretches long enough that my ability to find a copy of the book seemed assured. But with the release of Habibi looming, Top Shelf released an edition of the earlier book that is as beautiful as an object as it is a marvelous piece of comics, an edition that physically matches both the dimensions of the new book and the spirit of the old one, that is to say, Top Shelf released an edition that belongs on my top shelf. So when I ordered my books for the semester, I ordered Blankets too.

And then, with the books I actually have to read for my second-to-last semester in college, it showed up on my doorstep, big and thick and beautiful, all white and black on the inside and highlighted in various dark blues on the outside. Last night, five years after I made this mistake the first time, I opened up Blankets. Two and a half hours later, I was done. Sure, I tried to put it down. Maybe I even succeeded, once or twice, but never more than briefly. By the end, I was committing the cardinal sin of comics reading: I was skimming, just a little bit. Looking at the words rather than the words and the pictures. I had to reread the second half of the last chapter. I did, but rather than really conquering Blankets, it had, for the second time in my life and five years after the first incident, conquered me.

I can't really tell you why I fell so hard for Thompson's book the first time around. There's a distinct possibility that I liked it because everybody else liked it so much; even now, I'm not convinced my critical self is entirely independent. I suspect, however, that I was taken in by the spirit and the romance, by the impressionistic conveyance of a feeling-- love-- that I had been longing for a couple of years already but had eluded me up until that point. I suspect that, when I first read Blankets, I fell a little in love with Raina at just the same moment that Craig did.

Since then, I have more than once fallen in, and then out, of love, and now, rather than see the sort of love I would like to share with someone, I see in Blankets the arc of my own relationships. I see the quilts stuck in the cubby hole (and I know that I am not yet brave enough to dig them all out). I understand that Thompson chooses to reveal memories slowly, in the same way that we only allow ourselves glimpses of pains past, and I understand that, while it is a book about many things, Blankets isn't really a book about anything. It functions in the same way that our own narrative instinct does, it is a story constructed with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with motifs and themes and characters, but without being self-consciously about anything, like, say, the journey of a Jewish kid from the north suburbs of Chicago that begins with a stop at the library between the final bell and ACT tutoring and ends with him sitting at his computer, writing about how he got all the way there. And the story that bookends that story is just as striking at the end as it was at the start.

I think I know, by the way, why that is. Has there ever been as effective an impressionist as Craig Thompson? The simultaneous reality and unreality of the comics medium probably makes stories told in the medium inherently impressionistic, but Thompson really manages to get the senses confused, to tell a story with the feel of fabric in a fully visual medium, relating not the exact actuality of a moment but instead revealing in its complete, if not exactly its persistent, truth.

Habibi comes out in a little under two weeks (although I hold out hope that it will arrive early enough that I can lug it to Brooklyn for the Brooklyn Book Fest); I believe I read, somewhere and several years ago, that Thompson wishes to do for Islam in the new book what he did for Christianity in the old book, that is, humanize it. The fact that I can't find the quote anywhere makes me wonder if I made it up and, to a certain extent, I hope I did. Although, because of its subject matter, some will measure Habibi's success by its characters, I think we can expect carefully honest and earnest constructions; instead, I hope the book is judged by the standards and in the terms that Thompson has already set. I hope it (and, after having just reread the earlier work, I am confident that it will) has the same classic comics appeal of which Blankets is now a verifiable example.