Habibi

by Craig Thompson
Pantheon 2011

A sprawling, epic graphic novel of love and... no. Just love. But also a lot more.

Chance throws together Dodola and Zam, a pair of child slaves, and theres is an intricate story of love, admiration, and survival. It's a love that survives all the worst things that can happen to lost and forgotten children, and it is a love that seems to span thousands of years at the same time. It is an almost unwieldy story that falters adventurously where most storytellers would probably play safe, and it rewards the reader with something that feels as old-world authentic and modern at the same time.

The story begins when nine-year-old Dodola is sold as a bride to a scribe, a man old enough to be her father. Despite the forced consummation of their marriage he isn't entirely a brute and in short order begins to teach Dodola how to write. Yes, in the beginning was the word, and the word lead to the Qur'an, and to stories. These stories come to calm young Zam, a slave whom she saves and raises like a younger brother. They also save Dodola in the same way they saved Shahrazad when captured into the sultan's harem, they serve as a comfort to her when locked in jail and when she hovers near-death and is being nursed back to health by a grown Zam. Throughout the bonds of love that weave through the stories also wend through Dodola's and Zam's lives as they are separated and long for each other.

It might be easier to explain a book like Habibi if it had a traditional narrative structure but Thompson has chosen to bite of quite a huge chunk of landscape. Arabic stories and the stories of the Qur'an make their way into adventures and parables that could have come from the Arabian Nights tales. Actual religious stories and texts are part of the fabric, as is a fair deal of unashamed carnal humanity, and though it doesn't bother me in context I would be remiss in not mentioning in a review that there's quite a bit of nudity and violence in Habibi. Just like life, which I'm going to assume was part of Thompson's intent.

As a fan of Thompson's tale of first love, Blankets, I was cautious not to read too much about Habibi before I could see it for myself. But I had gleaned that some find issue with his western appropriation of Arabic stories and tropes. I am not learned enough in these areas to gauge those assessments, but I could see where a caution might go up when considering the perpetration of stereotypes and cultural biases. But I have read non-western religious texts, and the Arabian Knights tales, and creation myths enough to know that at the very least Habibi reflects much of what has been written before. Does the current global political situation make us more sensitive to these images and stories? Perhaps, but wouldn't a discussion as opposed to a condemnation be a good thing?



Habibi is strictly for teens, mature ones at that. In addition to the nudity and frank discussion of sex and reproduction the violence includes rape, voluntary castration and torture. There is also, very carefully worked into the story, an historical progression where the story seems to begin several hundred years ago but ends in the modern era. The implication that the more things change the more they stay the same may bother some, suggesting the middle east hasn't changed in a thousand years or so, but as we've seen a reactionary turn to old values cropping up perhaps we shouldn't shoot the messenger here.  Habibi is an accomplished work of art and graphic narrative that at the very least should raise the bar for what can be done with the medium.

The Snow Party

by Beatrice de Regniers
1959 Pantheon edition illustrated
by Reiner Zimnik
1989 Lothrop, Lee & Shepard edition
illustrated by Bernice Myers

Today, a little compare and contrast between two editions of the same book separated by three decades.

Snowed in on and old farmhouse in the Dakotas, a lonely woman begins to fantasize about having a little company. The man, her husband, points out that they don't know a soul and calls her daft for thinking such things. And besides, who'd venture out in the snow for a party even if they did have some friends. That night the storm takes out the electricity and the man decides to bring in 300 baby chick from the barn so they don't freeze. While he is out the back door the first wave of snow-stranded travelers knock on their front door. Happy for the company, the woman starts making some tea while the man welcomes the visitors. Then more stranded folks arrive. Carloads, busloads, whole wedding parties full of people stranded in the snow have made their way to the house. And then a bakery truck is stuck and there's cake and pastries and its a full party. By noon the next day the storm has passed and the stranded travelers move on. leaving the tired farm wife to sleep and dream the party all over again.

The first difference between the two is that the older version of the book is more of a picture storybook while the later edition hews more closely to what we recognize as a picture book today. In hardcover, the 1959 edition is closer in size to a trade paperback, and the illustrations are simple pen and ink drawings that have a folksy charm and seem more like spot illustrations. The pictures have a quirkiness to them, and the couple presented are round and old and very much country. Separate from a beginning reader, but not quite a middle grade book, this was clearly aimed at the emerging reader ready for slightly longer stories and fewer illustrations.

In the more recent edition (and it's odd to think of 20 years ago is "recent") the illustrations are full color and cominate the page in bright watercolors and more cartoon-y illustrations. The man and women here look a little more like aging hippies who were part of the back-to-land movement. They don't seem at all old. And as for its size the book is only slightly more square that the original, not quite as large as contemporary picture books.

Cosmetic difference aside, it's interesting to see how the text was modified for the new version. In 1959 the book opens with the happy couple in front of their farm house with the following text:

There was this little old woman and this little old man and they lived in a little old farmhouse 'way out in Dakota.

Charming, like a folk tale. Jump ahead thirty years and we get the following opening:

There was this woman, and there was this man, and they lived in a little old farmhouse way out in Dakota.

The breaks in the newer version remove some of the cadence of the original, and the word 'old' has been removed as a descriptor. Already I'm struck with wondering why the changes were made. Did it somehow seem irresponsible to put a pair of old people out in the middle of nowhere in a snow storm? Does it seem improbably that old people could want to party? Was this a question of ageism creeping into the revision?

And where the first book opens simply with that one line, the later version continues on for three more short paragraphs with the couple indoors talking. Through the window you see snow but no sense of the scenery you get with the older edition where, cleverly, the title page, the LOC page, and the dedication page all show the farmhouse and a nearby tree going through the seasons from spring through fall, with winter in full effect on that first page. It's setting and place and time and not a word used. It's the book equivalent of a movie's title sequence, or a musical's overture, and it doesn't feel anywhere near as jarring as simply jumping into the story without taking the time to establish itself.

The two books have exactly the same page count, and yet in the older book the second page explains how they lived on a farm with chickens, and in the third it talks about it snowing and snowing before the woman talks about being lonely. In the update the woman talks being "mighty lonely here with just you and the chickens for company" in the second sentence.

I don't think I'm reading into this by suggesting that the original version implies an empty nest couple who suddenly find themselves alone at the end of their days. The passage of time, the seasons, are clearly an indication of time's passage. With the new version we find a couple who don't look old enough to have raised kids and so the woman's longing for a party comes off more as a whim, a fancy, and somehow less serious. Frivolous.

Form here out the changes seem more one of economy – allowing for larger pictures and shortcutting the story where it isn't necessary. When the first guests arrive the woman sccops up some snow to make tea. It's a small detail from the original, not missed in the revision, except it is all the richer for the imagery it provides a story. The reader can try to imagine how much snow would be needed to make enough water for a tea party. It is precisely because the older book isn't a traditional picture book that it includes these details, but by reducing the story to fit the format is looses something.

The newer illustrations, had there never been anything to compare them with, would have been perfectly fine. But in comparison it is hard not to notice that for all their color and vibrancy they lack a depth. They are all surface, flat, stagnant. The older pen and ink drawings might bore younger readers for what they lack, but in return they have a sense of depth and paegentry. At the end, when the baker's truck is unloaded, the Myers illustrations show a sea of heads each holding platters of different pastries. In the Zimnik illustrations the line of helpers unloading the truck is repeated over two pages, which give the story a sense of lots of trips and an abundance of treats. In addition, despite the lack of horizon line, there is depth in the processional with the blank of the page serving as part of the white-out created by the storm.

The conversion of the picture storybook into another format is not new or unique. One of my favorite childhood picture storybooks, Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger, now exists as a rather slim middle grade book with Quintin Blake illustrations that don't have the same warmth and magic as the ones originally provided by William Pene Du Bois. Here, the book was shifted down to a picture book which is the only way it could go because it isn't quite enough for a middle grade reader.

But what is the problem with the book for children that is about the length of a short story? Why do kids have to make this progression from picture books to beginning readers to series books like The Magic Treehouse? I fear the day someone decides (really, its only a question of time isn't it?) that William Stieg's picture storybooks would make better middle grade readers, or become simplified into board books using their original illustrations. I feel sometimes like the adult world is pushing kids to reader faster then they are ready, faster than they want, and to accept longer and longer books out of some need to not leave them behind, educationally. Reading for fun, for the sense of accomplishment, with stories that can be reader and enjoyed and reread in a single sitting... I sometimes sense these are the casualties in the publishing and reading wars.

But let's hear it for the libraries that still carry both editions of The Snow Party so that readers can find the version that suits them best.

Punch and the Magic Fish (with video bonus)

A Grimm Brothers' Tale Retold
by Emanuele Luzzati
Pantheon / Random House 1973

Luzzati's retelling of the Grimm's "The Fisherman and His Wife" get overlaid with the Punch and Judy comedy of the hapless hunchback and his shrew of a wife. Not as opulent as some of Luzatti's other illustrations, the story melds the two stories fairly well until the end when it veers a little and the magic fish from the original ends up in the frying pan.

I've done coverage on the original Grimm story long ago when I was doing that sort of thing more often with my Grimmoire series. Basically, Punch the fisherman finds a fish who, in exchange for his freedom, grants the fisherman a wish. His wife Judy sends him back repeatedly to upgrade the wishes even though Punch is perfectly happy with his life at every stage of the story. Finally the wife goes one wish too far and the fish returns them back to their poor life with a family of hungry kids.

Luzatti is usually very bold with his colors, but here everything is set against open fields of white and it doesn't work for me the way his other books do. Still, the mix of torn paper collage and sketchy marker give it that whimsy that I like about his work.

As an added bonus, I was able to find a video Luzzati made around the same time that features Punch and the music of Rossini. It isn't "The Fisherman and his Wife" but it shows another side of this illustrator's work. The darker elements of a traditional Punch and Judy story are here - the beatings, Punch's journey to hell - but I think this could still work for kids today. Some kids. Anyway, enjoy.