Reflective Thompson Ponders Sex, Religion, and Water Crisis

Orientalism, journalism, and “The Lord of the Rings” were just a few of the topics that graphic novelist Craig M. Thompson addressed during a talk and book signing at the Brattle Theatre on September 21. Thompson, who is best known for the graphic novel “Blankets,” based on his youth in an evangelical Christian family, came to Cambridge to promote his newest book “Habibi,” which took him seven years to create.

“Habibi” is a departure for Thompson. While all of his previous work drew on his own life, his latest book is inspired by the culture of the Middle East. Anticipation for the new work was high. “A lot of people have been waiting for this book to come out,” Ryan J. Cook, a Harvard University Information Technology employee, said before the talk. “It’s been a while since he’s had a book of this thickness. And he seems like an interesting person. You want your writers to be interesting.”

It was Thompson’s 36th birthday, and before the talk the audience sang a round of “Happy Birthday” as Heather L. Gain of the Harvard Book Store presented Thompson with a cupcake and balloons.

After thanking Gain and the audience, Thompson explained the genesis of the idea for “Habibi.” After “Blankets,” he had grown tired of telling autobiographical stories and drawing “mundane Midwestern landscapes.” Two genres captivated him—sprawling fantasy epics like “The Lord of the Rings,” and journalistic pieces modeled after the work of fellow cartoonist Joe Sacco. “‘Habibi’ ended up being a combination of the two,” Thompson said. “It’s a fairy tale that draws on contemporary topics such as religion, sexuality, and water crisis.”

Thompson also discussed the opportunities that his latest project afforded him. He had been reading “One Thousand and One Nights” and wanted to explore Middle Eastern folklore in his own work. However, the text also spurred an interest in Orientalism. “I read the Richard Burton translation, which was bawdy, adventurous, and even scatological,” Thompson said. “I started wondering how much of this was from the actual Arabic text and how much of it was Burton’s idea of what the Middle East was like.”

As part of his talk, Thompson displayed a nineteenth-century painting by the American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman of a Moroccan woman smoking a hookah. “These sensationalized and eroticized paintings say a lot more about Western culture than [about] the Eastern cultures that they’re supposedly depicting,” Thompson said.

According to Thompson, Orientalism strongly influenced the artistic style of “Habibi.” Using designs inspired by Islamic devotional art, Thompson created a style he describes as more “OCD” than that of the much sparser “Blankets.”  He then showed several pages from “Habibi,” all of which were extremely detailed, in the mode of the Islamic ornamentation Thompson cited as an influence. “In a sense, [the book] is a defense of graphic novels as a medium,” Thompson said. “Comics used to be more minimalistic—they were quickly written and turned out.”

The power of comics was a theme to which Thompson returned repeatedly. At one point, he admonished the comics industry for pandering to audiences who prefer pulp to substance. He also spoke about the advantages that comics have over mediums such as film. “Film washes over the viewer—comics are more interactive and they require more of the reader,” Thompson said.

During the book signing, Thompson said that the medium of the graphic novel might be especially apt for a work such as “Habibi,” adding that the book was in part a meditation on words and pictures. The interplay between the two, he continued, would be lost in any other medium.

Both new and old fans of Thompson reacted positively to the talk.  Brighton resident Logan E. Faerber, who became a fan of Thompson in the late 1990s after reading “Good-Bye, Chunky Rice,” said he enjoyed the talk. Somerville resident Lazarus Morrison, who was previously unfamiliar with Thompson’s work, claimed that he “became a fan during [Thompson’s] talk.”

“I think that he has such mastery over what he’s doing,” Morrison said.  “He has an idea of comics in the broader sense, but he’s also got that technical sense. This is his life and this is what he’s devoted himself to.”