“Habibi” (and Tusken Raiders)
I spent today traipsing around in Vienna, Austria (something that sadly hasn’t happened in a while) and realized – among other things – that comic book artist Craig Thompson had a huge gigantic tome out (titled Habibi), and a massive ad campaign behind it. Get a signed print! Get a tote bag! Buy the companion volume! Shopping spreee!!! I totally missed all this because I was busy surviving the Jewish holidays.
Habibi costs €40 – for comparison: I bought two armfuls of remaindered English books earlier today for the same amount of money. I also bought a complete German set of Emma (10 volumes) for €35 – BTW, did the exchange rate have to tank in the past weeks? I’ve been looking for a set for years now. So €40 for a single volume is way, WAY over my impulse buy threshold, and probably even my not-really-an-impulse-buy threshold.
But there’s another reason why I didn’t pick it up. It seemed gorgeously drawn (as can be expected from Thompson), but also very orientalist. In addition to that, I also found myself blinking stupidly and thinking “wow, some his Black characters look like typical Western caricatures, is he trying to pull this off with a straight face? Is this for realz? Are people really selling this stuff in 2011? Are people buying it?!”
Lately I’ve read way too much “Westerners reflect on Exotic Arab Culture” stuff where I felt that as a Jewish person I was closer culturally to the supposedly oh so exotic Arabs than to the authors themselves… which made all their effort to woo me as a reader look really ridiculous. At first browse it looked like Habibi would in all likelihood fit into this trend. Maybe it tries to subvert those tropes, but I’m kind of doubtful about that. This kind of imagery has a very nasty history, which makes even a subversion tricky; this looked like nothing of the sort and more like “wow, I get to draw naked Middle Eastern chixx! See my sophisticated and progressive story? Here, have a rape scene” on the author’s behalf. For all these reasons, the whole ad campaign left a bad taste in my mouth.
Since I don’t have the book (yet?), I can’t say more, but here is a long and image-heavy review by Nadim Damluji that makes many of the points that occurred to me upon cursorily browsing the book in the bookstore. (Be sure to check out this round-up of Arab comics by the same author.) It also has TUSKEN RAIDERS. Nuff said.
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By the way, I don’t know what’s it about the purchasing habits of Austrians or English-speaking expats… I regularly buy great, recent English-language fiction from the bargain bin, the remaindered section, etc. All that great stuff doesn’t sell? At all?
I love it when people say “you should buy ebooks, they don’t take up space”. Um. In most cases, ebooks cost more than my actual purchase prices… I do actually buy ebooks when they are reasonably priced. Unfortunately several major publishers seem to have strange notions about ‘reasonable’. Today I saw an ad for one of Daniel Glattauer’s recent books (a very slim volume of short essays), only €13.50 as an ebook! Excuse me? That costs more than a paperback edition!





