Why Comics Part II

September 05

On my desk I have a framed picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken in 1948. In it are Lord Mountbatten, the last British ruler of colonial India; along with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mountbatten’s wife, with whom Nehru was reportedly sleeping. It’s the sort of image you couldn’t make up: Mountbatten gazes out into the distance like Nero looking over a burning Rome; behind him, Nehru and his wife are doubled over in hysterical laughter. Beyond the image, we can imagine the greater picture: the bloodletting and exile that Ghandi predicted would occur with the dissolution of colonial rule, the ugly birth pangs that gave rise to modern India and Pakistan. It is context that makes this photograph a work of sheer genius--in one image, Bresson captures absurdity and tragedy together. It’s easy to make depressing art, passionate art, arty art. The hardest mood to capture for any artist is the tragicomic. To be funny and sad at the same time is almost impossible, but when achieved, it frames some of the most raw, real, divine human truths that are possible to depict. Bresson did it with a single click. One image. A thousand stories.

That’s what comics do.

Comics are the ideal medium for the rare writer who thinks words sometimes intrude on a story. There comes a point when prose doesn’t do the job--if you want to tell a story that is particularly unbelievable or surreal, but you want a reader to be able to enter into it as if it was, you need a picture. Imagine Superman as a novel. Now imagine a world without Superman. Clearly it was a story that had to be told, and could only be told a certain way: words and pictures. A lot of people argue that comics are inherently silly; the vast majority of them deal with people who wear multicolored tights, fly, and have perfect hair. They may be right. Then again, that description could also be applied to certain members of Congress. But comics seem to fill a cultural need to personify abstract hopes and fears--seen in this light, characters like R’as al Ghul (vaguely Arab man who believes he will live forever and fights against a West he views as inherently corrupt), who was written decades before 9/11, seem oddly prophetic. This is an idea explored in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel WATCHMEN. (Go read it.) Above all, comics ask a question--over and over again--that human beings have never quite been able to answer: What is justice?

Well?

New comics are traditionally released on Wednesdays. Click here to find your local comics shop. 

Why Comics

August 23

Recently Ibrahim of the wonderful blog From Clay asked me why, with my background in a fairly heavy brand of journalism, I would choose to write comics. It’s a fair question. The answer is two-fold. First: ironically enough, journalism was for me a departure from comics, rather than the other way around. I’ve wanted to write comics almost since I first started reading them regularly, at the age of about fifteen. This would have been 1997-ish--just to put that in perspective, Vertigo was launched when I was eleven years old; early enough, in other words, for me to think it had been around forever. (Frankly, I still sort of feel that way; this will make me sound like a company shill, but everything that happens before you’re twelve automatically takes on an aura of immortality.) My ambition was sealed the first time I saw bestselling comics author Neil Gaiman speak during my freshman year at BU. Someone in the crowd asked him what he would change if he knew he was going to die in two weeks. He paused for a moment, and then smiled and said, “Nothing.” Very close to a religious conversion, I admired anything that was both ascetic and profound, and thought this was one of the more graceful sentiments I had ever heard. I wanted to get to a similar point, psychologically and artistically, and hearing this from someone who’d written very beautiful comics seemed to confirm that comics were a vehicle one could use to get there.

Yes, this is really how I think.

In college I spent a year and a half working for the Kennedys. Mostly this meant sorting and preserving documents in the JFK Presidential Library (the wonderful, vital and under-appreciated art of archival science), and occasionally acting as a page for one of the Kennedys themselves. There, I saw pretty clearly that I could take one of two paths: the path of academia and politics, in which one primarily observes the world; or the path of art and religion, through which one experiences it. After 9/11, students of Arabic and political history were in high demand, and since I was already interning at JFK, various advisers and bosses and soforth suggested I try for the FBI or the Fletcher School. I seriously considered it, but in the end I chose Cairo--I chose, in other words, art and religion. In the current climate, I knew full well that this would wreck any chance I had at a career in politics or intelligence. In Cairo, however, I saw that there were real stories--as opposed to fictional ones--that needed to be told and weren’t being told, and that more often than not there were very few people who could tell them, and that because I was a Muslim and could express myself fairly well in English, I was sometimes one of those people. Getting into journalism was thus more or less an accident. Most mosques and madrassas in the Middle East are closed to non-Muslims, making it hard for non-Muslim journalists (except for very seasoned ones) to get face time with the people who are moving and shaping modern Islam. I was one of the few western writers in Cairo who could walk into a mosque on a deadline. This is probably the only reason I got to write for big-name publications during my rookie year.

The whole time, however, I was writing CAIRO. I never lost sight of comics. I was as excited to hear that editors at DC were reading my articles as I was to publish the articles themselves. There are some truths that lend themselves best to fiction (I expand on this in a Newsarama interview) and they were truths I wanted badly to tell.

Next: Why Comics Part II (The second reason)

On The Other Side Of The Table in San Dee

August 03

It’s a strange thing when, having spent your adolescence avidly reading an author’s books, you end up sitting in front of him at a panel. Not only that, but sitting in front of him because he had nowhere to sit and gallantly refused your chair. That’s me cooling my heels in front of Mike Carey (author of Lucifer, Crossing Midnight, The X-Men, Hellblazer, etc etc) while author Bill Willingham (of Fables and Jack of Fables) holds forth at the mike. The picture was taken in very low light with a flash, which is why we all look so...pink. (I’m additionally pink because it really should have been me standing rather than Mike Carey.) And that was the tenor of the whole weekend: sitting at tables with very talented people and wondering how on earth I got there and whether I shouldn’t try to sneak out the back before anyone noticed me. And it was great.

Here’s another, bigger pic of the whole Vertigo panel from the Flickr page of someone in the audience.

I didn’t get to meet Neil Gaiman, but through the uncanny networking ability of my professional better half MK Perker, I did get to see him speak. I got in line for Gaiman’s panel late, just as the security people were shooing people away and saying the hall was filled to capacity. Hearing this, MK immediately ran off, talked to two different people, took me by the arm, told me to shush when I asked him what was going on, presented me to the guy at the door and said “This is her” and then herded me inside. I never asked for the finer details.

In closing and on a totally different note, if you want some good extracurricular reading, check out writer Josh Dysart’s articulate, insightful journal , which he kept during a trip to Uganda for his upcoming project The Unknown Soldier. It’s very well-observed.