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)