I found myself fascinated with the way that Arabic lettering and numbering intersected: the mathematics and the religion and the writing are all intertwined, and they also play into the shapes of the tessellating patterns. The story of the Prophet, as well as the origins of both Christianity and Islam, are interwoven with Dodola and Zam’s tale. In these sections, Thompson combines fluid curves and organic brush strokes with very structured patterns, using traditional Islamic tiling. Thompson weaves in a lot more: Dodola tells Zam stories about the Prophet Muhammad, about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and about writing in Arabic and the significance of the shapes of the letters and the name of Allah. That’s only one part of the book, though.
The story, told in a series of flash-forwards and flash-backs, is about the two of them as they struggle to survive - as they get separated and reconnect. Zam is a small boy whose own mother was also in chains, and Dodola rescues him and raises him herself. Dodola is a girl who was married off at a young age, before being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Set in an unnamed country in the Middle East, the book centers around Dodola and Zam, two child slaves who escape their bonds and flee into the desert. And the story is just as huge as the book. His newest book, Habibi, is even longer, nearly 700 pages, and it’s mind-boggling just to think of the act of drawing this many pages, let alone crafting a story of this magnitude. The story in Blankets was about growing up: stuck sharing a bed with his brother, falling in love, getting (and then losing) religion. At the time, it was the longest graphic novel I’d ever read, and is still probably in the top five. You may remember Blankets, a semi-autobiographical book published in 2003 to great acclaim, which weighed in at nearly 600 pages. Craig Thompson is a masterful comic book artist with the ability to fill pages with life: the amount of detail he includes in some of his drawings is incredible and astounding, as is the sheer scope of the work.
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