July 2008
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Tongue-tied
The Evasiveness of Language in Today’s Arab Comics
Edited by Hatem El Imam (Samandal Comics www.samandal.org)
The comic book, in its present day form, is regarded as an imported medium to the Arab world. We have always translated, lettered, reprinted and read American, European, and Japanese comics, and in comparison rarely made indigenous Arab comics. The rate and scale of production has been in fits and starts, never really sustained or cogent, mostly targeting children and often propounding dominant political ideologies from pan-Arabism to Islamism. Few attempts struggled with forging a native genre that transcended the barriers of sub-cultural differences and dialects.
To defy the status quo, a group of friends and I launched an experimental issue zero of Samandal (Salamander in Arabic) almost a year ago. A quarterly tri-lingual magazine based in Lebanon that collects and publishes comics from the region and abroad, Samandal aims to provide a platform for the alternative expression of cultural and social issues for youths and adults by publishing reading material that mixes stories from their own environment with international ones. Despite receiving acclaim from artists, readers, and the press, this nascent movement remains marginal and "underground", and has to overcome financial challenges, bureaucratic labyrinths, and the censor’s hands. However, the main challenge that my co-editors and I face remains a creative one; how to make relevant high-quality comics with rich content and powerful form, without falling into the trap of parroting established traditions, moralizing, or boring our audience to death? The work we receive teems with insights into our cultural production yet often brings with it more questions than answers. The lived experience transcribed in the strips is compelling, the lines of the illustrations borrow from many a school, and the question of using Arabic as a language emerges yet again: is it the glue that binds and defines expression or an ancient tongue that has outlived its time?
This ArteNews issue features investigations, experiments and speculations on verbal and visual strategies adopted by ten comics aficionados facing the complexities and contradictions of making an Arab comic.
Omar Khoury and Vartan Avakian take on two established comics genres: Science fiction and Superhero, but not without giving them a contextualizing twist. Mohieddin Ellabbad, the fdz and Mazen Kerbaj tell us about the prickly process of making comics today, while John Nasr and Omar Naim reflect on what it was like consuming them as Arab children growing up in the 1980s. Maha Maamoun transposes Egyptian movies into comic strips, using the medium’s particular handling of time and space to ‘read between the scenes,’ while Barrack Rima takes us behind the scenes of the grand meeting of book editors. Finally, all outlines and words fall off Raed Yassin’s telltale chromatic Superman pages.
The freshness and richness of these pieces only goes to prove the malleability of the medium of comics and a heartening readiness by artists who come from varying backgrounds to explore it. Filmmakers, musicians, photographers, performers, painters, alongside illustrators and writers collaborated to produce this action-packed issue, all the while appropriating their skills to add borrowed signs to the vocabulary of this ‘new’ language of Arab comics.
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Abu Uchuu
By Omar Khoury
Abu Uchuu is an attempt to transport the grounded mainstream Lebanese imagination into outerspace using a very familiar vehicle: the Service (communal taxi). Our Arabic fiction is often based in reality and any sort of commentary is very direct. Abu Uchuu is an experiment in giving the reader one step of distance from the subject, or a step closer to objectivity, in order to make social or political commentary easier to swallow; like having a glass of water with your medicine. For this reason, Abu Uchuu (the driver/main character) is set a thousand years in the future, in our solar system where people live in satellite cities, or space stations, that orbit the major planets and their moons. The strip is designed to be a daily newspaper cartoon.
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My father was a giant robot
By John Nasr
Well, not really --but for the majority of us growing up in the eighties and early nineties in Lebanon, we were beamed an invincible father figure in the form of a Japanese giant robot, whose rousing adventures appeared on our screens whenever gaps in the news would allow.
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The Adventures of Aluminum Hagop
By Vartan Avakian
The Adventures of Aluminum Hagop is an Arabic sci-fi comic, based on a thirteen-issue limited series in Armenian published under the name Hagop Aluminum. After the 13th Armenian issue was mischievously titled "Is this the End of Hagop?" H Publishers revived the series in Arabic, with occasional bilingual (Arabic/Armenian) special editions.
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By the fdz
الكتابة في إتجاهين معاكسين
فدز
ثقافة أساسية في الإنجليزية تجعل من كتابة نص للقصص المصورة في العربية فنا بهلوانيا في خلط اللغات و ترجمتها
العمل التالي هو توثيق لتلك التجربة
العمل التالي يتطلب تفاعل القارئ ويستعمل عدة نوافذ ويتضمن إنزال ملف واحد |
Writing in Opposite Directions
by the fdz
Educated primarily in English, writing scripts for comics in Arabic becomes a juggling act of languages and translations.
The following piece serves as a chronicle of the process
The following piece is interactive, involving extensive use of pop-ups, and includes one document to be downloaded
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Cameo Appearances
By Maha Maamoun
جزء من مشروع بحثي فني معني بالمشاهد و المعاني المرتبطة بإستخدام الأهرمات كخلفية في لسباق الدرامي لعدد من الأفلام المصرية
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Alien, By Any Other Name
By Omar Naim
When you’re raised thoroughly Arab, but on a thoroughly Western pop-cultural diet, sometimes strangeness is in the eye of the beholder.
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I will invent the comic
By Mazen Kerbaj
Lebanon’s most noted comics artist boldly exposes how it’s all done.
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The Illustrator’s Notebook
By Mohieddin Ellabbad
Three pages from the Egyptian master illustrator’s book on visual culture. Intended for children, yet equally insightful for adults.
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The Editors’ Assembly
By Barrack Rima
Vacant bubbles proliferate in this imagined assembly of book editors.
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Ready Made
By Raed Yassin
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