Jeff Baker, The Oregonian 09/24/2011 10:01 AM
This is the ninth in an occasional series of articles called “Where I Write” that uses work space to explore the hows and whys of writing.
A painting hangs above the drawing table in Craig Thompson’s <http://www.dootdootgarden.com/> Southeast Portland home. It’s a prized possession, a birthday gift done by his friend, artistDan Attoe, <that”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Attoe>that is both funny and intensely meaningful.
The painting is a portrait of God, full-bearded and wild-eyed, the angry Yahweh of the Old Testament, ready to smite a sinner. But step a little closer: There are four words at the bottom, painted in capital letters so small you have to lean over the table to read them.
“It’s a painting of God looking down on me as I work — with an important mantra,” Thompson says, grinning. “I suppose you can’t print the caption in The Oregonian.”
No way. A rough paraphrase would be “don’t mess up.” God doesn’t take his own name in vain, of course, and his message, in the narrowest sense, is consistent with strict religious instruction of all faiths. Attoe, who like Thompson is from a small town in Wisconsin where religion is taken very seriously, says he thinks the rigorous way Thompson was brought up, and his rebellion against it, is part of what makes him such a disciplined artist and what makes the painting so personal.
“It’s meant as a distilled caricature of what religions like his parents’ fundamentalist church are intended to instill in their members,” Attoe says. “This is why the ominous, glowing face of God is saying (what he says).”
Attoe did the painting as Thompson was finishing more than seven years of work on his new graphic novel, “Habibi,” <http://www.amazon.com/Habibi-Craig-Thompson/dp/0375424148/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316821215&sr=1-1> an enormous, ambitious book that expands and deepens the twinned themes of sensuality and spirituality that Thompson explored in his groundbreaking 2004 book, “Blankets.” <http://www.amazon.com/Blankets-Craig-Thompson/dp/1891830430/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b> Thompson followed God’s command and didn’t mess up, but the bold, original storytelling and stunningly detailed drawings in “Habibi” don’t fully reflect the pain that went into creating them. The pressure to follow “Blankets,” a book that sold 100,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages, was so intense that Thompson developed crippling pain, what he called “a creative castration going on around my hands” caused by tendinitis and stress.
“You have so much emotional investment in a body part, I guess,” he says. “The state of your psyche is reflected in your body.”
Therapy and a variety of treatments eased the pain in his hands, and so did the satisfaction of completing “Habibi” after so much work. It’s normal for Thompson to draw for eight hours every day and discard hundreds of pages while working on a book. The loose, fluid style and revealing personal content of “Blankets” has given way to much more sophisticated artwork in “Habibi,” which is inspired in part by Arabic calligraphy and architecture. It will be a surprise for many who fell in love with the coming-of-age romanticism of “Blankets,” as if Thompson followed “The Catcher in the Rye” with “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”
“After ‘Blankets,’ I was sick of drawing myself and doing this autobiographical, mundane, Midwestern sort of comics,” Thompson says. “I wanted to create something bigger than myself and outside myself.”
Mission accomplished.
“Habibi” is a huge book that combines Thompson’s fascination with Islamic culture and his natural artistic talent in a sprawling story that includes harems, eunuchs, deserts, skyscrapers, numerology, stories from the Quran and the Bible, and some of the most elaborate and finely drawn backgrounds and borders in the brief history of the graphic novel. It establishes the 36-year-old Thompson, who briefly worked as a designer at Dark Horse Comics before leaving to tell his own stories, at the top of a short list of great graphic novelists with Daniel Clowes <(“Ghost”>http://danielclowes.com/>(“Ghost World”) and another Portland artist, Joe Sacco. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Sacco>
“Craig might be the best pure artist that I know,” Sacco says. “By that I mean he is one of those artists that is born and not self-made. He has a facility with line that makes my jaw drop. I have seen him do staggeringly beautiful architectural drawings in ink, straight on a sketch pad without the intermediate step of putting down pencils. I would say he doesn’t so much know what he’s doing as feels what he’s doing.”
The front room of Thompson’s house reflects the success of “Blankets” and the variety of influences that went into “Habibi.” There are several small clusters of trophies: two Eisner Awards, named after Will Eisner, <an”>http://www.willeisner.com/>an artist and graphic novelist whose classic style is often compared to Thompson’s; and two brick Ignatz Awards, given at the annual Small Press Expo for alternative comics and named after the cartoon mouse who spent 30 years throwing bricks at Krazy Kat.
The Ignatz Awards are a little dusty, a tip-off that Thompson has been concentrating on the world of “Habibi.” The shelves have a mix of oversized books on calligraphy, art from Northern Africa and Islamic countries, and language guides and religious books from the Arab world. A large Oriental rug anchors the living room while a drawing table and art supplies dominate what in most houses would be the dining room. Thompson lives and works in the modest rental, one he says Sacco convinced him was a good idea.
“It’s by far the most peaceful location I’ve ever worked in,” Thompson says. “‘Blankets’ was created in a completely chaotic apartment. It was one of those cardboard Portland apartments that’s just full of drama and drug dealers. It’s amazing that I got anything done in that home. My neighbors often would knock on the door and ask for money. I thought that’s how I always would have to live, wrestling with the neighbors over stereos and domestic abuse, and finally I found this house with the most peaceful family atmosphere ever. I am really sensitive to noise, and it’s good for my soul to be in this mellow environment.”
When Thompson starts working in the morning, he keeps the blinds drawn while penciling or drawing because he wants to keep the outside world away and craves the “cavern-like quality” he remembers from his dingier apartments. In the afternoon, when he’s inking a page, he opens the blinds and lets the “natural cloudy light” pour in. His pace is careful and deliberate: One page a day was a good rate on “Blankets”; a single page on “Habibi” often took three days.
“Here’s some sketches of the characters as they presented themselves,” Thompson says, pulling out of a series of neatly dated and labeled sketchbooks that trace the seven-year evolution of “Habibi.” The two main characters, a brave girl named Dodola and Zam, a boy she looks after through a long string of adventures, came to Thompson in a dreamlike state, “fairly full formed as child slaves. Then I started researching child slavery and that started to inform the world that I made up around them.”
“Habibi” takes place in a fairy tale landscape outside any particular place or time. There are camel caravans but also industrial wastelands and huge hydroelectric projects. Thompson borrowed freely from books and the Internet and did no on-the-ground research other than one trip to Morocco. The mosques of Turkey were a visual inspiration, the artistic style owes something to late 19th-century French pointillist painting, and the narrative structure is straight out of “One Thousand and One Nights,” a book that lends itself to the graphic novel form in the way one story flows into another.
“Graphic novel” is an inexact term — nonfiction comics are part of the genre — and in Thompson’s case, “illustrated novel” better reflects what he does. The first chapter of “Habibi” opens with a drop of water from “the Divine Pen” forming a river and ends with the story of Abraham and Isaac told from the points of view of the Bible and the Quran on the same page. In between, Dodola is sold into marriage, escapes after her husband is killed, and finds refuge with Zam in a ship covered by sand, where she tells him stories from the holy books.
“Blankets” is an autobiographical novel with a main character named Craig and a family that resembles Thompson’s in look and attitude. It’s about love and loss and the experience of sharing a bed for the first time, themes that are evident in “Habibi” and in “Good-bye Chunky Rice,” <http://www.amazon.com/Good-bye-Chunky-Rice-Craig-Thompson/dp/0375714766/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3> Thompson’s first book. At the same time he was preparing “Habibi” for press, he was doing a new hardcover edition of “Blankets” (they can be “bookshelf buddies,” he says) and noticed the similarities, including a mismatched couple lying in bed telling stories.
“I certainly wasn’t conscious of it when I was working on (‘Habibi’),” Thompson says “other than that I recognized there was a theme of both religion and sexuality, which is approached very differently in each book.”
Thompson thought “Blankets” might have an audience of 2,000 readers, not 100,000, and was surprised that his small-town story resonated so strongly in so many different cultures. One reason it did was because Thompson used his art to portray his romantic and spiritual confusion in a sensitive, honest way that required little translation. When his character made the decisions he did about staying in the church and staying with his first love, no one could doubt that he did so after searching and baring his soul. In “Habibi,” the spiritual quest is universal while staying specific to the characters, and it affected its author differently.
“In many dark ways, but also in enlightening ways,” Thompson says. “It really expanded my knowledge of Islam and the connections between the Judeo-Christian faith. Most of all, I was getting caught up in the sort of esoteric faiths — Sufism, Kaballah and the Gnostic faiths. All of those things were really inspirational and did guide my more personal spirituality. In the end I felt much richer, much more grounded, sort of enlightened. That sounds a little pretentious, I know.”
It’s common for an artist to work through an emotional or spiritual crisis and not uncommon for physical symptoms to mirror the inner struggle. Pierre-Auguste Renoir had crippling arthritis, as perhaps did Peter Paul Rubens and many others who create with their hands. Thompson describes his condition as tendinitis and says it messes with the joints in his hands “so they’re perpetually in pain. But definitely my psychological or emotional state enhances it.”
There’s no evidence of pain as he pulls out a brush and talks about using India ink because it’s part of the old-school comics tradition that goes back to Milton Caniff and “Terry and the Pirates.” He’s interested in the purity of ink on paper, not color or texture or other painterly concerns, and with a few brush strokes he brings Dodola to life in a full-page portrait. It’s hard to believe Thompson went to art school for only a semester and has to reach to elementary school and community college for formal lessons he learned. He’s self-taught, someone Attoe says “can create atmosphere in a drawing using only black and white ink, which is very hard to do. His figure drawing is the most fluid I’ve ever seen, partially due to the fact that he is constantly drawing when he’s away from his studio.”
Thompson will be away from his studio for much of the next few months, promoting “Habibi” in Europe and the U.S. He’d rather be holed up at home, with the blinds down and then up, working on one of three new book ideas, but understands the need to take “Habibi” out into the world. There was a time when he couldn’t find the ending, a six-month period when he tried 10 different ways to conclude it and resorted to “the classic Portland tradition of hanging out in coffee shops.”
It turned out that was another “Habibi” theme — droughts and dams — and it was a sweet feeling when the drought lifted and the dam opened at last.
— Jeff Baker, <mailto:jbaker me on Twitter <http://twitter.com/oregonianbooks>
