The Rise of Comic Books in the Middle East

Comic books and graphic novels are starting to take hold in the Middle East.

From a piece in Publishing Perspectives...

Reflecting this emerging interest was the recent three-day workshop held in Cairo on comics and other books for teenage readers in Arabic, co-organized by the Goethe-Institut and the European Union-funded NGO Literature Across Frontiers. The workshop, titled “A Difficult Age: Books for Teenagers between 13 and 18 Years,” drew illustrators, writers, and children’s authors from across the Arab world. The organizers have already planned a second workshop this fall, scheduled for September 29-October 1.

Thirteen authors and illustrators from Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the UAE attended the workshop from June 23-25, where sessions were run by children’s authors Jukka Parkkinen of Finland, Fatima Sharafeddine of Lebanon, and Rui Zink of Portugal, as well as graphic novelist Barbara Yelin of Germany. One of the participants was Rania Amin, the Cairo-based author and illustrator of a popular series of illustrated children’s books featuring a girl named Farhana.

What Amin found most beneficial from the workshop was learning how to make “a graphically illustrated page so much more different and developed than the original text, and not merely a plain illustration of the text.” Amin described herself as “very much interested” in expanding into writing a graphic novel for teenagers and adults, and had already begun working on one before the workshop. As a child, she read a lot of comics, mentioning Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, and Charlie Brown as favorites, “but what really got me interested in the world of comics were the stories I have started reading only recently as an adult, that were more serious in nature,” citing as influences a number of French- and English-language graphic novels, including Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Adrian Tomine’s Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which has been published in an Arabic edition.

Pictured above: Artwork by Jana Traboulsi.