Adored Craig Thompson's "Habibi"

Can do no justice to it by writing about its graphics!

Here are some for you.

 

Get it Now!!!

I loved these books …

My first book is for diehard graphics fans and I wouldn't recommend this to you if you are not one. Called On The Great War, it is a 24-page long Graphic Panorama.

Who'd do this? Joe Sacco, of course. Some of you may have seen him at the Lahore Literary Festival. He is brilliant. There is an interesting piece, July 1, 1916 by Adam Hochschild and the book has annotations by Joe Sacco.

Joe Sacco has always been among my favourite cartoonists and I have most things that I could get my hands on by him. I was glad to get Bumf Vol. 1 this time. Ask T2F in Karachi or The Last Word in Lahore, if you want it … but be careful for it has nudes and sex in it. (This means that if you are under 16, you'll have to ask an older brother to get it for you!)

Here's the cover: Nixon saying he is Barack Obama

One could never ever trust him!

The essays are hilarious and so is the beautiful back cover,

called "I will make you fishers of men".

OK ... that's two books of Joe Sacco. But there was another superb one (also from T2F/TLW) by several cartoonists and graphics specialists. It's a Graphic History of Bohemians.

Obviously its called Bohemians.

I love reading about them and found this to be a great collection, taking a lot of salient features and putting them together in one book. It is co-edited by Paul Buhle who also co-edited The Beats, if you remember. I'd written about that once. Several artists drew that, too, and their gorgeous works are all over the book.

Just to remind you, here is a page from it:

I loved the beat guys and was an ardent follower in my old hippie days. I am still a hippie at heart, even now.

So go and get these … and enjoy!

#3K4T2F

Visit the Website

and watch this to see what people have to say about T2F

Joe Sacco takes you into …

… a world that many of us read about in our newspaper stories or see bits of it on newscasts.

Having written about Guy Delisle in a previous post, I thought I'd go back a little further in time and have a column on Joe Sacco (mentioned in Delisle's book, Jerusalem).

Born October 2, 1960 (that's 20 years after my birth), Sacco is considered a luminary and is best known for his comics journalism.

His strips have been put together in books and you should certainly get Palestine (1996) and Footnotes from Gaza (2009) since they are both available at The Last Word.

As it says on the Internet, "… these comic strips are investigations into two little-known and long-forgotten massacres in 1956 in the southern Gaza Strip that left at least 500 Palestinians dead. It is a chilling look back at an unrecorded past and an exploration of how that past haunts and shapes the present - including the beginning of mass home demolitions in 2003 in Rafah."

So let's start with "Palestine", which was the first Sacco book that I read. The illustrations are amazing and you are carried right into Palestine. 

The violence is everywhere and you feel it much more with the cold print in your hand, rather than the 5-minute video on TV (between two ads that tell you that you'd be beautiful if you were fair) or a newspaper report that carries this item amongst serious news stories, like the PM having gone to Hajj (on our money!) or the Governor (generally a friend/brother of the PM) opening a Mithai Ki Dookaan the belongs to his wife's nephew.

You get to feel the pain, understand the dogged perseverance of the families, and those around each victim.

Edward Said was right when he said this about Palestine — "A political and aesthetic work of extraordinary originality, quite unlike any other in the long, often turgid and hopelessly twisted debates that have occupied Palestinians, Israelis, and their respective supporters. With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Socco."

•••••

Hooked by Sacco's first book, I got  "Footnotes from Gaza", next. Wow. Absolutely astounding. 

 

His images were thrilling, the details were brilliant, crowds were captured superbly - making you feel you were part of that lot.

Scenes after devastations were drawn so brilliantly … but never did you get lost only in the images. The text was always there to take you much deeper, through small pieces that were thrown about … to large texts that led you through the war.

•••••

So, naturally, I went right ahead and got

The Fixer — A Story from Sarajevo. 

Away from the Middle East, this book took me through the mind of a man discussing things about his past - (was all of it true or not?) - to Joe Sacco, who appears as the lead, the one who is doing most of the talking, in all his comics and novels.

Take a look at a street scene. Look at the faces. Look in the background and see the other drawings of people. It must take hours of work to get a drawing like this done. And Sacco does this all the time!

And details? Look at the rape victim lying in the bottom left. Just a hint of it because your eyes are focused on the soldier's back. Then you look at it … Wow!!!

I hope T2F gets this book for sale, too. Many would adore it.

•••••

Notes from a Defeatist was an earlier book by Sacco, I think, but I received it much later when Sabeen Mahmud brought it for me from her UK trip. My recommendation is that if you are new to Joe Sacco you read the first three books mentioned above before you buy this work of his. It takes him away from the wars and on to other interesting subjects. 

•••••

But do that only if you love his art, as much as I do.

(The above book is for Mature Readers, only!)

Guy Delisle: Graphic Novels you must read!

A package arrived from Lahore via TCS on my birthday. Sent by Maleeha Azeem. It was longish and fat … and I thought the girl must be really mad to send me Sugar-Free Laddoos, Barfees, & Gulab Jamuns from Nirala (and I thought again, for the hundredth time, "Why the fuck have they closed their shop in Karachi?").

I hurried to open it and put the contents into the fridge … and, lo and behold, there were two gifts inside. Worth a lot more than the Sugar-Free stuff.

There was a box of 100 Comic Magazine Covers and a book: "Jerusalem" by Guy Delisle. The cards were a thrill to view quickly and be put aside to view again at leisure. But Delisle! I had to start reading it right away.

The first page had this, of course.

I had liked this French-Canadian cartoonist when I read his "Burma Chronicles", mainly because it went back to a land that I had visited three times in my early shipping days. It has changed an awful lot, since then, though the people still seem to be as aggravated as ever if they are in uniform.

I remembered how, in 1959, I had put my pass down at the main desk to go out, once. A very, very drunken guardsman had pulled out a cocked gun and pointed it a couple of inches from my head because he felt that the paper made a noise while he was sleeping. He was shaking wildly and said my body can be taken back to the ship when he was through, swearing in Burmese.

Trembling, Stanley Fernandes (a Second Engineer who was with me) and I pleaded with him and apologised as profusely as one does when facing death. Fifteen minutes of standing there, with a gun at your head is a terrible experience, let me tell you. Finally the guard agreed, took all the money we had, and let us go out.

Photo by Luigi Novi

Guy Delisle draws simple things wonderfully well!
Take a look at this mess/mass of wires …

… that reminded me of Karachi,

as did the sketch of a plug point inside the house.

So does this:

Right on!

It reminds you of how close to our home Burma is! (It's called Myanmar, now, by many countries except US and a couple of others who do not recognize it's Government and insist on calling it Burma.)

The trip to Burma with his wife who works at Doctors Without Frontiers shows you their life for a few months in that country, introducing you to its people, their customs, their religion, the repression that takes place there, and much more that could remind you of our own military rule.

•••••

So getting to read Jerusalem was essential! Once again, I thought how amazing these people are. Away from us, they think very much the same way as we do, give or take a few points.

I am not sure if we can find Mullas who would be anything like the anti-Zionist Jews, apart from the 'seven kids', their 'fashions', and the 'variations' among their personal beliefs that make everyone else a kaafir.

The Arabs, naturally, are even more like us.
Which is why we like them? Don't we?

The buses and the clothes. Wow.

The books takes us into their places that are strictly Jewish, strictly Arab, and includes the mistreatment of the Arabs by the Israelis (which is plenty!), and offers you a run down of the city that is (was?) a home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The book also suggests, as most Muslims do, that the Second Mosque is in Jerusalem. There was no mosque at the Meraaj (Isra' in the Qur'an) of The Prophet at Jerusalem, of course. It was built much later. The Second Mosque, as you may know, is never named in the Qur'an. It just states that it is the furthest mosque. Also the Qur'an says that the First and Second Mosques will have Peace … something that this Mosque has never really had. The First Mosque is the Kaaba and the Second Mosque is the Masjid Al Nabvi — both known for Peace!!!  This statement is now accepted by a few scholars. You can go to Google or YouTube and find a video from Mohammad Sheikh about this.

The priests there, too, have a sacrifice of animals, and seem to love blood! No wonder there's so much killing of humans in both parts because this must allow them to get over the feelings I and many others have about killing. 

When I was 10 years old a Mulla came to do the sacrifice at our downstair neighbour's house. He gathered all the children and said that the way to do this is to look straight at the animals eyes  … "and that will help you kill kaafirs in a Jihad without fearing." I wonder how many kids are taught this at Madressahs.

The Jerusalem book was superb and I learnt a lot more about the Jews despite having read many of their writings. My paternal side of the family that came from Turkey used to be Jews three generations before they migrated to India with Babar, who brought Kazi Kidvah with him to be the head of his court. I was most amused to find out about the Messianic Jews. (Read the book and you'd be surprised, too.)

Now I am waiting to read "Pyongyang" - a slightly older book by Guy Delisle - and learn more about Korea. 

So, The Last Word, when are you bringing it to T2F.