Graphic Novel

It’s a simple proposition: short graphic stories about city life, and one narrator – Mandy Ord – drawn with a single bulging eye. But the slice-of-life stories in Sensitive Creatures are rarely straightforward. Sweeping and brittle, kinetic and lush, this is a consistently surprising volume, at once an autobiography, a collection of vignettes, and a comprehensive catalogue of an artist’s career.

Habibi, Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel, is an epic six years in the making. Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, spanning ancient and modern epochs, Habibi tells the story of Dodola and Zam, child slaves who fall in love and dwell on a boat moored in a desert, before being dragged violently into lives of suffering and misery. It is a melodramatic tale full of humour, conflict, and heartbreak. It reminded me of Osamu Tezuka’s histories and of Will Eisner’s gritty, realistic fables.