February 2012
1 post
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December 2011
2 posts
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2011 In Review
Although 2011 has been a busy year for me, it’s been a relatively quiet year for the blog. Therefore, as the calendar year closes I figured it would be as good a time as any to recap and regroup. A year ago today I was exactly half way into my Fellowship year ringing in the new year in Cairo (before a bit of first-hand revolution witnessing and Anderson Cooper meeting). Now six months back...
Interpreting the World Through the Lens of Tintin →
Nate Berg of The Atlantic Cities wrote a thoughtful piece about me and my research this past week. Head over there to read it:
“When you’re made to confront a city versus imagining it, it’s just a completely different experience. It’s more holistic and more totalizing and more complicated than would fit in 60 pages of ligne claire artwork,” Damluji says. “But what I’m interested in is how much...
November 2011
3 posts
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A Conversation about Habibi’s Orientalism with... →
For my column on the Hooded Utilitarian this month I talk with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi. It was at times a hard conversation to have on my end, but he was so classy about it that it went much smoother than I had any right to expect. A selection:
Nadim: I want to switch gears to talk about Wanatolia and the decision to make it a timeless city, and how that factors into the end...
Sharjah International Book Fair
Hey readers! Just dropping in to provide a quick update that I will be talking about Hergé’s imagination of the Middle East in Tintin as well as contemporary Arab comics later this week at the Sharjah International Book Fair from November 15-20. I very much look forward to returning to the United Arab Emirates after my research took me to Dubai and Abu Dhabi last Winter.
While I’m back in the...
October 2011
4 posts
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June 2011
7 posts
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Show+Tintin: Tintin's Footprint in China
More than any other destination I’ve been this year, I found it particularly hard to concretely picture what China would be like before I arrived. I attribute this partially to the noise of Chinese news coverage in the West (mainly about economics, rarely about culture) and partially to my own lack of trying to picture it beyond the overly-abundant Orientalist depictions I’d seen...
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Show+Tintin: Wooden Tintins in Dubai
Today’s “Show+Tintin” takes us to the United Arab Emirates. While in Dubai, I heard rumors of Tintin spottings in a local souk or two. Sure enough, I found him (or them) for myself at the Souk Madinat Jumeirah. The souk is a perfect example of Dubai’s focus on polishing the traditional: it’s an air-conditioned indoor mall where one can buy everything from camel...
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Show+Tintin: Handheld Manhua & Bootleg 丁丁
This is the start of a new series called “Show+Tintin,” which will help me back catalogue a lot of the Tintin things I’ve seen around the world as the end of my fellowship year approaches. I’ll post the stray interesting items I’ve stumbled upon over the past year under this heading instead of longer critical articles or glimpses of Tintinography. In sum: less...
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Defining Manhua: A Translated Marketplace in...
Note: This article was originally published last week on The Hooded Utilitarian as part of my Can The Subaltern Draw? column.
I realized about halfway through a recent interview with Cult Youth founding member Chairman Ca that I was asking the wrong questions. I was nearing the end of my stay in Beijing when I finally got a meeting with Ca, who was seeming more and more like the leader of the...
May 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Introducing: Can The Subaltern Draw? →
Hey folks! I have been asked to write a new monthly column over at The Hooded Utilitarian which is called “Can The Subaltern Draw?.” My first piece is an updated version of the Superman post I wrote here awhile back. I’ll link to column every time a new one runs. This is all very exciting for me!
April 2011
1 post
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Samir Magazine and the Art of Bootlegging Tintin
Since at least the 1920s, there has been a rich history of comics in the Middle East. For the first few decades, this comics’ history mostly took the form of political cartoons in newspapers or two-page spreads in text heavy magazines. But in Cairo in 1956, the landscape of Arab Comics was redefined. You see, this was the year that the publishers of Samir (سمير) envisioned a much more...
March 2011
3 posts
2 tags
2 tags
You say Hello, I say Goodbai
Time flies and soon so do I. Although I’ve been quite on the blog front, I’ve been busy in the United Arab Emirates over the last three weeks surveying the contemporary business end of Arab Comics. Much like the rest of the money making sector of Dubai, the blossoming comics’ industry bares a striking resemblance to its established Western counterpart. Comics are sold in chain...
February 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Interlude: Post-Revolution Reflections
I wasn’t ready to leave Cairo. When I got the phone call from my Fellowship Director that I had to leave by Watson guidelines, I was a mixture of relieved, frustrated, tired, and overwhelmed; but never ready. My last few days in Cairo were a whirlwind, the emotional weight of which didn’t start hitting me until I was flying away from the city for which I had developed a hard earned...
Made For You and Me: Localizing Disney’s... →
Until I get back to the Tintin grind, I am very pleased to point you to The Hooded Utilitarian — a subsidiary blog of The Comic’s Journal — where a piece I wrote about Mickey Mouse’s transition/translation into Arabic went live in the midst of my Mubarak-imposed online blackout. As someone who grew up deeply admiring The Comic’s Journal as a venue for serious writing...
January 2011
4 posts
Waiting For Nabil Fawzi
One of the main reasons I came to Egypt was in search of an Arab response to Tintin. Put differently, I came looking for a regional comic book hero that children from all over the Middle East idolized, learned from, and escaped through. Where was the Syrian version of Astro Boy hiding? Why doesn’t the Arab World have a Superman?
In 1964, an editor at Lebanese publisher Illustrated...
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December 2010
5 posts
sophstomorrow asked: Hey,
just wanted to say this is a cool blog. I grew up with Tintin, one of my earliest memories was as a 7 year old drawing tintin from the comics. Your idea of following tintin around the world for your research is a sweet idea. Are you thinking of publishing your findings in any way, since i would like to read it?
just wanted to say this is a cool blog. I grew up with Tintin, one of my earliest memories was as a 7 year old drawing tintin from the comics. Your idea of following tintin around the world for your research is a sweet idea. Are you thinking of publishing your findings in any way, since i would like to read it?
Introducing: My Blog Roll →
As an unexpected (and very welcome) link to my blog from the Tintin Facebook page reminded me today, this blog does not exist in a vacuum. During my travels I’ve come to rely on content from a good number of websites and I figured it’s about time I catalogued my favorite of those websites — Tintin and otherwise. So I present to you my Blog Roll, which from here forward you can...
The Case of the Arab Henchman
While I haven’t yet met anybody whose favorite Tintin adventure is The Crab with the Golden Claws (Crab), it is certainly an important text in the scheme of Hergé’s overall story about the boy reporter.* For one, Crab is the album in which Tintin meets, is repeatedly almost killed by, and ultimately befriends the perpetually drunk Captain Haddock. In 1941, Crab was also the first story...
November 2010
6 posts
Introduction to "تان تان"
Major breakthrough! After a somewhat discouraging start at finding a tangible trace of Tintin’s legacy in Egypt, I quite literally took my search to the streets. After bringing up my fellowship with my roommate Mohamed’s family over Eid, his sister enlightened me about many potential resources, chiefly the existence of Egyptian comic magazines “Mickey,”...
Cigars So Far
Tintin in Alexandria enjoying the Mediterranean Sea
I haven’t been to the pyramids of Giza yet. I know that is probably the first non-AC featuring destination that people visit once landing in Egypt, but I have yet to travel to that particular wonder of the world. I think this helps capture how I am approaching Cairo and Egypt over the next few months of my Watson Fellowship. Although...
WatchHello readers! I’m experiencing a bit of technical difficulties here in Cairo (read: figuring out a reliable Internet option), but while I sort that out feel free to read this article about my research in a Dutch student newspaper. And um, if you are as language challenged as me you can use Google Translate (Edit: Thanks to Brian you can read the hilarious translation in the comments)....
King Leopold's Specter
“With his modern sense of public relations, King Leopold understood brilliantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event than how the public perceives it. If you control the perception, you control the event” (Hochschild 251)
One of my goals during my time in Belgium was to explore the colonial legacy of the Congo in Belgian culture as a way of getting at the context...
October 2010
5 posts
On Fête De La BD...
Papa Schtroumpf and I
As my departure to Cairo quickly approaches, it feels like a good time to start sharing my happenings in Brussels over the past three months (and some) in earnest. First up on the backlog: Comic Book Weekend! While back in US debate was swirling around wether Qurans would be burned or not, on the unusually sunny weekend of September 11-12 Brussels was throwing its newly...
September 2010
7 posts
“If you have a passion for something, such as Tintin, you want to share that with your son. If that turns out to be impossible, you become frustrated and you start looking for a scapegoat.”
-Nick Rodwell (head of Moulinsart and husband to Hergé’s second wife Fanny) from a 2009 post on his now defunct blog at Tintin.com.
During my time in Brussels, almost every time Mr. Rodwell has come...
"The One-Note Man" by H.M. Bateman →
The Comics Journal posits that this 1921 cartoon by the H.M. Bateman may be the “World’s Greatest Cartoon”; to which I kind of agree. It is really a brilliant piece of sequential art story telling. It’s funny, for us much as Hergé contemporaries and inspirations such as Alain Saint-Ogan (“Zig et Puce”), Martin Branner (“Winnie Winkle”), or George...