Portland cartoonist Craig Thompson is in the middle of the promotional book tour for his book Habibi, and made a brief return to the Rose City before the European leg.
Thompson appeared at Floating World Comics on Thursday, Bridge City Comics on Friday, and the Wordstock Literary Festival on Saturday, where he talked about his new book.. At each event, fans lined up and waited patiently for an autograph and sketches.
Arriving in town at 2pm Thursday, Thompson "hit the ground running" and was at Floating World for a 6pm appearance. In addition to copies of Habibi and the matching Blankets hardcover, the author also had silkscreened prints for sale. The two prints, created by local artist Pete McCracken, came in wildly different sizes to fit any budget: a postcard-sized version on cardstock and a nearly 3'x3' print with a limited run of 75. Both featured artwork from Habibi.
The Floating World show also included a gallery of art inspired by Thompson's Middle-Eastern tale. Artists in the show, which runs for the next month, include Michael Allred, Gabriel Ba, Jen Wang, and Farel Dalrymple.
At Bridge City Comics, Thompson arrived to a store already filling up with fans, indicating that the previous day's show had not diluted the demand for the artist's time. He was visited by local comics pros such as David Scroggy, Joe Keatinge, Emi Lenox, and Patric Reynolds.
Thompson was happy to be home, at least for a little while, and agreed that his current book tour was made easier by his experience touring for Blankets. He reported that after another month of touring, he would have a week or two off before returning to the tour.
Habibi, which was officially released on September 20th, had two special releases before that date. Working with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), Thompson was auctioning and selling copies of the book at the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Baltimore and the Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco.
The next day at Wordstock, the author was scheduled to do an hour-long presentation about his new book. Waiting to go on stage, Thompson was cool, making last-minute checks of his slides.
"Nerves? Not really," he said. "I don't get stage fright; it's nervous energy, really. I'm more restless."
Asked if speaking before a hometown crowd was easier, Thompson thought about his tour so far.
"All the reception has been good," he recalled. "I guess the only rough one was SPX, because I was still sick."
Thompson has been promoting Habibi for weeks, with many more to come, including a meeting with eleven foreign publishers in Germany this week. Does the artist ever dread his book tours?
"No, I feel like meeting fans is part of my job," he replied. "It's my responsibility, which is probably part of my Midwestern upbringing. If you spend all your time alone and working, your verbal skills atrophy!"
Thompson's talk at Wordstock was a overview of his career, from his childhood when he worked for "a comic book an hour" to the creation of Habibi.
True to his word, the author was quite at ease on stage in his bespoke vest and trousers. He showed slides of his early mini comics, which caught the eye of John Porcellino (King Cat), who agreed to distribute them through his company Spit and a Half.
After moving to Portland, he was drawing personal strips about his Wisconsin friends, and also a little comic about a turtle, which became Goodbye Chunky Rice at the urging of Brett Warnock (then at Primal Groove Press, now with Top Shelf).
Tiring of the slick brushes he'd used on Chunky Rice, he was inspired to change for Blankets by an anthology published by L'Association, which featured French artists Baudoin and Blutch. Here Thompson showed a slide from Blankets that mirrored one from Blutch's Le Petit Christian, which Thompson chalked up to having pored over Blutch's work.
"Blankets I wrote for myself," he said. "Comic books are short and full of action, and I thought it would be funny to do a giant book where nothing happened."
The next slide gave an example of Thompson's creative process, writing and drawing on the same page, combining sketches and notes. That stage is followed by more detailed thumbnails, which he shares with friends. To illustrate the length of time this process takes, Thompson shared that the thumbnails for Blankets took him a year to complete.
Thompson creates such detailed thumbnails, he says, because when he does the final inks, he doesn't want to think about drawing.
"At that stage, I'm thinking about the brushstrokes," he said, "so I want the thumbnails to be pretty finished."
Thompson showed a photograph of his family, and fans of his autobiographical work Blankets might have been taken aback to see a third Thompson sibling. The sister was omitted from the book to save her from being a minor character, a decision which made her quite happy when she was told. Although Thompson's parents were not happy with their portrayal in the book, the siblings became closer as a result of it.
A brief period was spent on the interim book, Carnet de Voyage, which was a sketchbook of Thompson's trip to Morocco and France. Creating the book in such an "uncontrolled environment" pushed the artist to expand his own palette.
"Finally, Habibi!" Thompson referred both to the book's arrival within his presentation and the long gap after Blankets.
"2003 was the first time that I could think about a new book," he remembered.
Researching the East African Arab slave trade, he decided that his project would be a book of orientalism, and began to study calligraphy. Thompson described Habibi as "a mashup of the sacred and the profane."
Photos of Thompson's sketchbooks first showed visual research of people and places, followed by a collection of ideas that he might want to explore. This process was interrupted by the promotional tour for Blankets, and his first sketchbook entry upon his return declared that he was "finally resuming/reclaiming Habibi."
"It was important that Habibi would always be a book," Thompson stressed. "I'm not ready for it to be an e-book."
The author felt that prose was already an order of distance removed from the reader, as it is mechanically typeset.
"With comics, that's the author's hand involved. I use a computer as a dirty little intermediate tool, but every final line is brush on paper... I am searching for the honesty in a pile of lies [which is fiction]."
Taking questions from the audience, Thompson assured one fan that drawing is an art that can indeed be taught.
"It just takes practice," he said, using Lewis Trondheim's Lapinot as an example of an artist learning to draw in the course of creating a book. He also quoted self-publisher (and prolific artist) Dave Sim, who suggest that one must draw 2000 pages before producing a good one.
In response to a question about potential alchemical references in Habibi, Thompson replied in the affirmative:
"Yes. The secrets and science of letters and numbers are in Habibi."
The final question was whether the author was worried about reprisals for the depiction of Muslim prophets in the book, which is a question that Thompson must have heard before.
"The cartoons from the Danish controversy were mainly intended to provoke," he explained. "I wanted to depict prophets with respect, and I hope that comes across. It's honestly Islamophobic to assume that this reaction is true of all Muslims."
Following the talk, Thompson moved to the autograph area to speak with fans one-on-one and sign books for the last time until he returns from overseas. His three-day visit to Portland brought out a large number of admirers, and Thompson's Midwestern sense of responsibility did not let them down.
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