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Not only is celebrated American cartoonist Craig Thompson’s latest one of the best recent graphic novels, it’s one for which the oft-maligned label of "graphic novel" is perhaps most apt.
   
Habibi, the third book from the Harvey, Eisner and Ignatz Award-winning Thompson — following on the heels of 2003’s Blankets — has the scope, expanse and detail readers expect from the most ambitious literary fiction. (Thompson doesn’t neglect the textual dimension, either; his prose passages are just as affecting.)
   
Habibi is a marvel, dense in ingenious, overlapping plot, character and theme — all realized in extraordinarily assured visual fashion. Born from his professed desire to better understand and appreciate Islamic and Arabic cultures, Thompson fuses the Koran, Islamic theology and philosophy, and Arabic myth, legend, design and calligraphy simultaneously on the narrative, aesthetic and thematic levels. So effectively does Thompson incorporate the wonder of his sources, any reader should want to revisit them.
   
Set in a Middle East that’s equal parts past, present, archetype and modern political allegory, the story concerns two characters whose destinies are seemingly intertwined from childhood: Dodola, an Arabic girl sold into marriage and subsequently kidnapped, and Zam, an African child Dodola rescues from the slave market.
   
The two hide from the world for years, until the adolescent Zam’s feelings for Dodola become… complicated. When Dodola is again kidnapped and made an object in the world of men, their parallel yet finally intersecting paths lead in transformative directions.
   
What also intersects unexpectedly is a sentiment given vivid expression since this time last year across the real Middle East — that the greater expanse of human life is willfully invisible to the powerful and privileged. Dodola’s and Zam’s lives are but grains of desert sand underfoot to the sultan who keeps Dodola in his harem, and whose mammoth dam project washes away entire villages.
   
The protagonists find comfort their world’s rich literary culture: Zam wears a nine-lettered talisman for protection from which innumerable readings can be gleaned. In one of the book’s most elegant panels, Dodola declares how "Zam was soothed by stories," as a rain of Arabic falls upon them.
   
Thompson’s sharp underlying point undercuts the same traditions he’s drawing from; ultimately, it’s up to Zam and Dodola to doggedly find direction in a world that finally offers none.
   
On a purely surface level, Habibi can be enjoyed merely by flipping through the voluminous pages. Individual images sing with brilliance, and Thompson makes the narrative literally flow, perhaps taking inspiration from — and indeed, sometimes directly incorporating — the fluidity of Arabic script. He also breaks up pages in endlessly creative ways, arranging the progression of the action in the process.
   
This author’s virtuosity and invention is boundless: his pen makes as one reality and dreams, the concrete and the abstract, and always finds room for throwaway touches of caricature, humour and terror. Habibi is as rich an example of the comics medium’s potential as you’ll find.

HABIBI
By Craig Thompson
(Pantheon Books, 672 pages)