Here Feiffer tries to do it all. Dedicating this graphic novel to writers Milton Caniff, Will Eisner, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain and to film directors John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks, and their many classic films (Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce), Feiffer attempts to create a full-scale noir novel, with all its dark action and sad characters, and then bring it to life visually in black and white drawings for dramatic, rather than purely literary, effect. The result is an unusual and challenging novel, full of adventures affecting down-at-the-heels characters, plenty of violence of the “blam, blam, blam” variety, some grim humor, lots of “ha, ha, ha, ha” moments, twists and turns regarding plot and characters, and surprises galore.
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Cairo-born cartoonist Tarek Shahin, who counts Garry Trudeau as one of his idols, reveals many of the same insightful, irreverent, and humorous attitudes toward life in this collection of his own cartoons as Trudeau has shown in Doonesbury during his long career. Published every day, from April, 2008, through April, 2010, in the Daily Star, Egypt’s independent English language newspaper, Shahin’s “Al Khan” cartoons foreshadowed the popular revolution which eventually took place in Tahrir Square between January 25 and February 11, 2011. Using daily life and newsworthy events, both social and political, as his inspiration, Shahin provides an unforgettable vision of what life was like in Cairo in the months leading up to the revolution. For a western reader like myself, who saw the revolution from a distance and may have regarded it as a bit of a surprise, Shahin’s cartoons make this momentous event much more personal, immediate, dramatic, and most of all, understandable because the forces leading up to it, along with its full, lasting impact, can be connected with “real” people, even though those “real” people are cartoon characters.
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