Happy Ancient History Month! This month’s artist is the amazingly talented Joumana Medlej, world traveler, feminist, and trailblazing creator of Malaak, the first Lebanese superhero comic. It’s an exciting comic, with a story filled with adventures, monsters, ancient myths, and a truly memorable heroine. It’s free to read online, but I recommend buying a copy if you have the chance just to appreciate her beautiful artwork (and it’s printed on nice heavy paper too). She also has created a series of children’s educational books about Lebanese history, which delves into the life and times of the ancient Phoenicians in a way that’s both fun and insightful.

Hi Joumana! Where are you from? What was it like, growing up for you?  Where did you go to school?

I’m from Beirut, Lebanon where I have lived all my life. Though it’s a lovely vibrant place now, I grew up in war and what that was like would take a whole book to tell. It was a constant juggling between “normal” life and dodging mortars and landmines, going to school when it was possible and trying not to go mad the rest of the time. I’d like to say it was never dull, but it was actually the indescribable boredom of sitting out the shelling day after day that got me into drawing and other activities I could exercise alone and without supplies (in daytime at least – sunset meant bringing out the candles.)

I went to a French-oriented school up in the mountains, and later to the American University of Beirut for my graphic design major.

How did Malaak come to be?  What was the inspiration and the impetus behind it?

In summer 2006 I found myself sitting out a @%$£*% blitz again. All I was able to do during that month was blog, due to aggravation, shortage of everything and a constant headache because the bombs were dropped so close to where we live our building rocked all day and night. When that was over I was both angry and depressed, and like everyone else in the country, felt infuriatingly powerless to stop small evil-meaning groups from taking out their quarrels on the entire population.

Back in 2000 I had had, out of nowhere, an idea of a child sent by the cedar trees to save the country, but I had no inspiration beyond that. It now came back to mind with a whole backstory attached, and that kept growing in my head, so I started drawing. It’s enormously informed by my own war experiences, of course, and by the city, but also by a great deal of little-known local history and mythology, as well as interesting folkloric beliefs. They make for a rich and unusual kind of superhero story and that makes me particularly excited to tell it. The inspiration is still on-going however: even now while reading or discussing certain teachings, I come across facts or beliefs that are directly relevant to the story and that I want to integrate – or better yet, that provide missing pieces of plot for me!

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you wanted to be a comic artist, but this didn’t happen until 2006, when Malaak made its debut. What comic artists were your inspiration growing up?  What other things did you work on before Malaak?

That’s not entirely true, I loved making comics, but I didn’t think of making it my profession. As a teenager I really wanted to be a veterinarian, and thought if comics were my job I might stop enjoying them after a while. Later when I embarked on a creative career, I was prevented from doing anything comic-related for nearly ten years and I thought that was that!

I grew up reading a lot of franco-belgian comics, as you might expect, and I started reading about comic theory and drawing my own when I was 12. At the time, my greatest inspiration was Hergé (creator of Tintin), simply because there was so much to learn from him: he set in place pretty much all the visual language of bande dessinée that would become the norm after him, and he had also shared and discussed his work method in great detail, giving me a model to start from. Even now that the digital age has made it a lot easier and that my work process evolved a lot, I’m aware of how much of an influence he still is.

Other inspirations were Michel Weyland, whose character Aria lived in a beautifully drawn but basically gritty and realistic fantasy world that got me to pay special care to dress, facial expressions and settings (even though I didn’t have the technical skill to reflect that for years). Her adventures were based on the culture and customs of the fantasy cities she travelled through, giving her something unique and never repetitive; that was also striking to me. There was Roger Leloup (creator of “Yoko Tsuno”): his hallmark are his painfully precise renderings of machines, which funnily is not something I ever even attempted, but I was struck at the time by the extreme aesthetics of his characters, where the purity of expression and posture was favored over dynamism.

Curiously, because I was not a big reader of the series, Derib’s work on “Yakari” was very formative: I learned to look at and stylize nature from studying his own style (come to think of it, I should study it again as it’s been so long an I will need it soon.) Other comics that didn’t directly influence my comic-making, but participated in my love of the genre, were the inevitable “Astérix,” “Spirou & Fantasio,” Gos’s “Scrameustache,” Willy & Lambil’s “Tuniques Bleues” (wonderfully well-documented and hilariously funny series that takes place during the American civil war), Seron’s “Les Petits Hommes”… Note the complete absence of anything American, because they hadn’t penetrated our culture yet!

Before working on Malaak, I made comics continually from 1992 to 1998, but finished none of them: they are all stuck at various degrees of coloring, understandably because it took me so long to do anything back then, and by the time the whole thing was inked and ready to color I was dying to move on to another story. I started by making comics about real adventures I’d had during my scout camps, a couple of short fan comics, though I didn’t know the word at the time (about TMNT and then Super Mario, as I recall!) My first ambitious endeavor was a story inspired by a family trip we’d taken across the US in ’93, and particularly to Yellowstone National Park. The story was set there and featured Native American culture and elemental spirits – I remember how very difficult it had been to find out anything about the tribes of that area in those pre-internet days!

After an abortive Sherlock Holmes fan story, I moved on to what I thought would be a whole series, the adventures of a scout patrol that found a staff that allowed them to travel through time. In the first story, the only one I actually drew, they accidentally landed in the Middle Ages and spent about 30 pages finding each other again and returning to their own time. The other stories would have them pick a time and place to explore every summer. It was quite fun to write and draw and would have been a nice series for younger readers, but oh well! After that, my studies then work completely stopped me from making comics until Malaak came up.

Who are your favorite artists right now?

I have so many! On the franco-belgian side, Bruno Gazzotti is my favorite. His style is so clean and precise, yet stylized in a very personal way. Also his attention to details is extreme, so the backgrounds are always treated with great care and there’s always something going on, so there’s always a feeling of a real city teeming with life beyond the main action. I always remind myself of his work and try to live up to it. I’m also smitten by Isabelle Dethan, whose watercolored series “Sur les Terres d’Horus,” set in the Egypt of Ramesses II, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, with exquisite detail work on the costumes in this gorgeous medium… Because of her I will have to make a comic in watercolor at some point! I must also mention the duo Peeters and Schuiten, creators of “Cités Obscures.” Benoît Peeters is a wonderful writer whose fame isn’t due solely to his mindbending stories set in surreal cities, but also to his engrossing writing about comic theory, and Schuiten’s architectural training makes the artwork monumental, forgive the pun. I met Peeters a few years back and had the pleasure of seeing the duo again just last week at the Algerian comic festival!

On the Anglo-American side, speaking solely of artwork or this would get way too long, I’m big on Chris Ware (those who’ve seen my tutorials will easily understand why I’m turned on by his diagrammatic approach!), Mike Mignola (especially his early Hellboy work, some of that stunning simplicity got a bit lost with time), David Mazzuchelli… I also love Michael Turner’s style (actually I have to confess it’s so beautiful it irritates me – jealous!) and though I didn’t read anything else he did, J.H.Williams III’s work on “Promethea” set a standard for me because it moved and changed so well as the story and planes of existence required. Also a big fan of Tracy J. Butler (I have no interest in anthro whatsoever but her “Lackadaisy Cats” are just unbelievable) and David Mack’s experimental approach. A last minute addition to the list, I just met Steve Lieber and after seeing him draw over a few days, I’m seriously reevaluating what inking can do for me, and this is great because it couldn’t have happened from just looking at the finished product. I’ll add Tim Townsend as an inker as well, whose style is so beautiful I really think it shouldn’t be colored! Since there are no useful inking resources around (they all tell you how to apply ink to paper or screen, never how to conceptualize the inking!) I learn from looking closely at his work, among others.

The list could get much much longer on both sides because I’m very eclectic and all quality work excites me, but that’s enough to get on with!

What media do you like to work with?

I like to play with media a lot, it’s a bit of a signature, but for consistency reasons I am pretty conservative within Malaak itself. I love the clean inked line, but I also love the texture of watercolor; I enjoy the flat technical feel of vectors (as seen in my Driving in Lebanon strips) but I also like to introduce three-dimensionality via solid objects photographed to look like they’re sitting on the page (used throughout cedarseed.com). It all depends on the subject matter. I work all this in digitally because it makes my life easier, but I prefer the physicality of things – I only ink on paper for instance, not on the screen, because without the feel of the pen sliding on the paper that would become a chore. And whereas in comic I keep a practical approach, bearing in mind future production, in other areas of my work I like to play with paper, gilding, beads and other odd media!

Again, thanks to the encounters I made during this festival, I may start playing with new things – for instance, one disgustingly talented Nigerian-American artist, Native Magari, blew all our minds by inking with bits of wood, a technique inspired by the calligraphers with whom he trained. Again, I can’t suddenly go crazy on Malaak with new techniques, but I’m itching to experiment!

One reason Malaak is captivating is because it’s a love letter to Beirut. (I didn’t have much interest in visiting Beirut until I started reading your comic– now I’m dying to come!) There are few superhero comics out there that capture a culture and a sense of place as well as Malaak. How has your comic been received in Lebanon, now that you’re working on Volume 5?

It’s very well received here by people who are comic-savvy, and by children (surprisingly because I neither write for them nor do I market to them), all because this place is so starved for positive references in popular culture. We have our own Lebanocentric literary and movie scenes, naturally, but there has never been anything in the way of a heroic character and fantastic adventures taking place in familiar locations. So everyone loves that and wants to see more of it. I’m sure many of my local readers are not originally comic lovers but picked it up because it took place in Beirut, and then got hooked on the storyline. Also, the fact it has several volumes in stores has given it weight, so it’s taken seriously even by those who have nothing to do with comics. I must say more people seem to get and enjoy it than I expected! I get truly wonderful reactions and they’re never what I might have predicted. For instance, I launched volume 4 in my favorite coffee shop, where I do most of the work on Malaak to begin with. I wasn’t aware that the whole staff read the comic, but shortly after that, I arrived one morning and one of the waiters stopped me outside: “You! Not one more step till you give me volume 5!!”

What are your thoughts on the Arab Spring? Are you thinking of incorporating these current events into your comic?

I’m not, Malaak is intemporal and has nothing to do with current events, especially political ones. Even if another revolution took place in Lebanon now (we’ve already had our Beirut Spring back in 2005), it would have no place in the story; as for the Arab Spring, it’s impossible to predict where it’s going and what consequences it will have on the region, though I hope they will be in the direction of justice and peace for all. It may affect the comic in “meta” ways, such as allowing a flowering of comics throughout the Middle East, spotlighting Malaak as a harbinger of peace, or possibly in the opposite way, if the region is plunged in such chaos that it becomes difficult to read or even produce comics. We shall see! But in general, I have no interest in writing stories tied to something so fleeting as current events. Everything I write is concerned with much deeper and longer-lasting things.

What do you think of western comics’ attempt at inclusion– most notably “the 99,” billed as “the world’s first Muslim superheroes”?

What I’ve seen of inclusion is well-meaning but weak. The inclusion of the 99 in Marvel smells too much of a publicity stunt, as they by and large address a much younger audience and fall short in many ways of what Marvel would (or should) normally accept in terms of quality standards. The 99 are not much read in their own part of the world, they are far more publicized than they are popular. Other attempts I’ve seen, such as the eyeroll-inducing Dust (X-Men) gave a strong feeling of trying too hard and ending up with characters so silly as to verge on the caricature.

Western comics suck at inclusion in general, not just of Muslims but of all “others”. Can you imagine if some guy in Saudi Arabia whose only contact with the Western world was over the internet wrote a comic starring American women? Yet that’s what happens in US comics where it seems writers are asked to throw in characters with backgrounds they have no notion of. If you don’t have close real-life experience with, say, Muslims, gays or teenagers, you should not even think of writing about them. This should be left to people in whom the defects of collective image have been eroded by personal contact. And then you may find that when those writers write a Muslim character, their religion may be the least noteworthy trait about that character, because in real life only neurotic people and fanatics are so self-conscious about being this or that. People everywhere want to be seen as real people and accepted for who they are, and there’s nothing worse than trying to fight the stereotype of “bad Muslim” by creating a “good Muslim”, which is just another image created by someone with no real knowledge.

If western comics were seriously interested in inclusion, they would hire good writers either from the minorities concerned, or who have intimate knowledge of them, and let them write about what they know. We might have to wait a long time for that, given the fact they haven’t even learned that female characters should not be written by male writers (cf. the recent DC fiasco).

And what about old classic superheroines like Wonder Woman? 

I love a lot of the old classics, both male and female, but I don’t necessarily like how every writer and artist treats them. I really like Wonder Woman, but I couldn’t tell you if the idea of her that I like is the one intended by the creator, for instance. I loathe the male-hating harpy some writers made of her. It’s difficult for me to discuss these characters because I only know them from reading a story here and watching a cartoon there and from reading about them, being such endurable pop icons. So the way I envision them may very well be my own alone and removed from canon. 

Is Malaak ever going to fall in love?

Does she need to? Throwing romance into a plot is such a cliché. Malaak’s already in love with the land and people she was sent to save, and I don’t see her shrinking her focus to an individual when there’s so much to do. Also your question unwittingly touches upon the infuriating middle-eastern prejudice that every woman’s ultimate purpose in life is to find a man and start a family. That alone would be good reason for me to turn that expectation on its head and keep her focused on things that really matter. That said, I’m not entirely in charge, so we’ll have to see what happens.

Malaak is one of the few superhero comics I read because– like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City– it does a marvelous job at deconstructing tropes. Is this intentional?

It sometimes is, yes! The “impossibly cool clothes” is a good example, where certain features of Malaak’s superhero costume are explained by the fact it was designed by a man, and she herself is horrified the first time she wears it! It’s doubly subverted when she realizes that after all, the costume so NOT her that it will protect her identity quite efficiently, as nobody would associate her shy student persona with it. A lot of the time, though, it happens naturally as a result of a story looking for solutions true to itself as opposed to picking from an established pool of them. What I mean by that is that the story contains a number of elements and locations not used before, and as the plot rebounds on and is solved in them, tropes end up averted or subverted without a conscious attempt on my part. Malaak’s helper being an older male, for instance, is a subversion of the “Miss Robinson Boy Wonder” trope, but it wasn’t even a decision of mine, that’s how the plot grew. I’m constantly discovering instances of these in my own work that I wasn’t aware of introducing.

I use quite a few straight tropes too, I must say. A story that constantly deconstructed tropes would be a story about deconstructing tropes and no longer a superhero story. The classic tropes I use (the superhero costume, the secret identity, the secret keeper, supervillains…) set a solid ground on which one can play with tropes, and that’s when deconstructing some of them becomes interesting and enriches the story.

I also love how you incorporate these wonderful archetypal mythological elements– like how she’s born from a cedar, she battles djinn in a dream world, and you delve into Phoenician history and mythology. It’s like “Astro City” meets “Fables”– but with a Middle Eastern flair!  What led you to bring these elements into the story?

The story was born of these elements, really. The very seed of the idea for Malaak, no pun intended, was an image that came to mind of a baby born from the cedars. Everything that Malaak is, her mission in this world, derives from that birth, due to the symbolism with which the cedars are charged. The Jinn were brought in because I didn’t want her fighting human militias, first because their story potential is very limited, second because the last thing I wanted was for readers to project an existing past or present militia onto them.

The Jinn are a nearly forgotten part of our folklore, still lurking in corners of our language and superstitious practices, and were ideal for the job, being part of Lebanon’s own cultural identity. All aspects of a culture are tied together to make up that culture’s collective psyche, so used together they make for the best stories because they keep stirring up other parts of that identity. The Phoenician/Canaanite mythology being the very first cultural manifestation of this land crept in for the same reasons, but it was in fact implied the moment I used cedars, as they were first known to be sacred trees in those days. The dreams on the other hand have nothing to do with all this, they’re from my personal experience with lucid dreaming, merged with teachings about the inner planes, because esoterically that’s the domain of the Jinn and such… everything always comes back full circle!

I love seeing so much about Phoenician culture, myths and folklore in your work, since it has been very poorly represented in the west. What are your thoughts on this? In upcoming issues of Malaak, are you going to delve deeper into Phoenician history?

It’s been very poorly represented because it’s been very poorly researched, with the west not going further than Greek and Biblical sources, both of which were doing their best to discredit their old and much more successful rivals. I can’t particularly blame the west though because the historical awareness in Lebanon is simply dreadful, this is barely taught in schools at all. I’ve had to do my own research and get some rare out of print books by prominent archaeologists to uncover more realistic accounts of the ancient culture and religion in this place. In a sense I’m glad nobody’s really used Phoenician elements in storytelling, it leaves me a quasi blank slate to work with, not polluted with popular misconceptions.

That said, I’m not actually dealing with Phoenician history per se (which is why I never use or refer to that name within the story – another reason being that some people have a knee-jerk reaction to the name, taking it necessarily as a political statement *rolls eyes*). It’s an alternate history grounded in thoroughly researched Phoenician culture, but proceeding from distant, imaginary events that will be revealed in due time. So although I do plan on delving deeper into that period, I don’t reference any historical events (save one! you’ll know which at the end of volume 5), and the observant reader may notice strange elements and deviations from “real” history. I am still debating how much to reveal and how soon, because so much of this takes place in a time period even more distant than the ancient flashbacks we see in Malaak, and it won’t appear in this series, but may later on…

Can you give us any other hints for what lays in Malaak’s future?

Lots of cliffhangers, as usual Hehe sorry. This volume promises a lot of action, and as is usual with me you can expect some unexpected twists. I don’t really know a lot myself beyond that, at least nothing I can reveal!

What other projects are you working on now? What other projects would you like to work on once Malaak is done?

Most of my other work right now is on computer games with my company, or our children’s books with my mom, though at the moment I’m spending a lot of time creating pieces in Arabic calligraphy. Theoretically I’m working on volume 2 of Driving in Lebanon, a very different kind of comic, but that’s been in suspense for a long time.

If all goes well, my next graphic novel will fully explore the ancient world we have glimpsed in volume 4, a magical protohistory set in Lebanon that I’m very much looking forward to – mountains and trees for a change from cityscapes and weapons!

Share on Facebook