The story at its essence is about the odyssey undertaken by a young girl and a younger boy, both separately and together, in a fictional Middle Eastern kingdom called Wanatolia, in which they encounter not only ancient story tropes but also modern technology. The girl raises the boy as a sort of son/brother until they are separated for several years, and then reunited at a terrible cost. That cost threatens to separate them again permanently until both find a way to work through it, and they live happily ever after. Along the way, Thompson throws in references to The Arabian Nights, eunuch culture, the Koran, Islamic mysticism, calligraphy, the fine details of harems, plumbing, and a half dozen other subjects.

More to the point, it seems as though Thompson kept coming up with ideas and ways to expand on these ideas, and he chose to try to include everything. The question I would ask is: Did Thompson succeed in what he set out to do? While Thompson created a great deal of interesting comics art and many memorable passages, the answer ultimately has to be 'no.'Ī number of critics have commented on the book's overstuffed feel it feels less like a single coherent work than a multi-volume series smashed into a single text. The jarring chapter breaks certainly don't help Thompson to achieve the sort of cohesion that Blankets (his previous work) has, for example. A number of the criticisms levied at Craig Thompson's highly ambitious new work, Habibi, have been aimed at political byproducts of the book rather than the story itself. The most prevalent brickbat has been that of Orientalism, the Western tendency to tell stories set in Asia or the Middle East and imbue them with a sense of mystery that is based on cliché and stereotype. Whether or not the charge of Orientalism is intended as a slight, there's no question that the artist is adopting (usually in a surface manner) tropes belonging to the Other in order to bring a sense of exoticism to the story. Other criticisms of the book include accusations that it contains racist and sexist imagery. These are all issues that deserve consideration and discussion, but to a large degree, they are also beside the point.

Habibi by craig thompson