18 minute read
An Interview with Omar Khouri
Omar Khouri by Audra McNamee
Omar Khouri
Omar Khouri was born in London and spent his childhood in Lebanon. In 2002, he graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston with a BFA in illustration. After spending a year in Los Angeles working in cinema and television, he returned to Beirut. In 2006, Khouri founded Samandal comics magazine, the first experimental comics periodical in the Arab world. In 2010, his sociopolitical satire Utopia won Best Arabic Comic book at the Algerian International Comic Book Festival (FIBDA). Khouri’s work spans many art forms, including painting, comics, animation, theatre, film, and music. Khouri’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections around the world, including Lebanon, the UK, the US, Japan, and across Europe. Recent shows include ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ (2019-2020) at the BAR Project Space, Beirut; ‘Glass’ (20182019) at the Park Gallery, London; and ‘Face Value: Portraiture’ (2018), a group show at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut. Khouri currently lives and works in North Lebanon.
Interview with Omar Khouri
By Debarghya Sanyal and Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/omarkhouri
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins: One of the most exciting threads running through all of the artists in the show is this ability to “world,” that is, to create an entirely new context of possibilities and create something that really did not exist before. How did you imagine a Middle East comic scene, that really wasn’t there before Samandal and has never been the same since?
Omar Khouri: When I started making comics and started thinking about starting Samandal, I never really had a vision for what Arabic comics might be. I just really wanted to make comics, and I thought there must be a bunch of other people who are spread around the region, who also want to explore. We’ve all grown up on what French comics are, what Japanese manga is, and what American comics are, and all the things in between. Maybe by just experimenting together, then we’ll have something that becomes Middle Eastern comics. In general that’s the vision for Samandal. For my own personal work, I had some little experiments that I was doing, drawing from things that I’ve learned, and figuring how to do things in my comics: what do I do that is specifically, like for Arabic how to use the language, how to use the calligraphy in a specific way because it’s a whole other part of making comics, what kind of layouts can be specifically more local in their design, and things like that. Starting Samandal it was like, “okay let’s find out what this thing could be,” with these people that we started to meet, and then we also wanted to open it up for people from other countries—people with a French background, American background, Japanese people—to mix those things with these new people that are all trying new things and see what comes up. Debarghya Sanyal: Given that you work both in fine arts, oil painting, and in comics, how do you imagine your role as an artist between these different types of cultural production? OK: Well, I guess at the moment my view of my role as an artist or the role of art in general shifts quite drastically, quite often. At the moment I’m questioning this idea of can art really be a force of change in the world? Can it really be culturally significant? Is it really something that helps make the world a better place? At the moment, I’m questioning these ideas again; as an artist you just kind of go in and out of these questions continuously. So at the moment, if these questions aren’t answered, at least I’ll try my best to add as much beauty as I can into the world, as much pleasure as I can give others in this world, that seems to be falling apart for people in Lebanon drastically, but for people everywhere as well.
So in this corner of space-time, I kind of feel like this is my role. As an artist, this is the best I can offer at the moment. KKS: How do you imagine the audience for this beauty that you’re bringing into the world? Who are you writing or creating art for? OK: When we were starting Samandal, it was just kind of impossible to imagine who the audience might be. If you look at the old issues, the old magazines, they were a little bit all over the place, because the same way that we were trying to find a language for comics here or make a scene, we were also looking for that audience, putting out different things, going to different schools and universities, and then trying to go to the art scene, and try to do international festivals, and things like that, just to see where we can find an audience because we had no idea who might end up reading this. So the audience mostly could be seen, especially in the beginning, as the artists actually involved. We were almost drawing these things for each other to get each other’s feedback because we didn’t know yet who else would give us feedback and that kind of family grew as the number of artists and collaborators grew over the years to the hundreds. The audience spread around them in that way, and each kind of person or group or collective brought their audiences in and created this whole other layer of readership. It’s not huge, but I think there are some people who follow and are still interested. DS: When did you get interested in doing nonfiction comics, and do you kind of approach nonfiction comics differently than your fictional work? OK: I started being interested in comics journalism when I read Palestine by Joe Sacco and it was before we started Samandal, but as soon as we started Samandal when we were looking for an audience, and trying to explain to the people around us what are comics—they’re not just for kids—the
biggest challenge that we had making Samandal was getting people to start thinking of it as an art form that is for adults. It’s not just these cartoons for kids, so we were always trying to look for ways that comics could show itself as this kind of mature medium that is for adults. We started being interested in comics journalism then, at least in research and talking to people and trying to get people to do work for Samandal. I did a couple of—they weren’t journalistic—let’s say nonfiction comics that were editorials for the magazine, kind of like essays in comics à la Scott McCloud. But personally, for me, I wasn’t very interested in journalistic comics until Andy Warner, really good friend of ours, that I met through Samandal, who is one of the editors of The Nib magazine. His work started going into journalist comics and nonfiction comics, documentary comics, and I really love his work. And then he started working for The Nib, and he suggested that some of the people like Yazan [al-Saadi] and I, and a few of our other friends from Samandal start contributing to The Nib in this format. I’ve never been interested in writing a journalistic comic, so the main difference for me between fiction and nonfiction comics is I usually work with a writer when I’m doing nonfiction, but fiction stuff, I write it myself. I started with Yazan on our first Nib comic—maybe 2017 or 18—it was an update of the war in Syria: that was my first entry into that. When I work with Yazan it’s—specifically, because we’re really good friends, and we like the same kind of comics a lot, and we hang out—we have a pretty good shorthand, if you will, so it’s quite a fluid process. He’d have an idea, and then we discussed the idea first at the idea stage and then get excited about it together, and then he’d go off and write a script. Yazan’s a really fast writer; he has really good turn around. He just writes a lot and doesn’t have this procrastination kind of feeling. So you talk about something, and the next day he’s like, “Here it is; here’s the script!” I’m like, “Whoa, okay.” But it’s good, because then we go back and forth on the script a few times before we submit it to the editor. So he’d write the script; I’d look at it and be like, “Oh, you know, what about this idea and that idea?” Plus, he writes into the script the panels sometimes, but he’s like “These are suggestions: I have a suggestion for this and that,” and he gives me complete freedom to change them if I want, but these are very useful for me to see how he’s thinking. So we go back and forth on the script and then he sends it in and we get rewrites, and then I do thumbnail sketches, run them by Yazan first, then send them into the editor. We’re always kind of conspiring behind closed doors before we send anything out. And then it’s pencils, and it comes back to you. At that point Yazan’s role goes into the background, and it’s just me going pencils. I send in the pencils and they come back, and then inks, and then colors is the last stage. And then, there you have it: a comic is born.
Yazan sometimes has reference photos and videos that he’s collected through his research. Like in the Bashar al-Assad, the first comic that we did together, the first shot is Bashar al-Assad sitting on the throne from Akira. And Yazan had that opening image already in his mind, he was like, “I want this exactly.” And he sent me picture, and I was like, “you don’t have to send me that picture. I know it by heart anyway.” So Yazan has a very strong visual imagination, which is quite helpful for me. For my own stuff, it’s quite extreme the difference between the nonfiction and fiction, because my fiction is usually science fiction or surreal, so it’s just kind of further away from reality than just regular fiction even. So with those I always have these ideas floating around that I kind of write in my sketchbook here and there, and then sometimes one of them just sticks, and starts spreading inside my head. A lot of times I start by sketching a couple of things, and then I start thumbnailing while I do the script. There are some times when I write like a movie script almost without panel design, just dialogue and story. But usually I imagine the flow of it in my head entirely combining visuals and texts at the same time, so I start drawing and then filling in the text in the little thumbnails and then I kind of just build it up from there. Then, when you have the whole thumbnails, you can read the whole thing in a way, and, of course, get a lot of people [to read it]. I have a lot of very smart friends, much more talented than I am, that I can rely on, like “read this!”; “look at this!”; “let me know what you think.” A lot of times I’m revising based on other people’s ideas, but I like that collaborative aspect of it. Even though I’m sitting and doing this whole thing by myself, it’s still like so many ideas are coming from other people’s suggestions. I don’t usually do the whole comic in pencil, and then all colors. I just do it spread by spread: pencil, inks every two pages. KKS: Between your sci-fi work like Utopia, and your work on, say, Syria, is there a different kind of responsibility you feel in creating the visuals or having some sort of accuracy? OK: That’s part of my process in both. I started out my first comic, Salon Tarek el Khurafi, it’s the first one that I started Samandal with, and it was a science fiction thing set in Beirut. And I wanted to be very clear that it was set in Beirut. And it was in Arabic, so I did a lot of drawings in that series that are very realistic, based on specific angles from the city that people who know the city will be like, “Oh, this is obviously Beirut.” It’s trying to bring that sci-fi into our lives because we grew up on sci-fi of everywhere else. It was great but there’s something about it that’s grounded somewhere else. A lot of people feel like this is sci-fi from Japan, like Akira for instance. So I’ve always wanted to do that in my fiction and science fiction comics—put that realism there, ground it in the area. So when it came time to do journalistic comics I already had that in the way that I worked, and so I didn’t really have to shift a lot. It still has also in The Nib comics or Guantanamo Voices, you have some panels that are based on a very obvious reference of a spot of the angle of a corner, and then there’s all this stuff that gets a bit cartoonier when the characters are around, then I can get a bit more symbolic or abstract. So I do both of those in both the comics, equally almost. To go back to your phrasing of it: I don’t feel like it’s a responsibility. It’s just kind of what makes it a good thing for me. This is how I already do my stuff, so it feels like this fits in my style automatically by itself, I don’t have to struggle and fight with it. DS: Do you think that comics can be an effective form for nonfiction?
OK: Well it’s exactly for those reasons, because when you’re doing a comic you have more freedom to get as realistic as you want, for a specific moment to make a specific point, and then you can get as subjective as you want once it’s needed inside of the same piece. It has that fluidity where you can mold it the way you want. It’s difficult to do that with video when you’re doing a reportage, like a little segment about something. There isn’t that freedom, you’re just stuck in the reality of it. Where every story has an emotional layer, has subjective elements to it. It’s more realistic to bring out those elements too. Pretending like you’re completely objective, because it’s a camera and because we believe that a camera is objective, it’s a false belief, but we have that instinct towards it. I feel like comics can be more truthful about the fact that nothing’s really objective. This is all just somebody’s perspective on whatever it is that we’re talking about, and I think that’s the power of comics journalism. KKS: You’ve talked about Joe Sacco, Akira, and other major inspirations; are there more that you can specifically point to, or are there bodies of work that you’re responding to in your own?
OK: There are many artists that have influenced me a lot. Andy Warner’s work is hugely influential for me in the field of comics journalism, and the other artists of The Nib, it’s become like a family. I mentioned Scott McCloud; he’s been a huge influence. Those are the standard main ones: Scott McCloud and Joe Sacco, but it’s true they are amazing. One of my favorite all-time comic book artists is Paul Pope. I like the way he uses science fiction to tell very human, very internal stories. And I love, other than Akira, other than Katsuhiro Otomo, most comics that I read come from Japan. Jiro Taniguchi is really good. My favorite thing, though, of all time is called One Piece. It’s not just my favorite comics or my favorite cartoon, it’s my favorite human creation. One Piece is by Eiichiro Oda, it’s this kind of pirate manga. DS: What are some of the specific goals that you think about for each of your projects when you are researching, when you’re working, when you’re kind of in the middle of it? What do you imagine for the life of your work after you have let it go into the world?
OK: This might be a bit of a childish answer, but I try my best not to think about the goals when I’m actually doing a thing. I try to let the goal be the thing that the work is trying to become itself, not who might read it. Of course, I’m not saying I’m a master at this—my mind tends to wander, to be like “people are going to read it like this,” or, “I wonder if this person is gonna like that,” or whatever, and I try to quiet that. When you think about these it drives the work away from its true self and towards superficially pleasing others. If the work is the best thing that it itself can be, then it’ll provide its own goal to the people who read it. In a way, it won’t be my goal; it would be the goal of this thing that I’ve created. Am I being too abstract about this? I’m trying to verbalize it and I’ve never really thought about it before.
That’s basically the idea: I know where it’s going to go, as in where it might be disseminated, where it can be published, where it’s going to be printed, but I try to not let that influence the middle of the work which is before I get the project and after I’m done with the project. That whole middle, I try my best to just let the work itself come out. KKS: I think that’s a great answer. To risk a similar question, how do you imagine the future of comics, either as an art form or as a platform for journalism? What are your hopes or the ways that you see the field going in the future? OK: Again, I’m gonna go with I try not to think about that. Because it’s always surprising; it’s always gonna go in places that I’ve never thought of and never imagined, so I do my best to just kind of give myself to the flow instead of trying to predict. Trying to think back to the beginning of Samandal, and it has been so long ago, but I’m sure I had a much more specific, naive 25-year-old goal to want to change the world in this way. But I feel like I’ve forgotten who that kid was. The world changes, no matter what plans you have for it. It’s been showing us quite often these days that it doesn’t really care about our plans. So, the best thing to do is just try to find your way in the storm, try to ride it out. KKS: It’s very Zen comics. Maybe, your answer is a new Zen comics.
OK: It’s been the mode that I’ve been in the past few months. You know, everything is really just literally falling apart around us here. There’s no electricity; there’s no gasoline for cars; food is disappearing; it’s super hot because it’s the middle of the summer as well. The dollar’s exchange rate is you know, it was $1,500 two years ago, and now it’s around $20,000. That’s like 1,500% change in the past year. So I finally reached a place where if that’s what the world’s gonna offer, I’m still going to find a good slice myself—like a nice boat to sit in that can jostle me on those crazy waves. Just build a boat, have a few people that you care about on that boat, and just try to navigate as best you can. DS: What would be your advice for aspiring comics journalists or even a comic artist? Are there specific trends or movements in this field that you are looking at and getting excited about or not so excited about?
OK: Advice for youngsters getting into comics... But I don’t find that actually I can give anybody advice about this. Because I do a bunch of other things as well, it’s difficult for me to think of myself as a comic book artist. I just go in and out of it, sometimes for three or four years I don’t do any comics, then come back to it. I have painting; I have music; my friends do movies, so I’m usually helping them. So I’m not really somebody who follows a specific school in any of the fields. A lot of people say that’s the downfall of my work because, even in paintings, I have 15 styles. In comics I have like six, seven things that I do. It’s hard to look at the work and be like, “That’s done by Omar.” The one advice that I can give—that is a bit tired and a little bit cheesy—just do whatever it is you believe in until it becomes good. Don’t change it because somebody tells you you’re not as good as you can be. If you want to do 15 things, and just be relatively unknown for the rest of your life, do that if it gives you happiness. If you want to spend all your time making comics even that people don’t want to see, do that. Because when it becomes the comic that you want to see, then people will see it, and whether it’s one person, or a thousand, or a million people see your things, it’s still been made, and it still has the same worth because it’s become a thing in the world, and everything has equal value, because of its existence.
