The Forgotten Awlad: Pre-1950 Comics in Egypt
My quest: to track down an iconic quiff of red hair. I was in Cairo, and the quiff in question was Tintin’s, created by the Belgian artist Hergé in 1929. This boy reporter is the hero not only of the world’s bestselling comic books but also of a TV series, a Steven Spielberg movie, a museum, an entire field of study… and a research grant for this writer. For a month I’d been in Egypt trying to trace the history of comic art in the Middle East; seeing a potential point of entry, I turned to Tintin’s Arabic translations. Throughout the dirt alleyways of Sur Al Azbakeya, a bookseller’s market in downtown Cairo, I peered into stall after vendor stall, hoping to spy that familiar blaze of orange-red amid the colossal stacks of used Arabic magazines and books.
Again and again I struck out. But then I reached the end of yet another alley and asked a bookseller the usual question: “Andack Tintin Men Zeman?” (“Do you have old Tintin?”) To my great surprise, he furnished a stack of Tintin collections, published by Dar Al-Maroof in 1976, including “The Crab With the Golden Claws” and “Tintin in America.” The vendor appraised his Tintin stock at 20 Egyptian gineih ($3), a price I found more than agreeable. (During a four-month stint in Belgium, I’d learned that $3 couldn’t buy one full comic let alone a bundle.) After I said I’d take all of it, the bookseller saw an opportunity. “Can I interest you in these as well?” Answering that question made me a few dollars poorer but ultimately much richer: Those dog-eared volumes, of Sinbad, a comic dating back to 1952 that I’d never heard of, set me on a course toward uncovering the impressive but forgotten history of Arab comics.
As Professors Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas point out at the beginning of their 1994 book “Arab Comic Strips,” “tracing the first…is a bit like choosing the earliest example of any art form; it depends on where in the line of preceding forms one wishes to start.” Indeed, one could locate pharaonic hieroglyphics as the first recorded form of “sequential art” or conversely claim the first comic art was visible in turn-of-the-century Egyptian anti-British political cartoons. In this article I use “comics” to mean sequential art published for entertainment that follows the continuing adventures of established characters.
Upon drawing this particular line, it becomes apparent that the first Arabic comics were published in Egypt in the 1920s in a format that closely emulated European children’s magazines. During the years 1920 to 1950, comics production in the Middle East was erratic, exclusively based in Egypt, and poorly documented. Due to factors such as war, publishing houses in the Middle East often folded without archiving copies of their catalogues or leaving records of participating artists. When you’re trying to understand how these comics were made, you’re left with little more than the images on the page, images that in the first decades of production were often translations of established Western commodities. Indeed, to appreciate Arab comics of the early 20th century, it is important to recognize the European and American markets from which they borrowed and that they transformed and intertwined into their own history.
In the West, the task of grasping the history of comics as an art form is relatively straightforward. A short trip to a local library or Wikipedia turns up volumes on the subject, histories that thoroughly document the names of foundational creators, circulation figures, and where to buy reprints of entire runs of series. In Europe in particular, where comics are considered “the ninth art,” children’s comics made by Belgian and French artists are a long-standing pillar of literary culture. In the U.S., comics most readily conjures superheroes such as Batman and Superman who have thrived with the support of a niche fan base, but in Europe, comics are a more universal product, purchased by children and adults alike.
The Franco-Belgian children’s comics of the early 20th century were printed in black and white as tabloid-size supplements in newspapers. Soon these became popular enough to create an entire industry around comics targeted toward children. Post-World War II, publishers began printing full-color weekly magazines devoted to comics, which were subsequently collected in hardback books. During this period, Franco-Belgian artists created iconic characters including Asterix, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, and Tintin. These are the very comics that I grew up with as a child in Beirut.
Moving to Beirut from California at the age of nine, I voraciously consumed European comics every day after school. Through “The Adventures of Tintin,” I learned French and traveled from Europe to India to China with the turn of a page. It occurred to me only years later while in university in the U.S. that the heroes of my beloved comics were all European like Tintin or American like Superman. Meanwhile, the Arabs in the comics were villainous or buffoons — usually both. I developed a grant proposal to trace Tintin’s footsteps around the world in order to research how artists from the countries he visited have created alternative representations of their identity in comics.
When I booked my flight to Cairo at the end of 2010, I assumed that a lack of a public record didn’t mean a lack of comics in Egypt’s publishing history. I moved into an apartment in Garden City, close to Tahrir Square, where I spent my first month using the research tools I knew, with no results. I visited the American University of Cairo library but couldn’t find call numbers that corresponded with old comics, while conversations over hookah with academics and contemporary artists alike also provided no insights. My education on Arab comics finally came from the booksellers of Sur Al Azbakeya.
Once a week I would walk through Tahrir Square to the booksellers’ market, and walk back with a new set of Arabic-language sequential art from the 20th century. At the start of my fourth month in Cairo, the tremendous forces of revolution precluded my routine walk. My fellowship advised that I evacuate; thus, my last week was split between frantically scanning the pages of comics I had acquired and taking breaks to witness the unified human spirit in Tahrir Square. Once I left, I realized that the same electronic tools that made mobilizing the revolution possible would mobilize my area of research better than I ever could on foot. Someone suggested I visit Arab Comics, an online archivist community of comics enthusiasts who scanned and shared their collections. Thanks to their diligent work, we can start to piece together a more coherent picture of what comics in the Middle East looked like at their beginning stages.
As the first Arab comic published in 1923, “Al-Awlad” (The Boys) was a startlingly accomplished children’s magazine for its time. In fact, the year “Al-Awlad” arrived, there were little more than a handful of comics worldwide with which you could compare it. The premiere issue arrived two full years before Alain Saint-Ogan’s “Zig et Puce,” the comic that inspired Hergé to create “The Adventures of Tintin.” Indeed, the comic was groundbreaking not only by “Arab” standards, but also by those of the world.
“Al-Awlad” was eight pages long, black and white, and in newspaper-broadsheet format. Every page was filled with original comic strips, drawn in a uniform style and all about, as the title would suggest, mischievous boys — no doubt the magazine’s target demographic. The comics in “Al-Awlad” reveal artistic tropes prevalent in many pre-1950s Arabic comics. For example, instead of using speech bubbles, the creators used numbered captions under each panel to advance the plot. Another distinct flourish: Each comic’s title is two sentences long and features an end rhyme. For example, a title from the premiere issue rhymes “mashoor” with “farfoor.”
What remains remarkable about “Al-Awlad” is how fully realized the characters are, as is the world they inhabit. Certain details indicate these characters are Arab — children wearing tarbooshes, men dressed in galabias — but these are wardrobes of the era, not props to flag foreignness. As was common for comics from 1920 to 1950, the content in “Al-Awlad” was created not as propaganda but rather simply to entertain children. And while it predated many well-known comics from across the world, “Al-Awlad” was not the immediate precursor to more Arab comics; nor did the artists who created it gain international recognition. In the several decades following its disappearance, comics failed to play as major of a role in Middle East publishing as they were beginning to in Europe and the U.S.
The next major comics-featuring magazine to be published in Egypt after “Al-Awlad” came in 1946 with the release of “Katkot” (Nestling) which ran from 1946 to 1948. The government-owned publishing house Daughter of the Nile Press printed “Katkot” every Monday for two years. Unlike “Al-Awlad,” which contained original comics on every page, “Katkot”’s comic strips took up only a few pages of the magazine. The majority of content in “Katkot” was longer, text-heavy stories like fairytales, science experiments, and word games created for children.
From the premiere issue, the star of “Katkot”’s serialized comics strips was a boy reporter named Hammam who traveled the world solving crimes with his fox terrier. If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because the adventures of Hammam were Arabic translations of “The Adventures of Tintin.” Here “Katkot” started a trend that would dominate the industry of children’s magazines in the Middle East for the next several decades: translating and localizing existing Western commodities for Arab audiences. One possible explanation is that 20-year gap, the lack of original comics in the Middle East in the dormant years between the disappearance of “Al-Awlad” and the release of ‘Katkot.”
Later issues of “Katkot” feature translations of “Tarzan” comics, yet in Arabic, Tarzan was still named Tarzan and his loincloth was not replaced with a galabia. Indeed, post-World War II marked a turning point for Tintin’s reach outside of Belgium — where it had always been successful as a black-and-white supplement in the newspaper Le Petit Vingtième — with the launch of the Tintin magazine. It premiered the same year as “Katkot,” with an initial circulation of 60,000 a week throughout Belgium and France, and featured edited color versions of the six original black-and-white Tintin stories. The magazine took Europe by storm. By the end of 1949, circulation had reached 300,000 a week in France alone, with separate versions appearing in Switzerland, Canada, and the Netherlands.
It’s not clear how the black-and-white versions of Tintin made it into the pages of “Katkot,” but given the years of its publication, it is clear that Arabic was one of the first languages into which Tintin was translated. Were they legal? Unlikely. Nevertheless, in 1946, Arabic readers knew about Tintin’s exploits a whole 12 years before English speakers. Soon other Egyptian magazines copied the format that “Katkot” pioneered. In magazines such as “Bolbol” (1946), “The Future” (1948), and “Ali Baba” (1951), children were introduced to Western characters including Mickey Mouse, as well as original comic creations like “Secoco.”
As comics crossed the threshold into the 1950s, they developed into a more consistent fixture in the publishing landscape of Egypt and shortly thereafter the entire Middle East. The children’s magazines like “Al-Awlad” and “Katkot” that were made in the 1920s up until this time relevantly show that the history of comics publishing in the Middle East is equally long and accomplished as that of the West, even though it isn’t as thoroughly documented. The obscurity of these early Middle Eastern comics is marked by the contrasting fortunes of comics in Europe and the United States. In 2012, an original cover of “Tintin in America” drawn by Hergé in 1932 sold at auction in Paris for a record-breaking 1.3 million euros ($1.7 million). In the Cairo book markets where I started my own education in Arab comics, one could build a sizeable collection of original 1930s-era comics with 13 euros ($17). Perhaps with the power of the Internet, the scales finally have a chance to be rebalanced.
Originally published at Qulture.
