Joseph Kai is a comics artist from Beirut, Lebanon and a graduate of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (2012). His first graphic album, L'Intranquille (Casterman, 2021) was translated into English last year as Restless (Street Noise, 2023). The album is set in Beirut, Lebanon, 30 years after the end of the civil war, and a few months before the disastrous explosion of August 2020. Through an otherworldly palette, Kai examines the life of a queer man in Beirut, who struggles in his day-to-day life and fears for his safety, but finds community and activism through comics. Kai has been a member of the Arab comics collective Al-Samandal (“Salamander” in Arabic, see their website) since 2010, as a contributor and then an editor-in-chief of issues of the collective’s journal (see Geography in 2015, 3000 in 2020). He has also participated in comics festivals around the world; he exhibited his works at “Les Révolutions de l'Amour” at L'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and held his first solo exhibition, “I Never Asked to Be So Sad and So Sexy” at TWXS in Brussels. He is currently living and working in Paris, and you can find him on Instagram.
Aubrey Gabel is an Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University and a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, film, and comics.
AUBREY GABEL: Could I begin with the most basic of questions: what brought you to comics and graphic art? How or why did you become a comics artist?
JOSEPH KAI: As far as I remember, I’ve always been obsessed with stories and storytelling. As a kid, I used to watch and listen to my mother and her sisters tell each other stories, while sipping their little cups of coffee. I remember being so impressed by their changing tone of voice, their facial expressions, their hand gestures, and I used to lose my sense of space and time when this would happen. I’d enjoy every detail of their stories, how they added sound effects and onomatopoeias to reply to each other every now and then saying: “Nooo !”, “You’re kidding me!”, “Really?!”, or (“والله”Wallah!”). I can see myself as a kid sitting there, eyes wide open, following every detail of the story, detecting every tiny change of facial expression and feeling ups and downs in full magnitude.
I was also exposed, like many Lebanese kids growing up in the nineties, to Mexican telenovelas broadcasted every other evening on television. These were dubbed in literary Arabic and were very long series, which told very complex stories involving usually dramatic love stories and class conflicts.
At the same time, I used to draw a lot, for no particular reason. None of my family members were artists apart from one of my aunts who used to make watercolors. It happens that she’s the most talkative person among my relatives; she tells a lot of stories and brings us into very fantastical worlds, as she’s very religious and obsessed with saints and miracles. So, she’d always tell us about that saint that healed that person, or this person who’s miraculously sweating holy water or oil with healing virtues. So I kind of evolved very close to these languages and tools that are pretty essential in comics: drawing and storytelling.
Years passed and I started hearing my parents and their friends telling more and more stories about the civil war : stories about people who disappeared, migrated, got married and displaced etc.; stories of Beirut before the civil war; what it looked like; what people used to do there; the vibes… This was quite impressive for me. I vaguely knew Beirut as I grew up in the mountains, and my brain would build up so much on these stories that sounded almost like fiction based on true stories.
Later, as a teenager and young adult, I discovered Lebanese comic artists who were publishing (mostly self-publishing) their own comics, like Lena Merhej, Mazen Kerbaj, Zeina Abi Rached etc. It was nothing like my aunts’ storytelling skills but it was more on the experimental side. Mazen Kerbaj was publishing on his online blog chronicles of the one month Israeli war on Lebanon. This was life changing for me because it was also the first time that I experienced war first hand. I was hearing the sounds of bombs, having sleepless nights, seeing people getting displaced and bridges and buildings destroyed, but I was also reading comics about it at the same time. I would open Mazen’s blog every day and read his illustrations, and I think that was when everything fell in place for me. Later, I took classes in comics and drawing at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, and it was already so clear to me that this is what I wanted.
I would like to congratulate you on your beautiful first album, which depicts the everyday life of Samar, a young gay comics artist looking for love, sex, and purpose, within the broader context of post-Civil War Lebanon. The album is narrated through dreamy neon pastels, which shift between two-or-three tone and faded-color scenes (no ligne claire here!); you also frequently narrate Samar’s dreams. I was struck by the dissonance between these other-worldly colors and surreal elements–which reminded me a bit of a ‘70s disco poster or a candy-colored Heavy Metal Sci-Fi landscape–and the banality and/or universality of the story you tell: a bored and mildly depressed gay artist, who alternately works and scrolls Tinder for less-than-optimal hook-ups. Could you talk more about the process of making the book and its aesthetics?
I started writing this graphic novel when I still lived in Beirut in 2015. For context, at that moment Lebanon suffered from a garbage crisis. It had always suffered from really bad waste management, but this time it was much worse, and we literally lived in the rubbish. The people protested in the streets under the slogan “طلعت ريØتكم” (“You Stink!”), which exposed, named and shamed politicians and their corruption in the public space. It led to some small victories, but mostly represented a reality check on the fact that the political situation in Lebanon was much worse than we thought and that our understanding of corruption and how it can be dismantled politically wasn’t enough yet.
At that time, the comics collective Samandal–of which I am a member–published a comics anthology on “Geography,” a theme and format that I had chosen. The book explored the potential of land, territory, borders, and the landscape in generating stories. This project triggered in me a long reflection about my existence in Lebanon and all the fear and the anxiety that this place and its corruption had injected into my body; I realized that many of the short stories I had written before were talking about that. These were sort of mistrustful explorations of how to express the queer reality in an unsure place.
So I started writing random scenes that came to my mind. Most of these were kind of studying moments where anxiety manifests or manifested in my body, my dreams, sexual fantasies and my behavior and were always exploring ways to link this micro-scale individual feeling to major political and social events and changes happening around me in Lebanon at that time.
The writing process continued in many different phases later, where I shuffled all these scenes and reorganized them in a dramaturgical sequence that made sense with what I wanted to tell.
At that moment, the Lebanese uprising of October 2019 was happening and validated many of these catastrophic fears, so the story kept on transforming with all these events until I had to start drawing the final pages. At that point, I had understood a lot about this journey and thought that it was time to let it out as is. Some pages were already sketched and storyboarded. Many of the Beirut landscapes and childhood flashbacks emerged in minimalistic lines and strong, saturated colors, as if I were viewing these events and places through a digital utopian filter or my own visual memory. Despite this, everything happening in the story is real or close to reality. I liked this contrast between the tone and coloring and decided to adopt it throughout the book, working with a limited but strong color palette and coding it according to each scene and mood.
It seems obvious that this album is at least semi-autobiographical or autofictional. What aspects of your own life came into play?
It was mostly my experience with fear. I was born into it as my parents fled the War of Liberation during the civil war in Lebanon, hiding with their two small children. I grew up with it during the post-war period, and over time, my body developed significant habits and reactions to it. It wasn’t always visible, and I wasn’t always aware of it. It was latent in me but always there. After my teenage years, I started noticing how fear and anxiety manifested in my body and how the remnants of past and recent traumas from wars, political corruption, and lack of safety conditioned my body.
In Restless, I wanted to portray the symptoms of this feeling in a queer fictional character by sharing some real experiences I went through living in Beirut. I also used fiction, fantasy, dreams, and the virtual world of dating apps to elevate this feeling and try to reach a different level with it in the storytelling. I was looking for a moment where Samar, the main character, decides to do something about this fear amid the global historical uprising of the October 2019 revolution—a crucial moment in Lebanon's recent history, as the population decided to confront a deeply corrupt governing system.
Could you reflect on your influences as an artist?
My artistic influences change often and quickly, much like many artists. In Restless, I wanted to pay homage to some Lebanese artists who inspired me and whose work informed my understanding of Lebanon's history and landscape. In the story, when Alia and Samar visit the exhibition, they discover works by Ali Cherri, Nadim Asfar, Nathalie Harb, Alain Vassoyan, among others. These artists have shaped my artistic thinking. Through their work I realized that, in the absence of any “authorized history” of the Lebanese civil war, art is our tool to preserve traces and reconstruct the collective memory of the place we live or lived in.
Additionally, I've always been inspired by my friends' work, especially those in the Samandal collective. These artists grew up in the same environment as me, and some explored the topics I discuss even before I did. I’m thinking of Barrack Rima, Lena Merhej, Hatem Imam, and Mazen Kerbaj. When I lived in Beirut, I also collaborated with artists closer to my age, like Nour Hifaoui, Karen Keyrouz, Tracy Chahwan, and Raphaelle Macaron. I feel that our collective reflections on corruption, dystopian landscapes, ecologies, non-conformity, and other subjects related to our post-war life in Beirut have greatly influenced me and my approach to comics.
On a broader scale, queer authors like Howard Cruse, Alison Bechdel, Nino Bulling, Aki Hassan, Nygel Panasco, and Sami Alwani give me a beautiful sense of comfort and safety through their works. I like to think that we are all contributing to making queer stories and histories more visible in different ways, and that these stories are also here to comfort other authors and stimulate further exploration of diverse narratives on identity, personal experiences, and the body.
On October 3rd, 2023, we were really lucky to have you at the Maison Française of Columbia University, to talk about your art with our students. They really enjoyed hearing about your work and process! I do remember asking you a question about Restless and the “aftermaths” of Lebanon’s history, and you demurred, saying that this work was for historians… And yet, I’m struck by the idea that you are interested in how life continues after the Civil War, or about “Dancing in the Rubble,” as one of your art prints is titled. Do you see yourself as thinking about what it means to be a young queer person in Beirut today?
Of course, history and the aftermath of the civil war are central to Restless. I've always been captivated by how Lebanese queer individuals and artists have shaped Lebanon's narrative through activism, artworks, and initiatives. They have reclaimed abandoned spaces, reviving and inhabiting them with documentation and reconstituted narratives of past events. I believe that comics offer another entry door into these histories and preserve their traces.
That said, when I wrote Restless, I was hoping to avoid a purely historical piece. I lacked sufficient documentation, information, and even the inclination to do it. Instead, my focus was on presenting fragments of my personal and fictional experiences and perspectives within the context of significant historical changes. I was asking myself, how did all of this translate in my body? And what is it in my own identity that took part in the Lebanese uprising of October 2019? Why was it so important for us artists and the queer community to take over the streets with the Lebanese population and become frontliners? I tried to narrate some events through the eyes of Samar, the main character, while also re-examining or reclaiming this “history” through his intimate experience.
So yes, I definitely find myself today thinking of the younger queer intimate experience in my work in general, not only in Beirut. I ask myself how did my body manage to exist and find pleasure and safety in the midst of these dynamics of corruption, power and micro-violence? These experiences exist increasingly everywhere. I wonder, how are young queer individuals and groups doing today after the port blast in Beirut, the widespread collapse and impoverishment of the population? How are the queer Palestinian teenagers discovering their bodies under the imminent risk of dying every second, with their identities instrumentalized to pinkwash the zionist entity. Where do they find medical care, safe spaces and the possibility to love? My short comic Safety First definitely came as a fictional exploration of these realities, speculating on how this would be perceived in the far future and what would be possible concerns of a community long persecuted and instrumentalized?
I was also struck by a particular comic that you presented at Columbia,“Safety First,” Strapazin (2023, a German comic-art magazine). In this story, an alien visiting our planet looks upon masculinity, heterosexuality, and racial bigotry as at best, a strange relic of some foreign culture, or at worst, a sign of Earth as retrograde. Looking over it now, the comic seems uncomfortably timely, with its offhand allusions to transnational alliances between queer and anticolonial artists. For example, in one frame, a poster stating “Not Gay as in Happy, but Queer as in Free Palestine” is enshrined in a museum of earthly objects. During your visit, you also mentioned your practice of making “pop-up” political comics displays, by projecting comics onto a sheet in the middle of the street. How do you see your art–in these examples and others–as intervening in politics? Do you see a difference between various modes in the medium (pop-up, prints, albums) and their potential as political forms?
When I think about how I entered the field of comics, I started with Samandal, a collective formed to publish comics due to the lack of representation and visual storytelling platforms in our region. We invited everyone to submit their visual stories and published almost everything we received under a Creative Commons license. This artist-led initiative affected Lebanese society in many ways by giving everyone a chance to be read, fostering collaboration, introducing new publishing politics and creating a considerable readership of comics. Some years later, Samandal faced censorship attempts by the Catholic Church, which took us to court for two pages of comics published in 2009, accusing us of inciting sectarian strife, denigrating religion, publishing false news, and defamation. This was a glimpse of my early years in comics. At exactly the same time, I was writing my first short stories, timidly exploring my queer identity and the possibility of writing about it.
From this perspective, I can’t see my art—and this applies to how I see art in general—as only intervening in or commenting on politics. It is inherently political, an actor in political life with its own independent tools, as artists and their work today shape the world as much as they are shaped by it. Thus, it feels difficult for me to describe how my work intersects with politics because, for me, the two are inseparable, and I’ve never known art differently. There is a tendency of labeling artwork “political” when it tackles specific struggles or marginalized narratives or social critique. For me, this is another symptom of a Western heteronormative gaze on non-Western or queer art, because even the most commodified, conforming art, or one created only to entertain, cannot be isolated from the context in which it was conceived and how it affects it.
In Safety First, my aim was partly to explore this intimate symbiotic relationship between politics and arts. When observed from an outsider's perspective in the distant future, how might social injustices profoundly felt by queer individuals and artists, and conveyed through arts and literature, appear to an evolution of queer humans that no longer experience emotions? How does this art inform them about the oppressive political system they live in on Planet “HXT”? One of the characters I aimed to develop presents signs of a queerness that may not look like what we conventionally understand as “queer,” but evokes the genuine curiosity of a young queer child exploring the boundaries of everything around them in order to understand. I consider this comic as an outline for a larger project I’d like to pursue and I thought that I’d like to share a physical version of it with some people, so I made a micro “friends’ edition” of 10 copies in english that I mailed to some of them and got some feedback to build on. I love these intimate exchanges of works in progress with my family of friends. They represent yet another scale of publishing that I’ve been able to experiment with on a safer, much smaller scale. Here, we can test narratives, discuss them among artists, and help each other develop them. It is beautiful how his microscopic and “intimate” process is empowering and politically so valuable for both individuals and the community. Joining forces to support each other helps us exist and change.
Returning to Samandal, the collective believes that every decision, from curatorial choices to selecting printing paper, influences the community around us. Details like paper choice impact production cost, sale price, and accessibility. Decisions about translation also have significant effects. Each choice reflects our commitment to accessibility, collective effort, and contributing to the commons. We’ve explored various formats such as cheap, one-color printed magazines, stapled zines in limited editions, riso-printed posters, full-color books, online comics, and Instagram-carousel-format comics involving photography, video, and puppet animation. Each format has informed us about reception and audience reach and participated in sharpening our understanding of the art of visual storytelling in general. We’ve also experimented with live drawing in private or public spaces, sometimes as Samandal and other times as groups of artists improvising visuals live with music on big screens and walls. A memorable “drawing concert” I represented in my comic book Restless took place on the “Ring” bridge in Beirut during the 2019 revolution. Although I was not there, I followed the event online, accessed friends’ documentation, and created a partly fictional reconstitution of what I consider a micro-historical moment—an artists’ battle against the privatization of their city, corruption, and death.
I am grateful to have navigated the diverse and challenging zones of comics making and publishing in the alternative world before working with a major publisher from the French-Belgian school, which has its own traditions. There’s a lot to learn and experiment with in the alternative space that offers unique opportunities for creativity and innovation. At the same time, having Casterman’s platform to reach hundreds of thousands of readers in the bigger publishing world is truly magical. While this broader readership brings new challenges, such as ensuring accessibility, it also offers exciting opportunities to share stories with a wider audience. Maneuvering queer narratives within these constraints, while preserving their non-conformity in content, sometimes unfamiliar aesthetics and formats, is both challenging and fascinating.
On a broader note, the comics industry, just like many art industries today, is still predominantly controlled by figures of privilege and power, providing access to marginalized narratives can be challenging. Established institutions—but also smaller independent ones— may desire change and seek new content and representations to engage younger audiences, yet they risk mishandling or inadequately protecting this material, or failing to fully embrace its political implications and the causes it defends. This risk is amplified when these institutions lack inclusivity in their governance politics and decision-making teams.
In a market that can sometimes be unconcerned or uninformed, especially when we are talking about a very large reach and distribution, forming advisory boards of diverse, underrepresented groups to guide the content within these structures and ensure content is appropriately handled and presented is very important. These institutions can become real allies of the causes they present in their books by nurturing the ground for these stories to become accessible and even sought-after on a longer term by providing information and education when necessary. In addition to that, larger established structures should support independent and smaller publishers and collectives that focus on unheard voices to broaden their reach and impact. Very importantly, they should always think of ensuring and advocating for fair compensation for artists.
Could you tell us a bit more about Al-Samandal, the international Arabs comics collective in which you’re involved, which has members located throughout the world, especially in Beirut and Paris. (Its active members include: Tracy Chahwan, Karen Keyrouz, Nour Hifaoui, Léna Merhej, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Carla Aouad, May Farra, Delphine Compain, Rami Tannous and Raphaelle Macaron. Its past contributors include well-known, international figures like Barrack Rima, Zeina Abirached, and Edmond Baudoin. What are the aims of the collective? How do you publish and circulate works? Do you have any shared aesthetic or thematic interests or is the “collective” element more open-ended?
Samandal is a family of comic artists and friends. The collective was founded in Beirut in 2007 by Hatem Imam, Fdz, Omar Khoury, Lena Merhej, and Tarek Nabaa. It was a moment of cultural “rebirth” in Beirut after the one month Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. Many collective initiatives popped up in the city in different fields like theater, cinema, comics, and dance. The collective was first imagined as a group initiative to publish comics in a country where comics publishing is more or less absent from the market. It consisted in a quarterly publication based on an open call where everyone in Lebanon, the Arab world, and the rest of the globe, was invited to contribute and published under the creative commons license.
These magazine-like issues created a beautiful movement of comics production and publishing in Lebanon and the Arab world. Collectives started popping up in other cities like Cairo, Tunis, and others with the aim of publishing collectively and giving access to telling and reading stories.
Years later, after eventful episodes with the censorship machine in Lebanon, the collective survived and embarked on different projects. In parallel to the open-call based books, we now publish thematic books curated collectively or by one guest editor, where we explore themes or formal aspects of comics making. The collective has also introduced a collection of solo graphic novels for adults and teenagers and is now moving towards a more “magazine-like” structure where long form comics, short strips, articles, and think pieces, made in a cheap accessible format.
The collective aspect of our work revolves primarily around shared thematic and political interests. We are all deeply committed to fighting injustices, decolonizing the art of comics and our histories, and using this medium to express personal, social and historical issues. While we do share some artistic and aesthetic affinities, these have never been central to our publishing practice or editing approach of our books. Instead, we focus on exchanging resources, visual stories that we discover, styles and narrative/visual experiments that we’ve never seen before, nourishing each other's influences and inspiration in a very permeable dynamic.
How does Al-Samandal approach translation? Arabic is, of course, read from right to left and many comics feature Arabic script as a visual element. How do you render these elements for an Anglophone or Francophone readership? Is anything lost in translation or do you find this to be a problem that invites ludic experimentation?
This is definitely one of our favorite fields of exploration–and an ongoing one. Over years of publishing, translation has been a central subject of continuous reflection for the collective. The reading market in Lebanon is rich in languages, offering books in Arabic, French, and English. As we received comics in various languages and wanted to preserve the artists’ original version, the question of translation arose quickly. The collective experimented with different translation formats: translating comics in separate booklets distributed with the books, on separate pages within the books, or under the comic panels (like movie subtitles). We even created entirely translated books, including in-bubble translations in separate editions.
These experiments informed us a lot about the translation of comics and how it affects the reading experience: the choice of words in different languages and their relationship with the image, the drawing style, and the tone. We contemplate how to preserve the text/image relationship when switching from one language to another. Very early on, it became clear to us that translation concerns the entire concept of the project, not just technical aspects of it, and that it is a politically challenging aspect in a paradoxically precarious and multilingual market.
Over the years, we have often reflected on our desire to be read by audiences in other parts of the world. We constantly ask ourselves: why do we want our work to be read by Western audiences and which of our books or topics we want to make accessible to them? Is it crucial to translate everything into English, or should we selectively decide which aspects of our stories and content should remain accessible only to a “concerned” audience? These are very complex questions that involve not only accessibility but also financial and social aspects, especially in today’s contexts of migration and displacement.
For example, in our latest anthology of queer and trans comics, titled Cutes, we transcribed a conversation among the featured artists about the politics of translation during our two-week residency at Documenta Fifteen. This conversation, available in English, is part of a broader reflection on the hegemony of imperialist languages in queer comics. As non-Western artists, we sometimes feel compelled to write in these dominant languages to reach the largest possible audience and tell our stories to the world. Despite the violence and colonial histories they carry, these languages are now the common tongues in which we can share resources and find available materials on queerness. Our discussion explored how we could convey our experiences and stories in our comics, discussing our bodies and identities using language and translation in a way that both opens and restricts access to different parts of the works, but also in a way which “preserves” a specific non-colonial expression of queerness in our mother tongues.
I particularly enjoyed the issue “Experimental” (Samandal, 2018), which read to me like the next generation of OuBaPo. This 2018 collection really plays with our assumptions about how to “read” or “see” a comic, especially for a non-Arabic speaking audience, bringing together wordless comics, single-color panels, frames that can be read in a circular fashion, and so on. How do you approach experimental graphic works?
Experimental is an important publication for us. In Samandal, we always laugh about the fact that it’s probably one of our most difficult books to read but also the most representative of all our experiments in comics on translation, accessibility, and storytelling. It kind of summarizes all the research the collective has undertaken since 2007 in these fields and celebrates it in one object.
In short, the book explores the possibility of translating comics, but also questions translation as a textual element only. Our idea with the editor in chief Alex Baladi was to propose a different visual adaptation in comics to every translation of the same story - including one version without words. The result is a perfectly symmetrical book that can be read from left to right in the English and French versions and from right to left for the Arabic and wordless versions. The most important part is that the translations are not adapted into comics by the same visual artist: so in a way every translation is a new comic. The center of the book constitutes a sort of nucleus: a comic by Alex Baladi and Mazen Kerbaj that reads in both directions.
Although not easy to read and grasp, the idea of this book pushes comics translation (a definitely very complex and slippery field) to an extreme situation where the possibility of interpretation is very large and varies between the vagueness of the texts and dialogues, the difference in visual interpretations and the mixture of both.
As mentioned earlier, this concept is reflected not only in the content but also in the format of the book. This extends to the book-making process itself. Collaborating with Tala Safie, the designer of Experimentation and a friend of Samandal, we chose to differentiate the stories using Pantone colors. The four versions of each story were printed with the same ink, which is also noted in the table of contents. This makes it relatively easy to identify and compare the different versions of a story throughout the book for those interested. Additionally, a fifth Pantone color (gold) was used for the cover and the central two-sided story.
Experimentation was a significant moment of celebration for Samandal. In 2019, it won the Prize for Alternative Comics at the prestigious Angoulême Festival. The book was described by the jury as a “UFO” in the world of comics publishing at that time.
Could you tell us more about your latest venture, Watwat (‘Arabic for ‘bat’), a collection of Al-Samandal comics aimed at a youth audience? I noticed that a lot of the stories were available to download for free. Are they intended to be part of an open-access philosophy?
After more than a decade of publishing comics primarily for adult readers and closely observing the market, distribution dynamics, readership trends, and the comic-making profession, our collective concluded that preserving this art form as a vital means of expression requires engaging a younger audience as well. We believe that offering stories to younger readers through the web is a key step in achieving this goal. The idea of the Watwat collection is Samandal’s first venture into comics designed specifically for teenagers and young adults. This collection aims to provide visual literature in Arabic for an age group that has been somewhat overlooked in the Arabic comics scene and literary landscape. While there is a notable interest in the Arab world for children's books, illustrated books, and translations of Western comics and manga into Fusha, Samandal seeks to develop a storytelling medium that more authentically reflects Arabic realities. Additionally, the goal is to foster inclusivity by addressing a broader age range and offering a wider array of representations and voices than what is currently available in the market.
For this edition, our budget allowed us to release an initial online publication, avoiding the significant challenge of distribution within the Arabic market and giving free online access to our first eight stories. Our collective wanted to ensure that these are easily accessible and readable from anywhere in the world as a crucial first step toward cultivating a larger future readership in Arabic-speaking regions. It marks a significant milestone for us in engaging younger readers and introducing them to the appreciation of and self-expression through comics.
The collection features a variety of content, including fiction written by teenagers for their peers, personal narratives of struggle, Arabic translations of non-Arabic comics, and works created from an open call for scenarios. This initiative marks a significant milestone for us in engaging younger readers and introducing them to the appreciation of and self-expression through comics.
Could you tell us more about what you’re working on now? You mentioned that you started a second graphic novel provisionally titled the La Mécanique des Sensibles (‘The Mechanics of Feeling’)?
The Mechanics of Feelings (working title) is a self-fiction project I've been slowly working on for the past few years. Initially, I wanted to try writing a straightforward story without much revision and complexity. However, obviously, I ended up re-questioning every aspect of the story and the visual storytelling many times, and my imposter syndrome fully took over. I’ve come to accept that writing is a process that requires living with the story, experimenting with different scene orders, and fully engaging with its temporality. So, I gave myself the space and time to do that.
This graphic novel, which is longer in format, follows Nour, an artist in his mid-thirties grappling with questions about his relationships and identity. Since relocating to France, he has experienced personal transformations that he doesn’t fully understand. Nour and his partner, Sol, face tensions, particularly in the crowded environment of Paris where “there is no space.” Though their love is compassionate, communication has become limited. At a costume party, Nour meets Clément, and they quickly bond over a lively discussion about their first sexual experiences. This connection leads to further encounters where they create magical moments to escape their realities, forming a sort of “wonderland” for self-discovery and transformation. Through Clément, Nour uncovers a new dimension of himself, reevaluating his understanding of his feelings and body, while revisiting childhood memories of seeking his true self. Nour also observes changes in his friends, realizing they, too, embody this constant state of mutation.
The story also tackles secondary themes that are currently significant to me. It examines relationships in a changing world. Reflecting on my own romantic journey, especially since my exile, I’ve felt a need to view it from an external perspective. New facets of my relationship emerge, shaped by cultural differences, adapting to a new life that evolves over time, and a renewed sense of distance, time, and home.
The narrative uses a largely linear structure interspersed with flashbacks to explore Nour’s past, blending fiction and autobiography similarly to Restless. The present-day scenes are partly fictional, following two main and two secondary characters, each with their own romantic stories that intersect with Nour’s journey. The story occasionally shifts to Nour's childhood, where he reconnects with nature and early experiences of queerness. Nature is depicted as fluid and magical, representing his initial exposure to possibilities and transformation. The comic also explores adult changes and evolving self-perception, analyzing early gender concepts.
Set against a “migratory” backdrop, the story moves through northern Paris—known for police violence, poverty, substance abuse issues, terrorizing police violence, anti-migrant policies— as well as various city bridges, concluding at the abandoned railway line, the Petite Ceinture. The Petite Ceinture and the Canal de l’Ourcq are significant to me as places where I began to connect with a new city during Covid-19, even though I still find it challenging to feel a sense of belonging, these spots have given me some comfort and care.
The graphic novel is still a work in progress. I just began drawing the final pages and am both excited and anxious about it. Two feelings that often go hand in hand for me. It’s set to be published in French by Casterman in 2025.
The post How Did My Body Manage to Exist and Find Pleasure and Safety in the Midst of These Dynamics of Corruption: an interview with Joseph Kai appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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