Lengthy review incoming
I'm conflicted by this book. It has a number of strong qualities that seem undermined by the craft of the author. I feel, at times, that I was reading a great work produced by someone ten years before they would be capable of doing it justice. Still, it is a book very much worth reading if I think it may be superceded by other works and reduced by time.
Sulaiman has knack for making characters work. They're all very well defined in terms of their interests and ambitions. Dialogue mostly gleams, but on occasion, it comes off as it maybe rushing to push along the story and as part of a rougher draft.
The passage of time is marked by a death count that wears the reader down. I felt myself feeling like the characters do, weighed down by the violence around them with seemingly no end in sight even in disbelief at its own continuation. Depictions of real life videos and photos are inserted into the book as filtered through the book's style. It is one of many creative decisions that ultimately make this book greater than the sum of its parts.
While the situation in Syria may be extremely complicated by any number of actors and agents, the simple graphic style of the story serves the setting well. But just because the style is simple, it does not mean it is elegant. The execution here is messy and clunky. The expressions of characters are too basic and inconsistent especially when it comes to women. The body language of the characters often exists only in a minimal way.
In some pages, silhouettes tell the story and they are used to great effect. I understand the author may have wanted to boil down the visuals to its most basic point in these pages, but the composition in these panels communicates too little to tell us anything of significance. Almost every panel is stiffly posed. Whenever the story requires a sense of movement, Sulaiman loses his hold on the craft.
In comparison, when Sulaiman includes them, his backgrounds are quite striking and dynamic. The high contrast style works marvelously here. At around the midpoint, pages 138 and 139 in my edition, there is a wonderful sequence where the characters set up sniper cover on a street. It is the visual highlight of the book and it may be telling that the characters occupy little real estate on these two pages.
But the book accomplishes what the author sets out to do. I came away from the book, not understanding the conflict to a greater extent, but seeing it with a more sensitive, grounded point of view gifted by the author. Am I personally bringing it down too many points because of what I want to be?
Is this type of journalism, one where a timely comic is created to explain a place, people and time, bound to the same standards as a regular entry of fiction? I don't know, but my ultimate recommendation is that you check this book out and make your conclusion as to what a work like this means.