'Habibi,' 'Feynman,' more graphic novels

Craig Thompson can build a comics page out of pretty much anything. In "Habibi" (Pantheon, $35), the writer-artist of "Blankets" uses religious iconography, Arabic lettering and the patterns on carpets to pull together the gorgeous love/adventure story contained in this incredible, nearly 700-page volume. It's certainly possible to write a comic book that goes on too long, but "Habibi" belongs to that category of novel pioneered by Dickens and more recently explored by Stephen King that is so long you never want it to end.

An escaped 9-year-old Arab slave named Dodola rescues a black infant named Zam from certain death and raises him in a beached ship somewhere in the desert; from there, Thompson strains to encompass everything about the Arab world, from its architecture to its mythology to the deepest mysteries of Islam. At times he overreaches, and at times he horrifies with the depths to which the maturing Zam will go to escape himself as he discovers a burgeoning attraction to the woman who raises him. But "Habibi," miraculously, is even more than the sum of its considerable parts.

Who is weirder than Jim Woodring? The inimitable cartoonist has been around for decades, but his work is finally getting its due from Fantagraphics in "Congress of the Animals" ($19.99), beautifully presented in the same format as Woodring's off-kilter "Weathercraft," and even better than that masterpiece. Woodring's hero is an animal of indeterminate species named Frank -- a lazy, taciturn character who lives happily with his pets Pushpaw and Pupshaw in a weird little house in a weird little town in a weird little world.

The "Frank" comics are "silent," which is to say, wordless, without even written sound effects. Woodring's visuals defy description, but here goes: imagine a very old black-and-white Walt Disney cartoon -- the ones with the singing trees and the rubber-limbed cows. Now imagine that all of the architecture and about half of the animals are styled after abstract china patterns. Now imagine that, instead of a cartoon, it's a series of woodcuts.

I know, I love it, too.

"Reading Feynman stories out of order is a great way to experience a life the way it is: messy, and without a discernible plot!" writes Jim Ottaviani in the bibliography at the end "Feynman" (First Second, $29.99), a cartoon bio of the groundbreaking physicist and Far Rockaway native. After finishing "Feynman," you'll find this declaration reads less as an endnote than as a statement of purpose. "Feynman" is deliberately messy, with a propensity to tell, rather than show, but the book is frequently saved by Leland Myrick's beautiful line drawings.

It's a crowded narrative, and yet, for all its verbosity, it feels sketchy. Ottaviani wants to introduce beginners to both particle physics and a very strange human being, and in his attempts to do both, neither subject gets the necessary attention. It's hard to blame Ottaviani for the attempt -- in Richard Feynman you have a guy who worked on the Manhattan Project and had three dramatic marriages -- but the resulting volume is a bit flat, and only the lovely drawings are flat in a good way.

Speaking of endnotes, don't skip the appendices when you read Chester Brown's "Paying for It" (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) -- and you should read it. Brown's astonishingly frank nonfiction book about the years he's spent patronizing prostitutes is less a memoir than a meticulously illustrated journal, with the author-illustrator's simple, staunchly unerotic pen-and-ink panels chronicling his girlfriend's push for a polyamorous relationship, the resulting breakup and his subsequent decision to seek out sex, rather than love, which he begins to doubt even exists.

"Paying for It" is larded with disingenuous libertarian claptrap about how liberating sex work could be if only the mean ol' government would butt out, but Brown is honest enough to wrestle with issues raised by his behavior ("Was 'Angelina' a sex slave?" he wonders of a girl he's hired.) He also gives a voice to friends, including fellow Canadian cartoonist Seth, who raise some wise objections even as Brown begins a monogamous relationship with one of his prostitutes. It's rare that someone as committed to a single issue allows for dissenting voices to intrude, and that alone makes "Paying for It" valuable. Out of his depth emotionally, Brown seems confused and on the verge of frustration over the missed possibilities in love and sex. However strange his own choices may seem, that, at least, is something we can all relate to.