The End of the Arab of the Future: A Youth in the Middle East, Volume One, 1992-94. By Riad Sattouf. Translated by Sam Taylor. Fantagraphics: Seattle, 2026. 170pp. $22.99.
Review by Paul Buhle
The reputation of the artist and of this book have swept France and reached global audiences. Creator of several volumes received well in France, Sattouf reached a level of fame with the appearance in 2004 of the French-language version of the volume under review. Since then frequently in the spotlight, he provided comic art to the wildly satirical Charlie Hebdo for ten years (2004-2014), directed a well-received film. (Les Beaux Gosses, The French Kissers) and received a major exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Still in his forties, Sattouf is obviously reaching the peak of his talents.
Perhaps now, amidst the renewed horrors of pogroms and a war that most Americans obviously do not want, readers have been prepared to encompass the deceptive power of Sattouf’s work. The “little guy” whose misadventures may seem Chaplinesque to cinephiles, stumbles through life, bringing us smiles and winces, more and better on successive re-readings.
Let us interject a scholarly note here. The comic artists of the Middle East, apart from those satirists appearing in the Israeli press, have been little seen in the US, with the noted exception of the Persian-raised Marjane Satrapi, whose recent death has deprived us of a genius contribution. A recent study of Egyptian comics suggests that in their home environment, the art form can be subtle and deeply influential.
Gamel Nassar, the ultimate father of Arab nationalism, famously enjoyed satires of himself, and if some Arab (or Persian) regimes have ruthlessly suppressed satires of power and corruption, numbers of artists have inventively found ways around censorship and persecution. Sherif Adel, Hocham Rahma and Khalid Abdelazeez have notably aimed their satire at the aspirations of Egypt’s planners seeking to rebuild Cairo or invent some new capital as utopia for the powerful, actually a pseudo-utopia for global investors.*
The personal approach of Sattouf seems utterly at odds with the large-scale vision of Arab civilization, but are these really so different? The human condition is the same, in our era of globalization, social and ecological crisis. Populations mix freely if not always happily, to say the least.
“Deceptive” may not be the proper artistic description of the spare drawing style in Arab of the Future, brought to vivid life by the use of reds and blues but more by the sheer power of the narrative. They need no dense “filling out.” That this is above all the story of a kid becoming an adolescent far from his birth place strikes home from the first page. It does not even need to be the artist’s own life story.
Palestinians, following the Lebanese and other Arab nationalities, often flee, when they can, to France, most especially if married to Jews—something unpopular bordering on unacceptable in almost any religion-based community of the Middle East. And not necessarily popular in France, where the Muslim community is endlessly accused of undermining the values of western civilization.
In this case, by way of the comic’s back story, a French woman of Breton heritage has been swept away by a romantic Syrian. Our protagonist, around age fourteen, faces the consequences. Mom, Riad and his brother Yaha, living in Brittany, are stuck with the consequences of a broken marriage. The father, obviously unable to deal with the modern secular society of France, returns to Syria, in effect kidnapping baby brother Fadi.
This might set the plot in a different kind of comic, but the adolescent urgings of the protagonist —not so very different from adolescents in the US, most of Europe and beyond—take charge. The craving for friends and for a girlfriend in particular find him perplexed, suffering from his short stature, and generally unable to do what every adolescent seems to want: to “be popular.”
A sense of social inadequacy, as so often seen in the real story of comic artists, plagues him and leaves him baffled that anyone would be either impressed by or romantically attracted to him—especially anyone of the desired sex. In this case, the one girl interested in him, at first threatening to overwhelm him with attention, happens by great good fortune to be the daughter of a successful graphic artist. Our hero’s inadvertent pushing her away, mostly but not entirely due to his personal crises, could easily constitute the major plot beyond his own family. Not here.
An erratic reader of comics (some of them on loan from the girl’s father), our protagonist also takes in contemporary and older favorites, but locates an improbable literary source of his special fascination: horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1900-38). The singular literary notable of Providence, RI, your reviewer’s adopted home, “HPL” is hugely popular among these French kids, immigrants included. Lovecraft’s imagined source of revelations—as Lovecraft describes them—too terrifying to reveal in any detail, are the purported writings of a “Mad Arab.” This detail naturally captures the fascination of the Arab-French lad.
What an idea! Once leading Edgar Allan Poe in the number of stories adapted to horror films, HPL and his purple prose fairly radiated a fearful racism. In youth, he became afraid of almost everything “outside” his Anglo-Saxon domain on College Hill—its fine mansions built on the slave trade—looking down on the immigrant communities. He was simultaneously drawn toward the very forces that might snatch him up from an insular (and sexless) existence. At the end of his short life, a fellow horror writer converted Lovecraft from racism to socialism, Norman Thomas-style. Never mind. Other comic artists, including the Afro-Caribbean Paul Peart-Smith, have found in Lovecraft a perfect literary source for their own fantastic art. Sattouf does not get that far.
But perhaps Sattouf, in his adolescent imagination, viewed the Mad Arab as kin? Not really. Yet getting through the day, where bullies threaten him outside the school and along his walks home, keeps him occupied with a fear that he might share with a Lovecraft protagonist. He spends an inordinate amount of time (and pages) observing the social life and mating behavior of fellow teens who are “popular” and obviously have fun, even sometimes, if only at the end of his high school years, actual sex.
His family crisis meanwhile threatens to soak up all his mental energy. His mother is becoming steadily more crazy, missing her son and placing her faith in mystics and/or in legal efforts, then in nothing at all. He seems to put off definite plans or even hopes to become a comic artist. Should he escape the family by educating himself for a profession? His father wanted him to be a physician, his grandfather suggested the secure life of a civil servant. Even more improbable ideas, like becoming an airplane pilot, spin around his head.
How close this narrative may be to the artist’s life is an interesting but not, we hope, an altogether compelling question. Sattouf’s own French grandmother actually gave him the comics that may actually have been his initial source of interest. That interest seems to have been rekindled after he had begun studying animation and was “discovered” by a major figure of he field. Turning back to comics, devoting himself to close study of a real-life Parisian Middle School, he found himself and his audience with the best selling Retour au college. Or so the story goes.
We hope to learn more, and not only about Sattouf, but about the impact of Middle Eastern comic art and what we can learn from it. A comic published earlier this year recounts, to great effect, the otherwise presumably forgotten incident in Chicago public schools of 2013. Wake Now in the Fire, written by Jarrett Drapier and illustrated by AJ Dungo, was published by Ten Speed Graphic earlier this year.
Persepolis, Satrapi’s classic and world-wide best seller, was pulled from the classrooms across the city’s system, with the excuse that the comic displayed violent and worrisome images. The day following the decision, 150 students at Lane Tech Cooledge Prep stood in the rain with protest signs, and with the support of the Chicago Teachers Union. The protesters won or, at least, the school permitted the return of the book for older students.
A small victory for comic art and young people, perhaps more precious now, with threats of school censorship abounding. The comic on the incident unknowingly paid tribute not only to the students but also to the memory of Satrapi who died far too soon, in her adopted Paris, in June, at age 56.
Paul Buhle
*Nadeen Abdallah and Ahmed El Antably, “Drawing Dissent: Egyptian Subversive Comics and the Critique of the Built Environment,” Radical History Review, #155 (May, 2026), 7-28.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
