The Bubble Doesn't Always Point Where You Think: Arabic Comics in English

Walk into a decent UK bookshop in 2026 and you will probably find a translated fiction table, a graphic novel section and, somewhere near the till, a few tempting hardbacks with sprayed edges. What you will rarely find is a shelf where those categories meet. Arabic comics and graphic novels tend to fall between them: too visual for the translated fiction buyer, too translated for the comics buyer, too niche for the chain's central buying team. That is a shame, because some of the most interesting work in English translation right now is happening in panels, bubbles and right-to-left pages.

Start with the wishes

If you only try one book from this piece, make it Deena Mohamed's Shubeik Lubeik. It is a big, confident graphic novel set in a Cairo where wishes are bottled, licensed and sold, and where three very different people come up against the awkward business of getting what they ask for. Mohamed's pages are full of visual jokes, crowded streets and small domestic details, and the English edition keeps the warmth and the bite. It is the kind of book that makes the case for Arabic comics without needing to make a speech about them.

Magdy El Shafee's Metro is the other obvious gateway. A Cairo crime story with a sharp, sketchy line and a healthy distrust of authority, it was banned in Egypt and has had a strange, stubborn life in English. It is not as polished as Shubeik Lubeik, but it has real energy, and it shows how Arabic comics can do genre as well as literary memoir. If you like your translated fiction with a bit of grit, start here.

The memoir shelf is wider than it looks

Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future, translated by Sam Taylor, is not an Arabic-language comic — it was written in French — but it belongs in this conversation. Sattouf's account of growing up between Libya, Syria and France is funny, uncomfortable and beautifully paced, and it has become one of the easiest ways for UK readers to enter Arab diaspora life through comics. The same is true of Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi, an English-language graphic memoir about a Palestinian childhood in Lebanon. It is rougher, more handmade, and all the better for it.

Zeina Abirached's A Game for Swallows, translated by Edward Gauvin, is a masterclass in claustrophobia. Set in a Beirut apartment building during the civil war, it turns a few rooms and a staircase into a whole world. Her black-and-white pages are full of repeated shapes and tiny movements, and the book reads like a stage play drawn in ink. I Remember Beirut, also by Abirached, makes a good companion: quieter, more fragmentary, but just as good on memory and place.

The page is not just a page

Here is where comics get tricky. Arabic books open from the right, and Arabic comics often flow right to left: panels, speech bubbles, even the way a character walks across a room. When a publisher brings one into English, someone has to decide whether to flip the artwork, reverse the reading direction, or leave the pages as drawn and letter them for a new audience. None of those choices is neutral.

I spoke to a freelance letterer who has worked on Arabic-to-English comics and asked not to be named because some projects are still in production. She said the worst mistake is to treat right-to-left pages as a simple mirror image. Flip a panel carelessly and a character becomes left-handed, a street sign turns into nonsense, a map points the wrong way. The better route, she argued, is usually to keep the artwork as the artist drew it and adjust the lettering: bubble placement, tail direction, the occasional arrow, a little more white space to guide the eye. It is less tidy, but more honest.

That is why lettering matters so much in these books. A speech bubble is not just a container for words. Its tail tells you who is speaking. Its position tells you when. Its shape tells you how loud. When a translator and letterer get it right, you stop noticing the mechanics and start hearing the voices. When they get it wrong, the page feels like a room with the furniture moved an inch to the left.

Cultural references do not travel in a straight line

Prose translators can explain a joke in a footnote. Comics have less room. A shop sign, a poster, a television in the background, a particular brand of biscuit: all of it carries meaning, and all of it has to be either translated, adapted or left to do its quiet work. Shubeik Lubeik is full of visual jokes that depend on Cairo-specific details, but it never feels like homework. Metro is rougher and more journalistic, and some of its references will sail past a UK reader. That is not a failure. It is what reading translated comics is like: you get most of it, you miss some of it, and you keep going.

Why the shelving problem matters

In the UK, comics are usually shelved by author or artist in a graphic novel section. Translated fiction is shelved separately, often by language or region. Arabic comics get lost between the two. A bookseller in a chain might not know whether to put Shubeik Lubeik next to the Egyptian novels or next to the memoirs. An independent shop might do something clever and hand-sell it, but only if someone on staff has read it.

So ask. Ask in Foyles, ask in your local Waterstones, ask in Gosh! or Page 45 or your nearest independent. Ask your library to stock them. Ask for Arabic comics by name, not just 'translated fiction'. The books exist, and they are good. They just need someone to point at the shelf and say: not there, here.

A short starting shelf

• Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed — wishes, Cairo, three lives, one very satisfying big book.
• Metro by Magdy El Shafee — Cairo crime, banned in Egypt, still buzzing.
• A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached, translated by Edward Gauvin — Beirut, one apartment, unbearable tension.
• The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor — diaspora childhood, bad haircuts, sharp comedy.
• Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq — Palestinian memory, handmade pages, a voice that stays with you.

None of these books needs you to know Arabic. They need you to read a page in the order it was drawn, to look at the corners as well as the words, and to accept that the bubble might not point exactly where you expect. That is not a problem. That is the pleasure.