Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave

Damezin offers readers an entrancing visual journey as he retells a classic Persian poem in this gorgeous graphic novel. Qays and Layla are young lovers, but their relationship is strongly opposed by Layla’s father, who deems Qays too mercurial to marry his daughter. Qays quickly proves him right, becoming Majnun, lingering just beyond the bounds of Layla’s town as she mourns him and dutifully marries a man of her father’s choosing. Majnun’s mystical mourning echoes through the desert, enticing animals to follow him, haunting all who hear it, and even enrapturing insects who consume his broken-hearted body after his death. Damezin’s visual language relies confidently on complex color; dark backgrounds and rich shades of orange, green and purple are overlaid with enhanced, artistically formalized textures of the natural world—flames, waves, and fecund plant life. Damezin’s most modern storytelling choice is especially compelling; Layla finds a strong voice in the tale’s final act, in which she boldly skewers the narrative expectations put upon the woman within a tragic love story and asserts that there is as much power in her silence as in Majnun’s ceaseless soliloquies.