THE INFIDEL is about twin brothers Killian Duke and Salaam Duka whose Muslim background comes to the forefront of their lives on 9/11. Killian responds to the atrocity by creating a counter-jihad superhero comic book called PIGMAN, as Salaam fully surrenders to Islam. Pigman's battle against his archenemy SuperJihad is echoed by the escalating conflict between the twins.
The first issue of the book is finally out now, and I got a review copy. The Infidel does display a strong sense of craftsmanship. This isn't some pissy conservative half-assedly fucking around with cartooning*. Fawstin is genuinely interested in pushing at the limits of cartooning, and trying to use comics to tell stories in a way that film and literature can't. There's a startling lack of originality in the way he pushes at cartooning in this first issue, though. He "homages" (others would be a little less kind and call it "rips off") early Frank Miller at every opportunity: Media talking heads are presented in the same way—dialogue below a TV-shaped box—as in The Dark Knight Returns, certain silhouettes appear to be clones of similar shots from Sin City or 300. But lots of comics artists start from a place of talent-worship, and you can see Fawstin trying to develop his own cartooning voice as the story moves on.
The problem is that Fawstin's politics—and probably personal experiences, as he was raised Muslim before becoming a virulent anti-Muslim cartoonist—get in the way of the storytelling here. It's smart that he makes Killian Duke into a cartoonist. It gives the Pigman sequences room to breathe, to be cartoonish in their violence and worldview. But the first issue ends with Duke, in the 'real world,' insulting a streetside Muslim recruiting booth, and the insulted Muslims behave with the same cartoonish violence as the fictional terrorists in the Pigman story, with knives and cliches.
This is a huge storytelling flaw: You can't have a cartoonish fantasy world in your story and then have that same cartoonish worldview represented in the more realistic framing sequence. Fawstin believes that almost all Muslims are caricatures, boogeymen who hate freedom and want to dominate the world, and this belief foils the structure of his own story. Unless he introduces a more reasonable Muslim character—if American Muslims react with violence every time they are presented with a dissenting worldview, they've done a fabulous job keeping it out of the evening news—or introduces more of an interconnectedness between the fantasy and reality sequences, his politics have undone the story he's trying to tell.
* I know that Hudnall and Lash have both made interesting comics in the past, but they've flipped their shit, and their comics are atrocious now.
