There are some cities that are impossible to grasp fully. No matter how much you try to explore them, to understand them, it’s impossible to make sense of it all. Beirut is one of these cities, continually morphing, changing and rising from the ashes despite the hardships, wars and seemingly endless other crises.

We find all of these aspects and more in “Beyrouth Ya Beyrouth”, a comic book collection in the form of a newspaper created last year by the comic book festival “Rencontres du 9e Art, Festival BD d’Aix” at Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. The collection sees a group of Lebanese artists sharing different sides of Beirut that are less known to the media. Rather than focusing on the crises and turmoil, they aim to capture the city’s everyday life, emotions and experiences through the medium of comics.

Michelle Standjovski, a comic book author, illustrator and professor at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), played a central role in the creation of the collaborative project based on capturing Beirut’s different districts and their residents. The idea for this came after Standjovski was contacted by Serge Darpex, director of the Festival BD d’Aix, in which she had participated before. “Serge contacted me and suggested the idea of creating a newspaper to be distributed,” she told me.

The festival, managed by the tourism office of Aix-en-Provence, has a unique structure that offers distinct advantages. Maxime Arnaud, the spokesperson for the festival, explained that having access to the city’s communication resources is what helped boost the festival’s reach and open it up to a wider audience, rather than comic book lovers only. The idea for the journal format was also intended to let the French public get to know Beirut through the popular medium of comics.

Initially, the proposal was for a more general focus on Lebanon, but Standjovski immediately saw an........

© Middle East Monitor