One of the Arab world's great stories gets a new lease of life

Naguib Mahfouz’s 'The Thief and the Dogs' has been adapted into a graphic novel, in a compelling version that does justice to it and may take it to a younger audience

Al Majalla

One of the Arab world's great stories gets a new lease of life

Tarek Emam

last update on 30 Jun 2025

The work of one of Egypt’s most celebrated novelists could soon find a new audience if a major initiative, Naguib Mahfouz Illustrated, succeeds in reimagining his books as graphic novels.

An adaptation of The Thief and the Dogs released by Diwan, Mahfouz’s publisher, in partnership with Al-Mahrousa, is a promising start. It tells the story through the rich, filmic illustrations which have made the art form popular with younger readers around the world, while it remains rare on the publishing scene of the Arab World.

Mahfouz’s literary universe has already been adapted to cinema, television, theatre, and the visual arts. This latest project aims to breathe new life into it via a new genre, often still referred to as “comics”.

A faithful adaptation

Readers familiar with the original novel will not feel alienated by this retelling. Scripted by Mohamed Ismail Amin and illustrated by artists Migo and Jamal Qubtan, the adaptation remains resolutely faithful to Mahfouz’s original in both language and narrative structure.

The graphic novel preserves the voice of the external narrator, incorporating meaningful excerpts from the source text as captioned narration that frames the visual storytelling. Dialogue between characters is rendered with equal care, maintaining the essence of Mahfouz’s literary voice throughout.

This sense of familiarity, however, does not dilute the boldness of the work’s engagement with a text long enshrined in the cultural canon, not only for its literary value but also for the potent visual legacy established by Kamal El-Sheikh’s acclaimed 1962 film adaptation, released just a year after the novel.

Published as a 128-page, mid-sized volume, closely mirroring the original novel’s 120 pages, the adaptation is in black and white throughout. It takes care to uphold the integrity of the original as a concise and tightly woven narrative.

The adaptation remains resolutely faithful to Naguib Mahfouz's original in both language and narrative structure

It opens in luminous brightness, depicting the morning when one of its main characters, Said Mahran, is released from prison to return to the alleyways of his old neighbourhood. The scenes gradually dim, descending into shadow and culminating in a final, entirely black frame. In that closing image, Mahran's body is outlined only by faint white lines, as if dissolving into the darkness.

This visual technique mirrors the emotional arc of the story itself, charting a path from the hope of redemption to the inevitability of ruin.

The graphic novel makes evocative use of panel composition, both in quantity and scale, to underscore thematic contrasts. Urban scenes are rendered through a dense mosaic of small, crowded frames, visually reflecting Cairo's claustrophobic sprawl and the psychological entrapment of Said Mahran. Even the speech bubbles feel compressed, their words squeezed as if gasping for air.

By contrast, the cemetery—marking both the physical edge of the city and Mahran's existential boundary—is depicted through expansive, open panels. Some pages feature a single, sprawling frame, evoking the stillness and emptiness of this liminal space.

Within the city, Mahran appears diminished, indistinct, lost among the crowd. Amid the gravestones, he becomes monumental—an outsized, tragic antihero confronting the silence of death.

Certain panels are set at oblique angles, visually echoing his inner disorientation. Others nest frames within frames, forming a symbolic spiral of entrapment, a visual metaphor for confinement and psychological descent.

Mahran's psychological disintegration is charted through his evolving relationship with light. In the early panels, he is depicted bathed in natural illumination. Gradually, however, his figure fractures into chiaroscuro, split between light and shadow, his actions divided between covert scheming and public vengeance.

The graphic novel makes evocative use of panel composition, both in quantity and scale, to underscore thematic contrasts

Revealing art

In several key frames, he dissolves into a black silhouette, his identity erased, reduced to a spectral presence. Elsewhere, the silhouette is inverted, rendered in ghostly white against a field of darkness, suggesting a flicker of purity struggling against a morally corrupted world.

In one haunting full-page spread, Mahran stands luminous and isolated before a tribunal, where three judges fused into a single, faceless black figure. The scales of justice are also darkened, symbols of fairness consumed by shadow.

In another frame, a noose glows with eerie light, coiling toward the pupil of a giant eye, Mahran's own. Here, illumination does not absolve. It condemns.

The illustrations also chart a transformation in Mahran's physical presence. Early frames fragment his body. There are close-ups of his hands as they break shackles, wield pens or grip pistols. But as he approaches his inevitable end, his figure begins to multiply across the page, each successive form more translucent than the last.

Layered interpretation

This duplication invites layered interpretation: Is it an escape from the confines of the flesh? A portrayal of infinite Mahrans, each destined to flee, to fall? Or the dissolution of self into abstraction at the moment of reckoning?

In one surreal moment, Mahran's face becomes the frame for a cluster of guns, his features sculpted from barrels. The weapon, once merely a tool, is now fused with his identity. Its muzzles point in all directions, out at the world, and back at itself.

The novel's visual language reaches a haunting crescendo in a final, poetic image: delicate moths circling a broken streetlamp. It becomes a fleeting festival of light amid ruin, a quiet elegy for the fragile, doomed connection between Mahran and another main character, Nur, a tenderness that flickers momentarily before vanishing into darkness.

This graphic novel seamlessly interlaces dreamscapes and hallucinations with its core realism, at times veering into the surreal. These interludes translate Mahran's fractured psyche—his paranoia, obsessions, and blurred grip on reality—into a visible dream-current that runs through the narrative. This dream-like stream of consciousness lays bare the protagonist's inner disarray, exposing the emotional and psychological turmoil.

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