By Milton Hatoum, adapted by Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-856-7
Win’s Christmas Recommendation: A Stark and Stunning Masterpiece… 10/10
Twin brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon have been winning awards and garnering critical acclaim ever since they began self-publishing in their native Brazil in 1993. From that time on they have produced remarkable and compelling works for France, Italy, Spain and the USA, ranging from 5 to De:TALES to Casanova to The Umbrella Academy to Daytripper…
Now their masterful graphic collaborations have culminated in a powerful adaptation of iconoclastic contemporary author Milton Hatoum’s generational novel Dois Irmãos (translated as both The Brothers or, as here, Two Brothers)…
Omar and Yaqub were twins born of a classic romance which they quickly stifled and buried. Their affluent tradesman father Halim saw teenaged Zana in her father’s Lebanese restaurant in 1914 and moved Heaven and Earth to win her. And naturally love triumphed and prospered…
Their early days together were filled with passionate excess which the boys’ birth soon ended. It didn’t help that the mother became obsessed with her children, not just the boys but also adopted orphan Indian girl/indentured servant Domingas and, eventually, daughter Rânia. Halim saw them all as intruders, but Zana decreed she would have three children and always got what she wanted…
Primitive, provincial backwater Manaus missed most of the Second World War, but nonetheless Halim insisted on sending his sons to live with relatives in Lebanon. The boys were thirteen and, despite being identical, were completely different.
Yaqub was serious, diligent and honest whilst his younger brother – his mother’s cocksure, blatant favourite since birth – had grown into a spoiled, indolent brat prone to criminality and unreasoning violence.
Omar had even been forgiven for permanently scarring his brother with a broken bottle in a petty dispute over a girl at a family party…
When Halim decreed they would go to abroad for the duration, Zana overruled him and only “the good twin†was banished whilst Omar remained at his mother’s apron strings, growing ever more wild…
At War’s end Yaqub returned, an accomplished and polished young man of 18, a brilliant mathematician and engineer intensely aware that in that troubled house only Domingas and little Rânia were pleased to see him…
The family’s reunion swiftly devolved into animosity, hostility, separation and open warfare. With all the various paths to true tragedy slowly merging together, the Good Son permanently distanced himself from his family and Manaus, becoming a cold monster whilst his brother – forever cosseted and shielded by a mother’s uncompromising, unreasoning, fanatical love – became a maddened beast and hunted criminal…
Narrated by Domingas’ patiently observant son Nael – born either of love with Yaqub or assault by Omar – the chronicle of the rise of the city and fall of the family is a stunning saga of twisted love, familial neglect, self-deception and the sheer destructive power of jealousy. Adding to the distress and tension, the events are depicted in potent snatches of revelation carefully arranged in anachronistic sequences which slowly construct a torturous skeleton of personal catastrophe which proves that family is everything and blood means nothing…
Astonishingly realised in stark monochrome by a pair of visual arts prodigies at the top of their game, Two Brothers is possibly the most evocative and crucial piece of sequential art yet seen in the 21st century.
© 2015 Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. “Dois Irmãos†original text © 2000 Milton Hatoum. Adaptation and illustrations © 2015 Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá.