Last time I picked up Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage, I vaguely remember once finished flipping to the fine-print page to see when it was put out. My second edition copy was put out in 2006.

That’s five years between that stop-gap release, featuring memories from his travels at the time, to the recent release of Habibi, his new graphic novel.

And it makes complete sense why it took that long. You can’t hurry a book that wraps up family and love and religion and existence, which Thompson does amazingly and in a way that might surpass his break-out hit Blankets.

It’s an amazing book, filled with beauty and horror and laughs. Encompassing hardly begins to describe it; he can feature a lighthearted crotch-hit on page 69 while showing some incredibly visceral damage done to his characters and never lost me.

For its ambition alone, Habibi might be the graphic novel of the year.