Review: The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Reimena Yee
By Luke Frostick
Reimena Yee is an incredibly talented artist. Her unusual comic book The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya that began its life as a Webtoon has a stunning new volume published by Unbound. We here at the Bosphorus Review have a special affection for Yee as she did a marvellous piece of cover art for us a few years back and are always excited to see more of her work.
The first volume told the story of Zeynel, the son of an Ottoman intellectual family who gives those privileges up for the love of his life and becomes a carpet merchant. It had laid-back pace, lo-fi family drama and moving love story at the heart with just a bit of vampire tragedy as spice. The new volume sees Zeynel far away in England, still plying his trade despite his vampiric nature, until the vampire that once turned him arrives to ruin his peace and quiet and drag the past back up.
The first volume was excellent. Its simple but moving story was enhanced by an incredible art style. Yee integrated different aspects of traditional Turkish art such as miniatures, henna, ceramics, architecture and, of course, carpets seamlessly into her work. She hence created some absolutely stunning panels that blurred the lines between comics and traditional Turkish art. All of this was backed up by some very rigorous research to ensure that the patterns and styles were authentic.
With the new volume, the art is still stunning. There is a lot less of the roughness in the figures that you can see in some of the early panels of the first volume. In addition, Yee has continued to use Turkish art as part of her panels. In this volume, water painting and Karagöz puppetry are integrated to great effect.
Although the art is still a joy, the narrative is weaker. The first volume fizzed with life. However, the second volume’s story doesn’t have as much character as the first.It doesn’t have the range or depth of characters that the early volume had and without the love story between Zeynel and Ayşe powering the narrative, it doesn’t have a lot to work with. Moreover, the original volume had a simple, powerful, bittersweet ending. This book doesn’t even really try to reach those same heights. To be fair, that was properly the right way to go; it was always going to be challenging to find places to go after the first volume. It does have the unfortunate effect of this book feeling more like an afterword to the original rather than a significant expansion.
The book has some well-meaning points about orientalism that it tries to explore. However, they are not very subtly integrated into the narrative. I couldn’t help the feeling that the artist was attempting to contrast the orientalists of the past with her own more thoroughly researched and thoughtful use of Ottoman culture in art. Her dedication to being authentic and avoiding the mistakes of previous generations of writers and artists is admirable, but perhaps pointing that fact out within the work wasn’t necessary.
This review is coming across far more negative that I hoped it would. I still have a lot of affection for the series and I think it is amazing that the book came out at all, let alone as such a handsome volume. Credit is certainly owed to the hybrid publishing model at Unbound. It expands what comics can be and the kind of stories that can be told in them, which is marvellous. The book is still beautiful and worth getting for the art alone and the story is not bad. It is still light and fun enough that I never got bored or frustrated with it. However, I hoped that it would be as strong an entry as the previous volume.. I remain a fan of the series and excited to see what Yee does next.
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