Tea and crabs with Raadh Thoriq Ibrahim
An animator, a comic, and a long detour through Trivandrum's printers.
Artwork: Dosain
38 minutes ago
The enigmatic animator and artist Raadh Thoriq Ibrahim and I catch up after a busy weekend of pushing our comic Crabs at the Lonuziyaaraiy Park on the good people of Malé. For us, the comic is old news though as we finished it over a year ago. But getting it printed was hell – it’s taken significantly more time than creating the comic itself. However, I managed to get the business done on a trip to Trivandrum, after checking with several printers during my hours off hospital duty.
Raadh and I are having a cup of tea in Henveiru and he explains to me, very candidly, how he got into art.
“I had a hard time talking as a kid. I was slow to pick up speech, so I stuck to drawing pretty early on,” he says brightly. “And people really liked what I drew, so I went ahead with that because that helped my self-esteem. I wanted to show that I had something, and drawing validated me.”
Raadh had a helper when he was a kid.
“She was from Kudahuvadhoo and was like a sister to me. She drew a lot and I think that had a huge impact on me too,” he explains.
Young Raadh fiddled around a lot with MS-Paint, and he shows me some of his material from back then, including numerous portraits of Mario.
“You must have gamed a lot,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I basically grew up with games,” he agrees. “Like, I went to Kudahuvadhoo when I was about five years old. And there was an SNES, or maybe an emulator of some kind, where we stayed so I gamed a bunch. That’s kind of how I got to know all the classics, Mario, Mega Man, Sonic.”
Later, he confesses that he played some nasty games on Adobe Flash. He shows me some violent examples of the Mario-based Flash games he played in which the otherwise harmless plumber revels in blood and gore. Raadh was also into Newgrounds and Stickpage, he tells me. They’re websites for animators and game-creators that played a pivotal role in 2000s game culture.
“It’s going to have an effect on your mind, whatever that is, and I don’t encourage people to consume what I did,” Raadh warns. “So, parents, please monitor what your kids do online.”
It’s hard to see how this has had an adverse effect on Raadh, but then he would know himself better. I don’t mind the man’s mind one bit, though.
To move on to greener pastures, I ask him when he got into anime.
“I watched Pokemon and Dragon Ball-Z as a kid but it’s not proper anime I think,” he recalls. “But then, I stumbled upon this channel, Animax, and one of the defining moments for me was watching Full Metal Alchemist. There was this one scene that hit really hard and I thought, ‘woah, this isn’t really the kind of cartoon that I thought it would be.’”
“I watched Akira when I was circumcised, at seven,” I tell him to join in on the age-inappropriate exposure. “I’d never seen anything like it, before or after, and the scene where Tetsuo gets mind-gamed by the weird looking children was horrific. Getting glass in his foot while a monstrous teddy bear was coming for him.”
Raadh laughs.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” he says. “I was pretty fascinated because it’s all hand-drawn, and very expensive. Lots of studios collaborated on the effort you know. But my favourite anime of all time is Grave of the Fireflies.”
That stuns me.
“Grave of the Fireflies over Akira?” I say. “Come on.”
“I just really like the themes and the narrative,” he says. “It’s a powerful story, maybe simple, but very powerful.”
Hmm. I think there’s at least a few grains of truth to what he’s saying and agree to disagree.
“I’ve maybe watched it nine or ten times by now,” laughs Raadh.
Whereas I could barely watch it that one time, and not because it was bad. It’s a stark and clear indictment of war, which the Japanese would know a thing or two about.
Coming back to Crabs, I tell Raadh that one thing I really like about it is how he’s captured the rhythm of the different areas of Malé. In the beginning, it’s very fast-paced and the panels are crowded but it takes a nice deep breath and exhales when the main character has found his special spot.
“I bet people who’ve been there, where the main character goes in the comic, will totally get what you’ve done,” I tell him. “I didn’t have to explain anything to you, you understood perfectly.”
“Thank you,” he replies. “I’d say the central style and vision, and maybe the whole ‘vibe’ of it, was inspired by Takehiko Inoue’s manga ‘REAL.’ He makes really good use of white space.”
He pauses for a moment and says: You should read ‘REAL’.
Crabs is not Raadh’s first comic. He has a little cache of stuff he’s done over the years, including a very funny narrative-less comic affectionately called Haa Shaviyani, named for its Thaana akuru-derived characters.
In any case, I’m very thrilled to have worked with him on Crabs. Despite or perhaps because of Raadh’s neurodivergence, I found that he was a highly intuitive person, taking mere moments to come up with incredible visuals for ideas that I’d thought were hard to communicate in the first place. The pace of his work is unbelievable, too. It’s like he’s got a head that’s too fast for his limbs.
I have been corrected many times by this young man (he is not quite 25 yet) and I truly hope we get to collaborate again. Maldives: keep your eye on this guy, he’s going places, that’s for sure. A mutual friend said he’s a generational talent and I cannot agree more.
Go get your copy of the Crabs at the Lonuziyaaraiy Park. DM crabs.lonuziyaaraiy.park on Instagram and we’ll do the rest.
Disclosure: the writer co-created the comic discussed here. We're running it as an affectionate portrait of the artist rather than as a disinterested review.
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