The graphic novel Metro (Mitrū), written and illustrated by Egyptian artist Magdy El Shafee, was first published in 2008 by the now-defunct Egyptian house Dar al-Malāmiḥ, which had a reputation for championing younger and politically outspoken authors. Soon after Metro's publication, the Egyptian government confiscated all printed copies of the book on the grounds of “offending public morals.” The novel includes one panel showing partial nudity, but the underlying reason for the book's confiscation was likely its bleak view of late-Mubarak-era Egypt, in which bank-robbing is characterized as a justified response to a corrupt system stacked against the poor. Both El Shafee and his publisher were fined 5,000 Egyptian pounds for “infringing on public decency,” which effectively banned the book in Arabic. It was not until 2012 – a year after Mubarak's resignation – that the Arabic text, which had long been impossible to find, was republished in Egypt under the auspices of an artists’ collective known as The Comic Shop. It was eventually translated into Italian, German, and English.

The government may also have found Metro objectionable because of the novel's grounding in the experience of city life in Cairo, and in particular the political, economic, and social frustration felt by its urban population. The city, in fact, plays a central visual and thematic role in the graphic novel. More specifically, Metro maps its narrative onto Cairo through its use of textual elements and through its spatial organization. The city is not merely the backdrop against which the narrative plays itself out, but rather forms the two-dimensional axis that structures the relationships between characters. This chapter will draw on Walter Benjamin's writings on cities, as well as on recent theoretical studies on comics and graphic novels, to examine how El Shafee renders Cairo both as space overwritten with text (covered in words that serve as visual as well as verbal background) and as space that embodies and reflects the novel's primary themes. Metro's use of its visual elements, in other words, is central to its aesthetic aims.

This essay proceeds from Scott McCloud's much-debated definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images, in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer,” while acknowledging the limitations to that seemingly straightforward characterization.