As a genre, graphic novels and comics are certainly not new to the Arabic literary scene, however the past five years have seen an unprecedented surge of such publications in Cairo and Beirut. Given the themes of these narratives and their textual and visual innovation compared to more traditional literary production, it is important to contextualize this surge in relation to the social and political transformations sweeping through the region. Chaos, disorientation, and social and political breakdown are prevalent themes that are expressed both visually and textually. In this paper, I examine three graphic novels and comics: Madīna Mujāwira l-il Arḍ (“A City Close to Earth”) by Jorj Abu Mhayya, published by Dar Onboz in 2012, Hādhihī al-Qiṣṣa Tajrī (“This Story is Unfolding”) by Mazen Kerbaj, published by Dar al-Adab in 2010, and Fī Shiqqat Bāb al-Lūq (“In a Bab-al-Luq Apartment”), which is written by Dunya Mahir, illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nadi, and published by Dar Merit in 2013. I explore the ways in which these novels’s mapping of the city’s landscape, which is characterized by chaos, collapse, and fragmentation, unfolds through the literary and visual language of the text. I argue that this graphic mapping operates simultaneously as a mapping of the self. Mapping, locating, and finding oneself on the page—in the city and in the text—produces a new narrative of Arab subjectivity through a series of jabs and revisions, lines and distortions. I argue that in these works, the juxtaposing and the meshing of the spatial boundaries between their visual and textual elements, amplify, yet in certain ways contain the social and political fragmentation and implosion of the urban cityscape of Beirut and Cairo in times of tumult. The multiple intertextual references and trajectories, the inserting of photographs amongst the drawings, the combining of different formats of writing, all serve to reproduce a social reality in the imagined and often dystopian versions of the respective cities. The mapping processes I identify in these narratives break with the discourse on Arab history and nationalism through which art and literature are often understood. Thus, theorizing a new genre of cultural production in this comparative context opens up the Beirut -Cairo intellectual trajectory and exchange beyond the Nahda legacy.