By Guy Delisle
Originally published by L'Association 2004
English Translation, Publication by Drawn & Quarterly 2005
The international travel comic has always been a lucky genre for a lot of artists: not only will your graphic novel sit alongside it's relatives in the comic stores, but Barnes & Noble will also file you over alongside the serious historical books of whatever country you went to. On top of that, if your subject matter happens to be a relatively upsetting part of the current global situation (Like Palestine, Kosova or the land of Kim Il-Sung,) you're likely to experience a decent upsurge in sales everytime something particularly nasty happens; after all, most Americans like to be informed about the people most interested in killing them.
Guy Delisle is a French animator who spent two months in North Korea in 2001 on a work visa, supervising the outsourced animation of a dull cartoon for French television. Each night, by the cover of darkness (Literally. North Korea only fully light areas when foreign dignitaries are around.) Guy sat down and sketched up a pretty blistering account of what he saw, and what he experienced. While the book is, by design, totally subjective, Guy was working so hard to maintain a level of respect and tolerance towards one of the most frighteningly bizarre areas on the planet that expecting him to maintain that in what is effectively a diary is totally insane. As days mount up, reading about Guy's banal days mixed with the near constant level of inane, psychotic bullshit that is North Korean sociopathy becomes more and more disturbing. North Korea, after all, is one of the few places on the planet where one can see a real world laboratory of how totally fucked up fascism can become, and there becomes quite a bit of hero worship for Guy. After all, he's able to restrain himself from screaming and shaking his guide/translators as they spit out some of the most inane horseshit on earth.
While no one should use a comic book to teach themselves about a foreign culture, it's not exactly like one has a lot of places to turn to when it comes to North Korea. Like Joe Sacco's deservedly award winning Palestine, these comics aren't dealing with the sort of places that get a lot of in-depth anaylsis from non-governmental sources, and it seems depressingly more common for them to be treated as sound-bytes by the news media. In America, where the cultural output of consumable art is so often totally cyclical, concerned only with examining itself, it becomes much simpler to treat the remainding areas of the world that we don't know about as if they are somehow correlations of our own country, albeit ones that are less advanced: discussion of foreign values and lands often reveal the American attitude that anything beyond our shores is somehow a part of us, only a few decades behind. When confronted with a place like North Korea, a place where all the bullshit Communist nightmares of Eugene McCarthy have, inexplicably, become not only true but even worse, Americans are content to just flat out ignore it. Delisle's narrative, while not out and out political (thankfully, Guy never pulls the "God I hope this country can change" card) is one of the rarest acts of exploratory journalism in the last decade--it's the story of a normal guy (with an Aphex Twin cd and a copy of George Orwell's 1984) who orders french toast only to be treated to a slice of bread dipped in milk and microwaved. Not only are these the sort of issues a normal person can understand and identify with, these are the types of things that make a place like North Korea seem more real as place, and less as fantastic land of mystery. Finishing Pyongyang is a dizzying experience: saying North Korea is a weird, scary place is a totally impersonal thing. Saying it's a place where people say things like "The Eiffel Tower is where all the beggars live, and I know because I went to Paris" is the total opposite. Neither CNN nor Karl Rove have been able to fully explain to America why it's so scary that North Korea has nuclear weapons--and that's because neither have the sense of what it's like to sit down to french toast and be served milk-bread.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
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