Comics

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China & Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea – Guy Delisle

In contrast to fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Delisle is ever-present in these books as in many ways they are as much as about him as they are the places he is staying. He’s working in the Far East for animation studios outsourcing their work, and the frustrations of dealing with language barriers, intepreters and foreign customs heavily pepper the narrative, as does the loneliness and boredom of being away from home in hotel rooms for long periods.

The two books differ in that Shenzhen is a more personal affair, focusing on his dealings with everyday people, his experiences as a foreigner in a strange land and the general insanity that the loneliness of such a position brings. Hardly anyone speaks English and he will sometimes go whole days without saying a word. Pyongyang on the other hand rarely sees him without an interpreter-chaperone and as a book has much more commentary on the bizarreness of the political landscape and the all-pervasive propaganda that shrouds the society. While Delisle clearly has preconceptions about North Korea – he brings Orwell’s 1984 with him in a fit of rebellion – he still manages to avoid a heavy-handed agenda, holding back from the scything critique about the realities of life for average citizens that I was expecting. Rather than painting things in a bad and uncompromising light, he paints them in a strange, quaint, bizarre and weirdly charming light, and each story still contains those beautiful, special, quiet moments that you get when travelling. Delisle himself has commented that these are by no means journalistic in nature as he feels there is too much of his own opinion in them.

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Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

With the impending release of the Watchmen film, I thought I should snag myself a copy of this before the cover got plastered irrevocably with “Now a major motion picture!!” Having read it before when I was young I was already familiar with the basic premise and the main characters, but Watchmen turned out to be well worth the return visit.

I never really took note of this first time around, but the heavy saturation of parallelism that occurs in this book is really striking. Frequently the scenes will dovetail into one another, the last words of the previous matching the imagery in the next, joined in the same panel. Through the course of the book we voyeuristically read several issues of The Black Freighter, the story of a man’s fall from grace into near insanity, over someone’s shoulder. The words and images of this are often split apart and intertwined with the main story to great effect, the grotesque fantasy-comic scenes often narrating the subtext of a seemingly civilised scene, or more directly echoing street violence and bloodshed. This gives the story tightly-woven, intricately crafted feel and is performed with such confidence that, as a reader, you feel you are in very safe hands.

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