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... is this ...life?

By Anonymous
There's a darker, flip side to the world of graphic novels. A world where you thoughtlessly dissociate yourself from the lives being lived out between the bound boards of that book you're holding. Okay, it's the book I'm holding (I apologize for projecting, it's a terrible habit). The book is Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy DeLisle.
(DeLisle 31)
DeLisle isn't drawing and writing about super-heros (subtract the hyphen and you've got a word that is copyrighted by Marvel and DC), or anti-heros, or fantastical realms. He's doing something altogether different and a bit shocking.

He's writing about his real-life experience. And in North Korea, no less.

There are 8,148 km between Canada, where Guy DeLisle is from, and North Korea. Those numbers don't really do the trick of illustrating the true distance between these two countries, however the panel above does an excellent job. We see the sparse and shadowy suggestion of faceless human forms moving up and down stairs in a cavernous maw which brings to mind Nietzsche's abyss. This image is an intuitive move by a good writer/artist. The expressionist style DeLisle employs amplifies how foreign North Korea's pride is in a subway that could double as a nuclear bomb shelter (31). Pride in such a thing is surreal to a modern Canadian; and it's part of the reason that readers may find themselves accidentally dissociating from the foreign edges and folds of the culture that DeLisle amplifies—and hey, there's that word again so we should probably talk about it.

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud points to techniques like amplification as just one way that comic creators can manipulate the interplay between text and images (160). Such interplay is really THE reason that visual sequential art is a medium with explosive potential.

If you'd read a short travelogue about DeLisle's stay in North Korea, would you have been as impressed with the sometimes explicit, sometimes elusive foreignness of the place? May I answer for you? 

No.

I'd like to look at two more panels that illustrate McCloud's argument using DeLisle's graphic novel. Food is one area of culture that can be extremely telling. Dinner at my childhood BFF's house usually meant fast food or restaurant dining. At my house, dinner was a made-from-scratch affair with veggie-rich dishes bookended by salad at the start and fruit at the end. If food culture can be so different across two neighborhood blocks, how different is it across two continents, an ocean, and the DMZ? Here's what DeLisle had to say/draw about food in North Korea.

(DeLisle 36)
First: French toast. In this series of panels, DeLisle takes us from present time to his childhood and back again, while illustrating first, hopefulness—buoyed by fond memories of his mother's French toast—then, a sharp snag with reality shown simply with a bland drawing of what DeLisle is actually served; and, finally, resignation voiced sardonically as he proceeds to eat this very foreign version of French toast (36). If we subtract the words, or conversely the pictures, we might be able to gather most of the story, but we would lose the subtlety and nuance.

(DeLisle 47)
This infographic is a pretty perfect summation of how foreign North Korea is to those of us living in democratic, capitalist western countries. DeLisle may have bemoaned his French toast, but it was clearly fleeting because he follows that story up with this information about how foreign aid had been divvied up. Here the images and text are interdependent in that special way only infographics achieve. Like a graph, these panels quickly impart depth to the data they show, but it's depth with a human face. I'm left wondering: is this life for a North Korean?

I don't actually know. I do know that it's one man's experience in a very foreign environment. Is it journalism? Maybe...but there's a whole missing side. It works for this graphic novel; but if it aired on NPR, it would be on "Fresh Air" or maybe "Radio Lab," but not the BBC World Hour.

Works Cited
DeLisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Translated by Helge Dascher. Drawn & Quarterly, 2004

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.







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