Hello everyone. Today I read rather interesting graphic novel called “Pyongyang: a journey in North Korea” by Guy Delisle, the Canadian cartoonist and animator. The story is about his time in North Korea as an animator.
While we've all heard horror stories about North Korea, footage is rare and hard to come by, so it's hard to get an accurate depiction of what it's really like there. By coincidence a while back I watch the documentary on North Korea that contain footage of a kind of tour guide walkthrough of parts of North Korea. So I can say with all certainty that this graphic novel seems to capture the exact same experience. One of the big things in common this novel has with the documentary, was that they only get to see what the North Korean government would allow them to see. One of the things that seems to always be on the tour in both the documentary and this graphic novel, is the giant statue of the “great leader” as seen in this page.
The novel depicts North Korea as a country under constant surveillance. However, the surveillance aspect is not overly noticeable as their guides tend to go ahead of them and there doesn't seem to be an overwhelming military presence as one might expect to see. It is clear from this panel they are nervous about not checking in with the proper authorities before going somewhere.
What the imagery and story tells us about North Korea is that it is a very restricted country, and that is likely everything the non Korean characters are experiencing is staged in some way. At least it feels that way. This panel seems to support that assumption.
Something interesting, is the way this panel was framed as well. I noticed this artist has a habit of both showing in picture and explaining in text in order to clarify the images meaning. This was fine most of the time, as I felt some scenes needed explanation. However, every once in a while you would come across scenes that were clearly self-explanatory and yet the author decided to add text anyway. One example would be these panels with the extremely long escalator and the man sitting on it.
Personally, I felt the same scene could have worked with or without word boxes for those two panels. The author does a very good job of combining words with pictures most of the time. Ovne of my favorite set of panels is the Korean water lady. He uses a set of moment-to-moment panels to show her creeping into the room to replace water.
One of the great things about using comics tell your story from a journalistic standpoint, is that visual images can convey far more information at a time than written words. This can become complicated however because sometimes pictures do not always convey information accurately without context. Context isn't always an explanation, sometimes it's little details that an artist can miss that a photograph would not. Another thing that can complicate graphic novels as legitimate journalism, is that we have to go by the artists word. An artist can use words and pictures to give as context, however in many ways it falls behind things like film in photography in that they carry a certain weight to their veracity. Because of this people may be less inclined to believe the story the graphic novel is trying to tell.
Another thing to think about is that people aren't always good at reading the context a pictures even when text is included. I was recently reading a Hawkeye comic where a man was confused at the airport about why there were alligators symbols. The symbol was actually supposed to mean a runway with an airplane touching down on it, but the way it was composed made it look like an alligator. So the artist must be careful how they depict words and images together. Not that journalists who use photographs and film who use photographs in film don’t have to be careful of the same thing, but the comic artist has to go the extra mile because it is a artistic media. This may be changing soon though, because of programs like Photoshop that allow pictures that were once thought of as solid evidence to be manipulated and even outright faked. It is kind of like the turn that Scott McCloud mentioned when he found it intriguing that just as arts and the written word began to shift, we ended up with the media of comics. In this way journalistic comics may gain greater veracity do to the fact that if you can't trust a picture from a camera anymore, how is it any different from a drawn comic. You would still have to take it's creator at words value, because of the public losing faith in a media they thought was as good as absolute proof only a few decades earlier.
Well that's all I have for now, thank you and have a nice day.
And if you’re interested in reading Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea then I'll leave the link below to where it can be purchased.
While we've all heard horror stories about North Korea, footage is rare and hard to come by, so it's hard to get an accurate depiction of what it's really like there. By coincidence a while back I watch the documentary on North Korea that contain footage of a kind of tour guide walkthrough of parts of North Korea. So I can say with all certainty that this graphic novel seems to capture the exact same experience. One of the big things in common this novel has with the documentary, was that they only get to see what the North Korean government would allow them to see. One of the things that seems to always be on the tour in both the documentary and this graphic novel, is the giant statue of the “great leader” as seen in this page.
The novel depicts North Korea as a country under constant surveillance. However, the surveillance aspect is not overly noticeable as their guides tend to go ahead of them and there doesn't seem to be an overwhelming military presence as one might expect to see. It is clear from this panel they are nervous about not checking in with the proper authorities before going somewhere.
What the imagery and story tells us about North Korea is that it is a very restricted country, and that is likely everything the non Korean characters are experiencing is staged in some way. At least it feels that way. This panel seems to support that assumption.
Something interesting, is the way this panel was framed as well. I noticed this artist has a habit of both showing in picture and explaining in text in order to clarify the images meaning. This was fine most of the time, as I felt some scenes needed explanation. However, every once in a while you would come across scenes that were clearly self-explanatory and yet the author decided to add text anyway. One example would be these panels with the extremely long escalator and the man sitting on it.
Personally, I felt the same scene could have worked with or without word boxes for those two panels. The author does a very good job of combining words with pictures most of the time. Ovne of my favorite set of panels is the Korean water lady. He uses a set of moment-to-moment panels to show her creeping into the room to replace water.
One of the great things about using comics tell your story from a journalistic standpoint, is that visual images can convey far more information at a time than written words. This can become complicated however because sometimes pictures do not always convey information accurately without context. Context isn't always an explanation, sometimes it's little details that an artist can miss that a photograph would not. Another thing that can complicate graphic novels as legitimate journalism, is that we have to go by the artists word. An artist can use words and pictures to give as context, however in many ways it falls behind things like film in photography in that they carry a certain weight to their veracity. Because of this people may be less inclined to believe the story the graphic novel is trying to tell.
Another thing to think about is that people aren't always good at reading the context a pictures even when text is included. I was recently reading a Hawkeye comic where a man was confused at the airport about why there were alligators symbols. The symbol was actually supposed to mean a runway with an airplane touching down on it, but the way it was composed made it look like an alligator. So the artist must be careful how they depict words and images together. Not that journalists who use photographs and film who use photographs in film don’t have to be careful of the same thing, but the comic artist has to go the extra mile because it is a artistic media. This may be changing soon though, because of programs like Photoshop that allow pictures that were once thought of as solid evidence to be manipulated and even outright faked. It is kind of like the turn that Scott McCloud mentioned when he found it intriguing that just as arts and the written word began to shift, we ended up with the media of comics. In this way journalistic comics may gain greater veracity do to the fact that if you can't trust a picture from a camera anymore, how is it any different from a drawn comic. You would still have to take it's creator at words value, because of the public losing faith in a media they thought was as good as absolute proof only a few decades earlier.
Well that's all I have for now, thank you and have a nice day.
And if you’re interested in reading Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea then I'll leave the link below to where it can be purchased.
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