Seven Oaks Magazine.

Pyongyang is the story of a trip few people get to make. Guy DeLisle, a French animator who was born in Québec, chronicles a trip he made to Pyongyang, North Korea, in this graphic novel published this year by Drawn and Quarterly Press (and distributed by Vancouver’s Raincoast Books). DeLisle’s story is chronological, and recounts his immersion in the most foreign of cultures. Not only is Pyongyang the story of a trip to one of the most politically remote locations in the world, it is a trip back in time, as DeLisle experiences a type of Stalinist dictatorship that disappeared everywhere else in the world decades ago.

Pyongyang is a difficult book to pigeonhole, because it defies genre. It lacks a plot, although it does include some character development, as we get to see DeLisle’s evolving response to the experience of a grossly impoverished autocracy. It is not really travel literature either, because so much of its content is taken up with the job DeLisle is in North Korea to do; that is, supervising a battalion of Korean animators, who are filling in the transition scenes for cartoons meant for French consumption. This job has made DeLisle an experienced traveler of Communist countries, as most of this animation had been done in China prior to 2001. A subtext within Pyongyang is DeLisle’s experience with dictatorships. In one panel, when passed by a Chinese woman in a miniskirt, the contrast between North Korea and China – a contrast that demonstrates how truly totalitarian North Korea is, considering it makes China look liberal – is starkly illustrated. Literally: the story of Pyongyang is told in a comic book format.

It is the graphic novel aspect of Pyongyang that makes it so compelling. There is no doubt that a more traditional format could have captured DeLisle’s experience to some extent, and he includes enough narration that parts of the book are like reading a more traditional diary. But he uses his art incredibly effectively, both to reinforce the regime’s overwhelming power in North Korea, and his own personal disaffection and growing alienation. The art in the smaller panels is at times used to emphasize the experience, and at times to indicate details too small to note in the narrative. But it is the larger pieces - placed within the book like the covers of individual comics, but themselves becoming a collection of larger pencil portraits of moments or places - that really steal the show. In one, presented early in the book, DeLisle draws himself sitting at a table set for eight, eating a meal in a restaurant meant for dozens of guests. But he is alone, and the lighting is poor, making the room a melancholy dinner companion. More than just his alienation is depicted here, though. The tables, chairs, and wall art (a massive landscape) are European in origin, clearly meant to look bourgeois for the hotel’s guests. And yet the designs are a little too old, the layout a little too forced, and all of it is starkly different than the North Korea experienced by Koreans. In context, the image is a haunting reminder of how overpowering and oppressive the experience of North Korean totalitarianism is, both for DeLisle but much more clearly for his Korean translator and guide.

DeLisle speaks often about the ubiquitous repression around him, and offers some compelling examples that are purely narration. At one point his guide insists that all Koreans are born strong and healthy, when DeLisle asks him what the nation does with its disabled citizens. One recurring character, a technical assistant who works with DeLisle, sings along throughout the days of work with the nationalist songs that are played constantly on the radio. There are few enough of them that DeLisle soon learns their tunes, and yet his Korean officemate continues to joyously sing them aloud. But these examples are dwarfed by those that are hidden in the background of panels, or are highlighted with the larger portraits. One example is the enormous amount of “volunteer” labour done by Koreans to keep Pyongyang clean and finished. DeLisle establishes fairly early in the book that such labour is part of the citizen’s duty, and then includes the workers in many of the scenes of the city as he is traveling about his work. Their regular presence reinforces the power of the state in Pyongyang.

Similarly, several of DeLisle’s largest drawings are of state-funded monuments, which double as the only lights in the city at night. These enormous monuments, almost invariably to Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il, illustrate DeLisle’s experience in a fashion that a more traditional account might have failed to do.

Pyongyang is an excellent book, and well worth reading for anyone interested in the state of life in North Korea, or under the most severe of dictatorships. Although this review has made it sound like a glum book, it is often funny, and DeLisle’s sense of humour moves the story along at several points. More than just a good travel diary, however, Pyongyang also demonstrates the considerable power available to authors of graphic novels. As a format, graphic novels are increasing in popularity, and Pyongyang is a good sign that the scope of these books is only limited by the ingenuity of the author. Altogether, Pyongyang is an excellent addition to the growing collection of graphic novels on non-fiction shelves.