I enjoyed Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen, so I was eager to try his earlier Pyongyang, in which he journeys to North Korea. I’m glad I did, because I found it to be an ever better book than the other, largely because the country is so much stranger. As in Shenzhen, Delisle is working in North Korea for a couple of months as a supervising animation director. The opening scene, in which he’s taken to worship at a giant statue of President […]

Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China captures Guy Delisle’s culture shock in visiting a country so very different from his own. Shenzhen is in Southern China, near Hong Kong. He’s been sent to this commercial city in the late 90s to supervise an animation crew. For three months, he’s got to deal with inferior work, a lack of other foreigners, and the things that are common to all big cities: dirt, noise, smells. There aren’t many translators, and those that are […]

Get a Life properly introduces Mr. Jean to English-speaking audiences. Lengthy stories featuring the character, written and drawn by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian (who both do each), have previously appeared in Drawn & Quarterly anthologies, but this book collects the earlier work where a younger man struggles with his life decisions. Jean is a novelist living in Paris. He’s gone to the museum because a friend is supposed to meet a woman there, but the friend ducks out on […]

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan uses a Tintin-like “clear line” style to tell a modern story of the effects of terrorism and the search for a life of one’s own. In Tel Aviv, Koby drives a taxi cab. He’s been estranged from his father, so he’s not sure how to feel when a soldier tells him his father might be the unidentified victim of a cafeteria suicide bombing. The soldier, Numi, tries to talk Koby first into a DNA test […]

Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville opens with a quote from Jack Kirby: “Comics will break your heart.” Horrocks goes on to prove that epigram true, although in an unexpected way. Journalist Leonard Batts is in search of information on Dick Burger, “the most influential comic book creator of [this] generation”, a man whose Captain Tomorrow graphic novel sold millions. Batts visits Burger’s New Zealand hometown, Hicksville, a place where everyone reads comics and discusses them as other people would the weather. The […]

This one-shot interested me because there are relatively few comics out there that deal with religious faith in a mature manner, without relying on the stereotype of the crazy fanatic. The Revival is the story of a couple journeying to a revival meeting in Kentucky in 1801. The particular gathering dramatized here was, according to the author’s research, “the largest camp meeting [the United States] had ever seen…. Estimates of attendance ranged from 10 to 25 thousand.” This scope isn’t […]

After impulsively dropping out of school and working at a dead-end print shop apprenticeship, Paul is asked at the last minute to become a counsellor for a summer camp for underprivileged kids. He doesn’t like solitude, the woods, or kids, but he accepts anyway. Since Paul Has a Summer Job is a standard coming-of-age story, by the end of the summer he’s challenged himself to overcome his fears, become a mentor for the kids, been touched beyond words by a […]