It is fortunate that Guy Delisle didn’t bring a camera into North Korea. For one thing, if he did photograph or film the limited amount of things he’d be allowed to, then he likely would not have bothered to make a comic out of his experiences, sated solely by his pretty pictures. To go a little further, if North Korea was the kind of country where he *could* have taken pictures of whatever he liked, then he wouldn’t have even needed to make a comic about it.
As it stands though, the country’s own strict mandates compelled Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea to be made, and made in the artistic medium most suited to describe it- that of the drawing.
You see, North Korea is held together by its image. If it didn’t scrape foreign labels off of bottles of water or refused to hire natives for its decadent capitalist casinos, how else could they convince their people that they lived in a land of plenty and that their brand of communism works? Without image, its workers paradise would be revealed as the labourer’s hell the world knows it to be, the people would rebel and the society would collapse. In short North Korea – the North Korea the people there believe themselves to live in, is a fiction created by their ruling party. And you cannot photograph fiction.
You can draw it though. And it’s through Guy Delisle’s drawings that you finally get a sense of how North Korea truly is; a flaking, rusting nation held together by a silent and ever-present threat; not from the outside as they tell themselves, but from within.
It’s fair to say he nails this impression on their society before you even open the book. The sublime cover-art manages to encapsulate the tone from the offset; the talent and the apparent happiness showing us what The Glorious Leader wants us to view the nation as...but the set-piece nature of it telling us the rest, the smiles too large and distorted to be real, the lines the children are sat in making them look regimented and identical as if coming off a production line, and the muddy, rough shading hinting at just how murky and sinister the whole enterprise really is.
It’s a truth that a photograph could not capture nearly as well, and it’s one that Guy Delisle’s art excels in revealing. The pictures are simple and solid without being abstract, giving the events described a presence without tailing off into confusion through multiple meanings or interpretations – clarity is the objective here, something important when covering a nation which likes to cover things up.
This philosophy of clear-thinking also seems to extend to the writing, as it has a very wry but exact way of conveying itself that leaves you in no doubt of Delisle’s real opinion of what he sees and experiences regardless of tone (When sombre, factual; when humorous, understated).
For its part, the art never moves in contrast to this ideal. There are no appreciable instances where Delisle says one thing and shows another, rather the images work to expand on what he’s saying in order to make his point clearer or, more commonly, to colour his writing with the emotion it otherwise seems to lack. An example would be when in a conversation with his translator, Guy draws him wearing a military uniform to subversively make fun of his talking about army manoeuvres- something that wouldn’t have been picked up on in a drab conversation alone, and much more honest to Guy’s personal feelings for it. Indeed it could well be said that he expresses himself through images better than he does through writing – a fact hinted at through his background as an animation director, a background without which he would never have had cause to enter the country or have as much travelling freedom within it; just another reason why the medium of images most fits this subject- he literally couldn’t have done it without them.
As it’s basically a documentary on his time in Korea as said animation director, one notes that a sizable chunk of the book is just about the daily grind and the way he tries to liven it up. Small, oftentimes daft events of no particular note crop up often, while ‘the big questions’ about North Korea are dealt with sparsely at irregular intervals, as if avoided. Both of these quirks seem a product of Guy’s experience there, and manage to nod toward what kind of a country it is without needing to say too much about it directly- basically, to live there one has to take their mind off of the madness of the system, otherwise they would be driven mad too. The humour present throughout, from the visual gags to the little ‘spot the dissident’ games seem to be there to help Delisle cope as much as they are there to entertain, with the small highlights of brainless hijinkery present showing some of the few ways he could rebel against the oppression he felt around him...and to say that he *could* rebel, as it seemed no-one else there dared to. I received the impression that were it me or most other people there in Pyonyang, bubbled up in our foreign hotels and foreign quarters, we would be much the same; acting out because we could while others couldn’t, frustrated at being watched all the time when not on our little alien ‘island’, with everyone on it merely transient or moving onto somewhere else, all just killing time until it was their turn to go.
It all makes it seem like Pyongyang, with its unresponsive citizenry and deserted highways and lack of electricity, is a ghost city. And in this city, the ghosts are real. The fear of them hovering over the heads of every citizen there, unspoken but ever-present, and perfectly represented by Delisle’s great use of that city’s own darkness via shading, specifically in relation to the ‘sheets’ covering this ghost city- the buildings and architecture.
During the more ominous moments of the book Delisle tends to pull back on the writing and suffuses his imagery with a murk which seems unnatural for a city that’s reportedly ‘too clean’, a stylistic choice not used to give his image more depth of detail but more depth in meaning. Brilliantly, he tends to pair this effect with rare, page-wide drawings of the threat’s presence in Pyonyang, the party’s giant buildings – their show of power. These pages come as a drastic change to the normally cramped and constrictive panel layout of the rest of the comic, creating a feeling of over-arching dominance, the effect the North Koreans were aiming for when building them...however, like in the opening cover, Delisle’s artistic depiction of them reveals the true state of things: The buildings seem worn and drab, uniform in purpose...but above all, lonely in their darkness. Cold. A sign of solidarity when what they need is openness.
There’s much more to be said about Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea; about the interesting insights into how animation works, the use of the 1984 novel Guy takes with him on the trip, but in the end they all sum up to a point – not one where you despise their regime, but one where you pity the people under it. By keeping it grounded and the party more of a deadly phantom, Guy Delisle manages to draw a much tighter focus onto something that *is* real in that fabricated world; the people he works with and alongside...and how ill-informed and naive they seem compared to the rest of us, but still not without their amusing, human quirks. By the end you realise his last gesture in the book symbolises not just a simple game conceived in boredom, but a hope he extends to all those within the country.
And, to follow on that optimistic note, I also hope you pick this graphic novel up, even if these kind of things normally aren’t your cup of tea. Much like NK opening its borders for goods, it’s well worth coming opening up your horizons for too.
