Thoughts on PYONGYANG from Richard Mammana

Again, my old friend RM has sent something to share with the internerd. As I've not picked up anything comics related in about a month, I haven't had a chance to get Pyongyang yet, but RM probably wrote about it better than I could.

PYONGYANG: A Journey in North Korea
By Guy Delisle
Drawn and Quarterly, 2005, 176 pp. US$19.95

A few months before my 14th birthday, my American citizenship and lack of a student visa meant that I was more or less deported from Japan. The condition for my coming back to finish eighth grade in Osaka was that I would leave the country long enough to have my passport stamped by a third-party government, after which I was free to return. My host family generously made a long weekend out of this diplomatic-bureaucratic nonsense, and they booked two round-trip tickets to Seoul—one for my host-father Toshiro, and one for me. As we touched down at the airport in South Korea, he leaned over to me and said, “If you look out the window, maybe you can see the North!”

I couldn’t see the North, of course, and today almost no one born more than a few hours’ train ride from Pyongyang can see North Korea. The country is closed to all but foreigners invited expressly by Kim Jong Il—pizza chefs or movie directors—and others with business interests directly beneficial to his régime. Defectors describe a system of brutal repression and isolation in which worship of Kim Il Sung (still the president, despite having died in 1994) and his son Kim Jong Il permeates every facet of life. There is no Internet access, and foreign news media are forbidden. People suspected of stepping out of the ideological line disappear along with their families and relatives.

In 2001 French Canadian graphic artist Guy Delisle went to North Korea for two months on a rare work visa to supervise an animation contract outsourced to studios of North Korean workers. The project itself does not appear to have been completely successful; a language barrier stymied Delisle’s efforts to communicate with the people he was meant to supervise, and all day, every day he was followed by a government-issued guide and translator. Fortunately for us, though, Delisle wrote and drew a graphic memoir of his surreal visit. Pyongyang is witty, sensitive, extremely well produced, and worth every penny of the $20 price tag Drawn and Quarterly has given it. [1]

The biggest surprise of Pyongyang comes in the droll humor with which Delisle depicts the earnest delusions of his hosts. Most English-speakers are undoubtedly familiar with North Korea as a credible nuclear threat and famous third of the so-called “Axis of Evil;” this makes for a funny sense of impropriety for the reader who can’t help laughing at the turn of every other page. Delisle does not downplay the sinister realities of the country—he weaves Orwell’s 1984 deftly through the narrative, and emphasizes the extent to which human beings are categorized wholly in terms of their usefulness. But he does expose the wild absurdity of a country in which foreigners may eat only at Restaurant No. 1, Restaurant No. 2 or Restaurant No. 3; which was the world’s largest importer of Hennessy Cognac during a famine that killed an estimated two million people during the 1990s; where no foreigner has ever seen more than two subway stations; and in which there appear to be neither handicapped people nor any political dissidents.

In one of the most hilarious series of cells, Delisle sings “Get Up, Stand Up” to his antagonizing hosts, who are, needless to say, not fans of Bob Marley. His position as a guest of the government also gives him some leverage with which he is able to bring reason to bear on conversations about issues like Korean reunification. This is the author speaking in response to the notion that North and South would reunite immediately if the United States gave up “meddling” in affairs on the peninsula:

After the Asian economic crisis in 1996, South Koreans don’t intend to support a country 46 times poorer than their own! And after seeing what West Germans had to pay for their reunification, they won’t be inviting you over anytime soon! Especially given that the young (unlike their parents, who still had family in the North) have no desire to sacrifice material comfort to welcome a floodtide of unemployed workers. Cheers!

After this lecture, Delisle lifts a glass of beer to toast his political military guardian, and they go out for a night of pool in the diplomatic area of Pyongyang.

Pyongyang is the newest intersection of graphic novels with the realities of today’s geopolitical hotspots, and that is very good news for the reading public. Other treatments of the subject—like The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan or Michael Harrold’s Comrades and Strangers—are written with distinct audiences in mind and with very different perspectives of their own. Delisle’s work stands alongside Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series and Joe Sacco’s Bosnian trilogy as a subtle, intelligent, first-person, subjective treatment of a place and political climate too often reduced to simplistic headlines.


[1] My only quibble with the book is that in one instance Delisle refers to the capital of China as Peking; no one has referred to it as anything but Beijing in English since the 1940s. This is probably a translation mistake, as the French still call it Pékin and Pyongyang was first published in French in 2003.