{"id":81,"date":"2008-02-27T14:27:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-27T14:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chestercomix.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/27\/book-review-pyongyang-by-guy-delisle\/"},"modified":"2008-02-27T14:27:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T14:27:04","slug":"book-review-pyongyang-by-guy-delisle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/book-review-pyongyang-by-guy-delisle\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: "Pyongyang" by Guy Delisle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I listed in my Teacher reading list<\/a> a comic for high-school age and up called “Pyongyang,” but wanted to expand on my one-sentence review of the comic.<\/p>\n

With the New York Philharmoic performing a groundbreaking concert in North Korea this week, now is a great time to have students read “Pyongyang,” a 2005 comic by Canadian-born cartoonist Guy Delisle. The concert has provided a splash of media attention to this closed, Communist country, but Delisle’s work provides a lot of simple details that show how a government can grind down people. He proves that in the modern rush to digitize and animate and YouTube, the pencil is still one of the most powerful tools a human can wield.<\/p>\n

The grayness of his pencils perfectly suits his travelogue about his time in North Korea’s capital city while supervising an animation project. Most of us who follow the news have a mental picture of this nation controlled by one totalitarian family for the past 50 years, but Delisle provides evidence of a cultural brainwashing that goes even farther than I suspected.<\/p>\n

The details are human and built naturally:
\nPeasants sweep the superhighway that no one uses.
\nNothing else can hang on a wall holding a portrait of Kim Il-Sung.
\nMovies and TV shows continue to glorify resistance to the Japanese occupation in World War II or the American fighting in the Korean War. (There was a massive effort before this week’s concert to tear down a lot of street posters showing the same kind of images, but reporters still saw some of them.)<\/p>\n

But the most chilling moment comes when the cartoonist notices there are no handicapped people on the clean streets of Pyongyang. His guide answers, “There are none. We’re a very homogenous nation. All North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy.” And that’s that. Delisle concludes that his guide believes it – the propaganda has sunk in.<\/p>\n

The best joke is that the North Korean handlers panic about any photography a foreigner attempts. But they never questioned Delisle’s pencil. Their mistake.<\/p>\n

CONTENT WARNING: There is no violence or nudity and only a handful of PG-13 swear words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I listed in my Teacher reading list a comic for high-school age and up called “Pyongyang,” but wanted to expand on my one-sentence review of the comic. With the New York Philharmoic performing a groundbreaking concert in North Korea this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-graphic-novel-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chestercomix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}