Guy Delisle: Comic Tales By A Canadian Expat

Guy’s travel journals include Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles and Pyongyang. Written in first person narratives, these stories run through a series of Guy’s journeys. Replete with revelations and self-talk, naivety and tact, these experiences are his own, right out of his visits to Asia and the Middle East. He analogizes cities to recluse individuals opening up to a new friend. Then, he takes readers through the socio-political traditions that have set the blueprint for the lives within their walls.
Guy roams across the map, and through the chaos and loneliness of being ‘different’ in a new culture. The stories are real, and at the same time, dramatic.

Guy is adventurous, and studies these cities in detail. Throughout his journals, he explores packed locations through their people, customs and lifestyles. He wanders through busy markets, empty days, boisterous festivities and crowded settlements on foot and on public transport, and describes them expressively. The comic flavor is from his lost conversations with locals who don’t speak his language. Despite his lamentations and apprehensions, Guy also appears to unconsciously savor the complexity of being the odd one out.

Agony precedes wit. The comics entertain without hurting. The entertainment happens from everyday affairs, from the tug of war between traditions, and from landmark incidents, articulated in their physical and emotional detail. Every adventure finds comic relief in the visual representations of the mundane, and the beauty in being different and similar at the same time. Wit is in detail, in Guy’s composed reactions, and in the host’s hospitality. You’ll laugh and probably feel for the artist as he struggles to make sense of cultures so different from his own. Even the fearful events are tempered with goofy expressions and verbal directness.

Simple line illustrations and color themes highlight the complexities so well that readers are almost instantaneously pulled into these scenarios. Although simple, these illustrations show landscapes, facial features and cultures in life-like detail. The local attire, structural design, city layout, local art and history, and even the flora are relatable and real, without being overly elaborate. Short texts allow for quick reading, and also convey the relevant. Take a tour through the brand-infested streets of a Chinese city, and to the commotion of the old East Jerusalem, and meet the Burmese ‘walking street vendor’; you’ll be ready for your next trip abroad.

Guy Delisle creates brilliant works in a strongly representative style, and with a deeply personal touch. These are non-judgmental and honest accounts of madness and order, of adventure and home, through the pulse and grind of cities. Witty, unglamorous and exotic, these are your alternative travel guides to some prominent Eastern cultures, politics, and people – straight from a Canadian.