Start with Pyongyang. Delisle spent two months in North Korea supervising animation work outsourced to a Pyongyang studio, and the book is what he saw while accompanied at all times by a guide and a translator. It is funny, it is bleak, and it is the shortest route to understanding what all four travelogues are doing. The alternative entry is Shenzhen, which describes an earlier trip and was published first, but it is slighter and more tentative, and readers who begin there often assume the rest will be the same.
Before anything else, the thing worth being clear about. These are not books about North Korea, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Myanmar or China. They are books about one French-Canadian animator being somewhere he does not belong, cannot read the signs, has no language, and mostly cannot go where he wants. That is the honest limit and it is also the source of their value: Delisle records what a constrained outsider actually gets to see, including his own boredom, rather than pretending to an access he does not have. Read them as a foreigner's notebook and they are excellent. Read them as country studies and they will mislead you.
The four travelogues, in order
Shenzhen (a trip in the late 1990s) is Delisle alone in a southern Chinese industrial city, checking animation cels, eating badly and talking to almost nobody. It is the most claustrophobic of the four and the least eventful, which is the point.
Pyongyang is the one that made his name. The guided tours, the empty monuments, the volunteers sweeping motorways by hand, and the small negotiations with his minders make up almost the whole book. He is explicit that he is being shown a performance.
Burma Chronicles is the first written from a different position: he is there for a year accompanying his partner, who works for Médecins Sans Frontières, with a small child in tow. The frame shifts from bored worker to bored parent, and the country he describes is the one visible from an expatriate compound and its short excursions.
Jerusalem is the longest and the most substantial, again built around a year of his partner's posting. It moves through the city and the West Bank with the same method — go somewhere, note what is there, note what he cannot get to — and it is the book where his refusal to conclude is most conspicuous. Some readers find that restraint honest; others find it evasive on a subject where evasion has a cost. Both readings are fair.
Everything else in the list
Hostage is the book to read after the travelogues and the one many consider his best. It is the account of Christophe André, an administrator for Médecins Sans Frontières abducted in the Caucasus in 1997 and held for three months chained to a radiator. There are no jokes and almost no scenery; the drawing goes deliberately flat and repetitive because that is what the experience was. It is over four hundred pages of a man in a room.
Factory Summers is memoir rather than travel — teenage summers working in a Quebec paper mill, and a father who works there too. Quiet and much smaller in scope.
A Users Guide To Neglectful Parenting and Even more bad parenting advice are short gag-strip collections about being a lazy father. They are jokes, and they are not doing what the travelogues do. Albert and the others and Aline and the Others are early wordless formal exercises — silent single-page strips — and are of interest mainly if you already like him.
The comparisons at the end of the list
Joe Sacco's Palestine and Safe area Goražde are in this path deliberately, because they show what comics reporting looks like when the author is actually reporting: Sacco spent extended periods in both places, interviewed people at length, and builds his books out of testimony with his sourcing visible. Marjane Satrapi's The Complete Persepolis is the insider's version — Iran told by someone who grew up there. Read either alongside Delisle and the difference in what an outsider can claim becomes obvious.
Where to stop
Pyongyang, Jerusalem and Hostage are the three that matter. If you read only those you have read Delisle. See more graphic-nonfiction reading orders on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Guy Delisle Reading Order: Where to Start His Travel Comics.
