Conducted in English by Kenan Kocak, 23 April 2014. This interview originally appeared in European Comic Art Volume 7 Number 2.

Guy Delisle was born in Canada’s Quebec City in 1966. He studied an­imation at Sheridan College in Oakville, near Toronto, and has worked for animation companies in Canada, France, Germany, China and North Korea. His comics career started at L’Association, where from 1995 onwards he contributed to the French periodical Lapin, whilst also working on the Canadian magazine Spoutnik. Delisle is also an active animator strongly associated with Dupuis-Audiovisuel. He has just fi n­ished the third volume of his current series, Le Guide du mauvais père [A Users Guide to Neglectful Parenting], which will be available in January 2015.

In 2012, Chroniques de Jérusalem (Delcourt) won the Angoulême fes­tival’s Best Album award. In it, Delisle follows on from previous travel accounts, in particular Shenzhen (L’Association, 2000, about China), Pyongyang (L’Association, 2003, about North Korea) and Chroniques birmanes (Delcourt, 2007, about Burma). In all of these he presents foreign, exotic and sometimes oppressive cultures through the every­day. In the case of the Jerusalem album, this is done via his own expe­riences as a child-minding father whilst his partner, Nadège, worked there for Médecins Sans Frontières in 2008.

The style of Chroniques de Jérusalem, like that of Delisle’s earlier work, is that of line drawings with clear representational elements, whilst remaining far from any notion of photo-realism. A main dif­ference, perhaps due to the possibilities offered by Delcourt is the use of sepia tone and splashes of colour, albeit sparsely, to accentuate key incidents and objects. The style draws the reader in and situates the story in an exegetic ‘reality’, whilst keeping the distance that comes with caricature. It fits perfectly with the subject matter, one that pres­ents traffic jams and the search for children’s playgrounds, allowing us momentarily to overlook the background events, those of the religious conflicts in the Middle East.

Although the book was a popular choice that frequently topped the weekly BD best sellers, it was also very much in keeping with literary trends within the graphic novel genre and beyond. Indeed, the non-A4 format, low-colour artwork and 334 pages keeps the work within the ‘graphic novel’ style championed by L’Association, Delisle’s previous publisher, and continued by the high-profile but trendy Shampooing collection to which the album belongs. Through the subject matter of the Middle East conflict, comparison with Jo Sacco is inevitable, although Delisle is considerably less politicised. Another point in common is the first-person diary format, although the viewing angle remains third person, as we look onto the line drawing of Delisle, not directly through his eyes. And the use of the everyday as a foreground to broader events plugs into the current trend for ‘everyday studies’, whilst putting the BD alongside other forms of ‘popular but intelligent’ literature that presents world-changing events via the backcloth of the preoccupations of ordinary life, as recently championed by the novels of Jean Teulé, Annie Ernaux and Jonathan Coe.

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