Pyongyang: A Graphic Novel about North Korea
Last week, amidst the media rush to cover North Korea in some unique way, I heard a story on public radio about an animator who spent several months in Pyongyang, supervising animation work.
As an artist, he made up for the restrictions on taking pictures and condensed his experience into a ~200 page graphic novel. I happened to be near a computer when I heard the story and ordered a copy. I promptly forgot about it until Sunday morning, when I left for breakfast and found an Amazon box on the step that I apparently didn't notice as part of the Saturday mail.
I tossed it in the truck and didn't get around to opening it for a while and suddenly remembered ordering it. I spent most of last night and early this morning poring over the black and white drawings. The striking similarities to George Orwell's 1984 are everywhere, including such "facts" as the Glorious Leader's "11 holes-in-one" on his first ever golf outing. That kind of revisionist history just reeks of Newspeak.
With the aging population fast approaching the day when no one remembers anything prior to 1953 and the rise of the current situation, the reality in North Korea is really tragic. If you're even a little bit interested in getting a better understanding of what is arguably the most isolated place on earth, you owe it to yourself to check out this book.
