"Show, don't tell," writing teachers exhort. "Don't just tell me something was beautiful or horrible or interesting - show me."
The graphic novelist (formerly known as "comic book author") literally can "show" us what the author has seen and, even more than in photography, how he or she feels about it. Thus, the technique is eminently adaptable to travel writing.
Some of the books reviewed here are fiction, some are not, but each fulfills the travel writer's primary obligation to take us along.
- JERRY V. HAINES is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
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Pyongyang by Guy Delisle (Drawn and Quarterly, $19.95)
The people of Pyongyang are busy: rehearsing for holiday festivals, "volunteering" to repair the North Korean capital's decaying infrastructure and preparing for "imminent attack."
"To hear them talk," writes Delisle, "the war ended last week and is due to resume any day now."
That probably is why they endure constant shortages and deprivations without complaint.
Delisle, a Canadian animator, is sent to Pyongyang by a French producer to repair a badly botched production. His efforts are frustrated by language and cultural differences, but in the course of his two-month stay he records his wry impressions of this most insular city.
Kim Jong-Il worship is intense, inescapable and, apparently, sincere. Kim's photograph and that of his father, Kim Il Sung, are everywhere, often precisely tilted so that reflections do not interfere with appreciating the images.
Delisle's official minders take him to cultural highlights, including the Museum of Imperialist Occupation and the International Friendship Museum, ironically, "dug into the side of the mountain to withstand nuclear attack."
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Corridor, by Sarnath Banerjee (Penguin Books, $13)
There's something familiar about the voices in Corridor: Are they from public radio's This American Life (or, more precisely, from something that might be called This Indian Life)?
As exotic as the settings may be - Delhi, Calcutta - the neuroses and self-absorption of the principal characters resemble the urban angst of someone we know.
The center of Banerjee's small cosmos is a secondhand book store in Delhi, whose owner not only buys and sells books, but acquires his customers' stories. They struggle to reconcile their ambitions with reality, their modern lusts with traditional strictures, and, in so doing, they display life in contemporary India.
A computer guru lives almost entirely within a fantasy world, but shows real heroism defending his mother's honor. Another man, newly married and insecure in his prowess, buys an aphrodisiac that is far more efficient than advertised.
As odd as their stories are, some part of us connects with these people. That's it! They're all Woody Allen.
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Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon Books, $16.95)
Remember family gatherings when, after dinner, the men would gravitate toward the TV for football, and the women would move to the kitchen to clean up and talk? The smart kids knew to stay (quietly) with the women, because the curtain between the kid world and the world of the grown-ups soon would fall, and sometimes great family, cultural and sexual secrets would be revealed.
Satrapi, whose graphic Persepolis memoirs permitted glimpses inside Iranian culture, goes there again in Embroideries and smuggles out the good dirt.
The result of her eavesdropping titillates and horrifies:
Who knew Mother and Grandma knew such words, thought such thoughts, had done such things? Women, supposedly protected from worldliness by their veils (both literal and virtual), speak candidly and sometimes coarsely about love and marriage, which all too often are not the same thing.
Even the title, which sounds prim and domestic, is a euphemism for an operation to conceal a woman's lack of virginity.
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The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar (Pantheon Books, $21.95)
The Rabbi's Cat will never be mistaken for Hello Kitty. Scrawny, disrespectful and profane, he gains the ability to speak to humans after he eats the family parrot. He then challenges the rabbi on matters of faith, even showing up the rabbi's own rabbi.
But he wants to learn the Jewish teachings and demands a bar mitzvah. Why? So that he can stay near the rabbi's daughter. His jealous devotion to the comely Zlabya ("her name sounds like a honey-drenched pastry") borders on obsession.
Having won prizes for his children's books, Joann Sfar here gives us a graphic novel definitely not for impressionable children. Set in Algeria and Paris of the 1930s, the novel is rich in historic and cultural detail and affectionately shows the tensions between tradition and youth.
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Carnet de Voyage, by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf Productions, $14.95)
Thompson's record of his trip through Europe and Morocco is illustrated with his drawings, which can be rich in detail - as when he sketches Parisian cityscapes or Moroccan souks - or penetrating and revealing - as in his character studies.
There's also a good bit of fun in his mix, particularly when his little bloblike alter ego teases him out of his nearly perpetual self pity.
Thompson isn't bad with words, either. Though sometimes ungrammatical or misspelled, his hand-lettered text could stand on its own. Hassled, lonely and sick in Morocco, for example, he is nonetheless sad when it's time to go:
"So easy to love a place on the day you're leaving."
It's about missed opportunities, an unsatisfied desire to learn more, and a sense of traveler's remorse we all can appreciate.
