Many travellers record their experiences with a camera. Guy Delisle relies on an older method of preserving memories. Using the digits of his hand rather than digital handheld devices, the artist keeps sketchbooks where he draws the sights he encounters in other lands. He then reworks these impressions into comic strip travelogues, currently available in three volumes each named after a foreign locale.
A Quebec-born cartoonist and animator now based in France, Delisle leads a peripatetic existence for reasons of career and family. He worked for several years as a supervisor of animation with studios based in Asia. Because animation is a labour-intensive art form requiring thousands of nearly identical drawings to create even the tiniest illusion of motion, many studios outsource the drudge work to countries where artists can be paid in cents instead of dollars. This quest for cheap...
Jeet Heer, a Regina-based cultural journalist is co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (University of Mississippi Press, 2004) and A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is editing a series of volumes reprinting Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, three volumes of which have been published by Drawn and Quarterly under the umbrella title Walt and Skeezix.
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