The Canadian artist Guy Delisle has made a career of moving to foreign places and drawing casual vignettes on cross-cultural confusion. Over the past few years, he’s documented his tenures in Pyongyang, Shenzhen and Burma (now Myanmar). Like the books that resulted from those trips, JERUSALEM: Chronicles From the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) isn’t exactly reportage. It’s a series of brief strips, many only a page or two long, depicting his experiences caring for his kids, seeking opportunities to draw local landmarks without being interrupted by soldiers, and trying to comprehend how the residents of a heavily contested territory live day to day. Delisle, a former animator, has a knack for visual shorthand (his self-portrait is a few jauntily canted lines with dots for eyes) and for drawing environments: religious shrines and settlements, but also grocery stores, playgrounds and checkpoints — lots of checkpoints. The cultural and physical barriers among the Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities in and around Jerusalem, and the compromises and work-arounds the city’s residents have been forced to devise, become the source of dark but gentle comedy: absurdity teetering on the edge of tragedy.
