RaveBroken FrontierFor readers familiar with his travelogues, these panels are far removed from those amusing anecdotes set in unusual locales. What stays the same is his understated humour and ability to take on the role of impassive observer, enabling us to draw our own conclusions at leisure ... There is a looseness here that is almost immediately apparent, a sense of freedom that presumably comes from not being compelled to draw within the prescribed boundaries of a travelogue. It explains the somewhat experimental approach, hinting at a past career in animation, and creating the impression of being allowed to look at practice sessions before a main event. It’s the equivalent of being invited to a soundcheck before the concert has begun ... There is much to enjoy here because it reveals a lot more about the artist than his more popular, often autographical work does ... There is much tongue-in-cheek wit here — thanks in no small part to translators Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall — revealing a playfulness to Delisle that is often lost in his weightier observational humour about places like North Korea and Jerusalem ... The nicest thing about World Record Holders is how it gives us an inkling of the breadth of Delisle’s imagination. Unfettered by time, or the need to chronicle the history of a place, he soars, and it makes for a wonderful sight.
Aminder Dhaliwal
RaveBroken FrontierEvery page of Cyclopedia Exotica resonates with the perspectives of people who live on the margins ... It is an undeniably clever approach, because Dhaliwal’s characters can comment on everything from that position as society’s underdogs; the outliers peeping in at the rest ... Most of the panels come from Dhaliwal’s posts on Instagram, where she has been serialising these episodes for a while. There are some obvious pros and cons to this approach. On the one hand, it compels her to get to the point, as it were, by relying on pithy dialogue to highlight racism or throw daily microaggressions into sharp relief. On the other, this leads to a series of hits and misses, where some panels nail their targets and others clearly belong more in the realm of content meant for an app one scrolls through ... Having said that, the whole clearly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and Dhaliwal does manage to make some strong statements on what life as a second-tier citizen can feel like, from the inadvertent humour to subtle or overt discrimination, and the rank hypocrisy of those who pretend to engage with the other side ... Dhaliwal used her powerful debut, Woman World, to ask some intriguing questions about society and the place of women in it. With Cyclopedia Exotica, she brings her formidable skills as a writer and artist to ask more probing questions. At a time when more and more of us are beginning to evaluate our established values and question long-held belief systems, her work seems more relevant than ever.
