Three months, one room. This is, to say the least, extremely challenging territory for a cartoonist. Somehow, though, Guy Delisle has turned André’s account of his weeks of hell into a gripping visual narrative ... In Hostage, it’s the treacherous landscape of the mind that Delisle determinedly makes his own ... Looking at these cells within a cell, every corner of André’s prison depicted from every possible angle, you’re able to absorb the terrible accretion of time in a single glance – at which point you suddenly grasp just how well the comic serves this particular story. All this darkness and claustrophobia shouldn’t be exhilarating. The fact Delisle makes it so is yet another reason why he must be counted as one of the greatest cartoonists of our age.
Delisle’s new book, Hostage, is his best since Pyongyang. It breaks his recent formula, and in doing so beautifully demonstrates the aptitude of comics for representing time and subjective experience ... it excels in immersing the readers in the lonely and terrifying experience ... Representing this story, the bulk of which features André alone with his thoughts, is a feat of elegant visual storytelling. Hostage shows us how comics can movingly express an experience like prolonged captivity ... In making his focus narrow, Delisle departs from his earlier work, and recent comics work so riveted to visually articulating the world-historical stage. Hostage, in its beat-by-beat, day-by-day scope, is ultimately a travelogue about the power of imagination.
Between the guns-blazing opening sequence and the adrenaline-soaked conclusion–which feel like action comics, minus the primary colors–it’s panel after panel of not much at all … With so little to go on, Delisle turns to color, light, and line to create a visual narrative. The result is a brilliant testimony to the possibilities of the graphic form. A restrained color palette consisting only of gray and steel blue makes us see the monotony of captivity; the repetition of visual elements and a masterful use of shadow and light recreate the cyclical rhythm of life in the room … A different telling of André’s story might overlook these awkward, human moments in order to maximize the violent drama of his capture and his courageous, adrenaline-fueled escape. Because Delisle’s refuses to do so, it collapses the distance between ordinary life and extraordinary circumstance, making a harrowing story feel remarkably familiar.
The account of André's experience, dictated to Delisle years later by the man himself, would be powerful enough, if depicted in prose alone. But Hostage is a comic, and it's Delisle's art — his character design, his use of page and panel layout to underscore the mind-numbing sameness of solitary confinement while controlling the story's mood and pacing — that makes us feel André's plight so deeply ... It's a testament to Delisle's gifts that we remain so deeply invested in André's situation, seeing and feeling only what he does, that this knowledge never registers; we keep turning pages fearfully, hungrily, plowing on along with him, vibrating in the tension between word and image, terror and hope.
It took Delisle and André 15 years to hone the narrative of Hostage and an intensive two years of drawing for Delisle to realize the narrative in graphic novel form. Their collaboration is seamless. From the first page, the reader is yanked into André’s overwhelming fear, uncertainty, and sudden confrontation with himself ... Delisle’s rendering is masterfully simple, drawn in a loose flowing line and shaded with muted blocks of gray and green. His drawings of André, shackled by the wrist, staring out into a strange room, evoke the terror and tedium of captivity ... The graphic novel format lends itself beautifully to the pacing of this story. Through carefully sequencing subtly shifting panels, Delisle evokes the incremental changes in André’s surroundings and the looping monologues that trace his battle to stay sane.
Andre's testimony, which is the text of the book, would be powerful all by itself, but as enhanced by Delisle's art, using a color palette out of Picasso's Blue Period, we are immersed in the experience of being held alone in a room, chained to a radiator. The internal experience of Andre's terror/boredom is conveyed by text that often crowds the panels, obscuring the images as Andre drowns in his own worries. It is harrowing and beautiful. I've felt haunted by the book since I finished it. I'm looking forward to experiencing it again.
Delisle, who is used to positioning himself as the butt of his own jokes, drawing on his own comical hypocrisies as a father and anxieties as a man and cartoonist, never mocks Andre. Delisle’s sympathy is absolute and almost divine ... Reading graphic nonfiction, playing that nimble match-game between words and images, feels something like watching a foreign movie with subtitles, but the translation by Helge Dascher is perfectly transparent, and never reads like a translation.
