Guy Delisle, Pyongyang, a Journey in North Korea.
Delisle is a cartoonist who spent several months in Pyongyang as an adviser to an cartoon animation project by a French company. He is a French Canadian who lives in France, and a pal of R. Crumb. He was put up in one of the three tourist hotels, which are mostly empty, in Pyongyang, and was escorted to the usual venues for visitors. He was given a bouquet when he arrived at the airport, which he thought was weird. But before he was shown his hotel room, he was taken to the huge monument to Kim Il Sung and was told to place his flowers at the foot of the statue. Which is even weirder. he meets a number of the NGO, diplomatic and small foreign community there, and offers rather more insight than one usually gets from books I have read about North Korea, always with humor and a French sense of irony.
Will Eisner, The Contract with God Trilogy, Life on Dropsie Avenue.
Eisner is the father of the American Graphic novel. The award for the best each year is called the Eisner in his honor.
This is a series of stories that take place in the Bronx, starting with the Dutch farmers who first settled the area, and covering the years from 1870 through the 1990's. All the immigrant groups are covered, with a lot of neighborhood stories and NYC politics.
Both I finally found at the local library.
Also, I have always been fond of Jim Woodring's The Frank Book, which is a cartoon fantasy written with almost no words at all. It is a lot of fun, but hard to describe, because the characters and their actions are too fantastic for words to describe accurately.
