Craig Thompson’s travel journal, Carnet de Voyage, is a comic for anyone who has ever travelled alone – and hated themselves for hating it. First published in 2004, it is not a new book. But it has been long out of print, and this lovely edition comes with 32 extra pages, there to provide a kind of update on some of the people he met on his original tour across Europe and Morocco. Clever, funny and disarmingly honest, it is, of course, predictably lovely to look at; Thompson is a master sketcher. What I like about it most, though, is the way it acts as an antidote to the all-seeing, all-consuming power of the smartphone. As its author notes in his opening pages, no cameras or mobiles were used in its making: his eyes and his brush pens did all the work.
It is 2004, and Thompson, the acclaimed author of the now classic graphic novel Blankets, has left his home in the US, first for Europe, where he is to promote his work, and then for Morocco, where he plans to research the book that will eventually become the marvellous Habibi (2011). In Europe, he has fun. His foreign publishers take care of his travel and, thanks to various old friends and the introductions he receives to several famous cartoonists, he is never lonely (or hungry: staying with a family in a chalet in the French Alps, he can’t get over the mountains of meat and cheese they consume). Morocco, however, is a different matter. Arriving in Marrakech, the yawning gap between his exotic fantasies and the realities of life there (poverty, mass tourism, constant hustling) works to lower his spirits. Consumed by homesickness and longing for the girlfriend with whom he recently split up, he is often to be found in tears.
What saves him, of course, are his sketchbooks. It is not only that they provide a kind of protective screen, behind which he can hide. They also enable him to meet people. Those he draws in the street will often invite him to eat with their families in exchange for a sketch. He records everything he sees (markets, graveyards, sand dunes), everything he does (camel trekking, visits to tanneries, nights out with fellow tourists) and, above all, everything he feels.
A lot of this was terribly and painfully familiar to me, and will be to anyone who has travelled alone. The highs are incredible: those sudden epiphanies in which you’re consumed by a sense of freedom and privilege. But then, of course, there are the lows, when you must face up to how unexpectedly pathetic you are: unable, sometimes, even to leave your hotel room, however grim. Did you realise, before you set off, that you secretly yearn for luxury? If you did, you would never have admitted it out loud. Thompson captures all of this, and if his narrative is, as a result, sometimes a little claustrophobic, you always forgive him for it. All human life is here: in his head, as on the teeming streets.
• Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
