Comic-Con News: Drawn & Quarterly has announced that it has acquired worldwide English language rights to two highly anticipated graphic novels that will be published in France this year, Guy DeLisle’s Hostage and Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findalky & Lewis Trondheim.  .Both Hostage and Poppies of Iraq will be translated by Helge Deschler and published by D&Q in 2017.

The Canadian-born DeLisle, who created the superb political travel log Pyongyang (a film based on Pyongyang was deep-sixed after North Korea hacked Sony in response to the movie The Interview—see “Graphic Novel Adaptation Scrapped”), has spent 15 years working on Hostage, the true story of a Doctors Without Borders official who was kidnapped in the Caucasus and held for over 100 days.  Hostage, which will be released by D&Q in the spring of 2017,  presents a political kidnapping from the point of view of the victim, and the result is a harrowing depiction of a gruesome ordeal where the psychological torture and uncertainty is even worse.

Lewis Trondheim is fairly well-known to North American audiences due to his sword-and-sorcery parody Dungeon, but it is his wife (and colorist) Brigitte Findalky, whose life experience is central to the biographical Poppies of Iraq, which chronicles her life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and then in France where the family fled and she had to deal with growing up as an outsider, caught between the strictures of competing cultures.  D&Q plans to publish Poppies of Iraq in the fall of 2017.