A Few Perfect Hours
Stripburger #39 (November 2004)
by Ivan Mitrevski
[translated from Slovenian]

Not long ago a scientist and publicist Edward Said has died. He was trying to prove that collecting of knowledge about other cultures is not as innocent as it seem. Knowledge gathered by misionaries, travelers, ethnologists and all sorts and kinds of experts for foreign lands, is not merely giving information about those lands. This knowledge (Orientalism as Said called it) is often a pretext of a political and cultural domination. Said, who wrote an introduction to Joe Sacco's Palestine, would perhaps include Josh Neufeld in his definition of Orientalism.

Josh Neufeld, a comic artist, who took on a journey through Central Europe and S-E Asia and brought home a bunch of sketches and ideas, decided to make a comic book out of them. Comic book itself is dealing with more or less trivial matters, from exotic looks of the Buddhist holidays, culinaric peculiarities of foreigners to rudeness of the non-English speaking hotel owners and taxi drivers (a big travel discovery for Josh is kneel-down toilet, in our parts of the world also known as èuèavac) and does not bring us anything other then a thousand-times chewed images of the strange worlds, so often seen in travel literature. I supposse we cannot expect anything else from a cartoonist that thanks the Lonely Planet guides in his book. A disappointment so much bigger as the artist in question is a talented and prospectful one.