As 2012 rolls in and a New Year dawns, millions of people around the world can be happy for many things. Among them, is the sudden lack of surplus in evil dictators, thanks in large part to a healthy thinning out in the Middle East through most of 2011. It just wasn't a good year to be a vicious, undeserving, ruling jerk, as we said good-bye to some longtime heavyweights including Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and North Korea's Kim Jong-il. As we cast their repressive memories into the sky, here's to a new year, and new possibilities across the globe.

With the passing of North Korea's idiosyncratic dictactor, Kim Jong Il, it might be just the right time to give Guy Delisle's graphic novel, Pyongyang a read.

With its wonderfully simple pencil drawings, Pyongyang documents Delisle's extended stay in North Korea as a director for an outsourced animation team. Through humour and keen observences he explores the unique and often baffling society that is North Korea. With his trusty chaperone, Delisle experiences both the workplace and the "recommended" tourist sites, while doing his best to handle the culture shock. From amongst the backdrop of abandoned half-finished building projects and power outtages, endearing characters emerge...sometimes walking to work backwards as a form of exercise and other times hand-pruning grass in parks as a form of patriotism. Having gotten a glimpse behind North Korea's closed doors, something so few will ever get to do, Delisle does his best to pass on the experience, and Pyongyang does just that, in heartfelt and engaging fashion.