World Record Holders by Guy Delisle

This is a flashback: you need to know that first.
Guy Delisle’s comics career has been mostly circling the lands of memoir – a series of longer, more serious books about his travels, created when he was a working animator and/or lived in interesting places of the world ( Shenzhen
, Pyongyang
, Burma Chronicles , Jerusalem
), and a series of shorter, funnier books about his “bad dad” parenting style ( User’s Guide
, Even More
, Owner’s Manual
, Handbook
). His most recent major book, Factory Summers
, was also in that mode: a look back at the job he went back to, several years in a row, while he was in school.
The outlier is his book Hostage
, which is non-fiction and the story of one person’s time in a particular place, but was about someone else, not Delisle himself.
But Delisle’s first  couple of books [1]  were stranger, quirkier things: two collections
of short wordless comics, full of transformations and uneasy connections, Aline and the Others  and Albert and the Others . They were originally published in 1999 and 2001, with North American editions in 2006-7. Like a lot of creators, Delisle started with shorter comics and then turned to book-length stories.
And he was making comics before the Aline  and Albert  stories – there’s a French book, Réflexion , back in 1996, which I suspect was short comics. If I were a betting man – and I am very much not  – I would say some of those stories are probably in this  book.
Which finally brings me to World Record Holders
, a collection of Delisle’s short, mostly earlier comics. It was translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall and published in 2022. It collects twenty-two stories, originally appearing in various places – mostly magazines and anthologies, I think, with a whole lot in Lapin , a couple from Deslie’s 2002 French collection  Comment ne rien faire , a handful in Spoutnik , and a few other scattered publications – between 1995 and 2014. But the 2014 story is an outlier; other than that, the newest piece is from 2007, and about three-quarters were published by 2002.
These are very much stories by a young creator trying new and different things; the art is mostly similar to Delisle’s mature style, but “similar” covers a lot of ground, and the level of finish varies a lot here, along with other details of line width and shading and use of blacks. That’s a lot of fun to see, and the styles generally work well for the individual stories.
It opens and closes with two short autobio stories, from 2001 and ’02, of Delisle – in very much his modern style – confronting the blank page early in his cartooning career. They make strong bookends, and also help bring the reader into the odder, quirkier material in the middle: most of these comics are not about Delisle at all…in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to make any  overall statements about this collection, to say what it’s “about” in any comprehensive way. 
There are stories that may have been experiments, or try-outs, or explorations. Shaggy dog stories, artistic exercises, a few pieces of short autobio. A whole lot of a variety, in art and tone and matter and style – but all Delisle, all pretty successful, all enjoyable to read. And, yes, there is a title story – it’s buried, almost exactly in the middle, so you’ll have to find it to learn what records Delisle is talking about.

[1] In English translation, at least – assuming that means something for wordless comics. I see from Wikipedia
that Delisle did a number of books in French that have never been translated, and I’m particularly intrigued by the “Inspecteur Moroni” series.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.