"Drawings and photographs are like oil and water," says graphic artist Emmanuel Guibert. "One always wants to kill the other. They are like enemies."

Despite this esthetic antipathy, however, Guibert's graphic illustrations blend peacefully and seamlessly with the black-and-white photographs taken by his late friend Didier Lefèvre in The Photographer (First Second Books, 2009), a deeply compelling narrative in words, drawings and photographs. The book, a 278-page graphic memoir, describes Lefèvre's first mission to Afghanistan for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in 1986, during the Soviet occupation of the country.

"It's a project of discovery," says Guibert of The Photographer. "It's about a man discovering his own job. We always see the fruits of reporting, but we never see a reporter doing his job."

Guibert first met his Paris neighbor Lefèvre in 1968, when he was 14 and the photographer 21. "Around 1999," recalls Guibert, "I decided I was at risk of missing an important friendship in my life if I didn't get closer to this man, so we began to have a meal a month to exchange news."

During one of those meals, Guibert prevailed upon Lefèvre to show him some of his photographs. Guibert was enthralled by Lefèvre's work in Afghanistan and by his tale of traveling to that wild and war-torn country. The idea for The Photographer was born when he saw Lefèvre's contact sheets.

"It was my first time to look at contact sheets with the photographs side-by-side," Guibert says. "A contact sheet is a wordless story. It is a graphic story."

Guibert, by then a successful comic book artist and the creator of Alan's War (Dupuis, 2003; First Second Books, 2008), a graphic documentary about the World War II experiences of an American friend, prevailed upon Lefèvre to loan him all 4,000 of his Afghan photographs, only six of which had previously been published. He did not, however, simply make drawings based on the photographs.

"My drawings are between the photographs," explains Guibert. "My job was to fill in the blanks. Each time I see a photograph, I always wonder what happened before and what happened next."

Initially, Guibert drew in black and white with gray shading in an attempt to give his drawings a look similar to Lefèvre's photographs, but he threw out a month's worth of work because the drawings and photographs were fighting one another. He then turned to bold, simple drawings made with black ink in a dropper. Colored and laid out by designer Frédéric Lemercier, who designed Lefèvre's 2003 book Voyages en Afghanistan, the ink dropper drawings complemented the photographs by conveying similar content without trying to ape the photographic style.

First published in three-volumes in France between 2003 and 2006, The Photographer was an immediate hit, selling close to 260,000 copies. It has since been published in 11 languages. (First Second Books published the American edition in May.) The success of the book brought critical appreciation and a measure of financial stability to Lefèvre, who had been struggling for years to make a living as a photographer.

"The comfort he had expected for years finally came," says Guibert.

In 2007, Didier Lefèvre died of a heart attack at 49, just two days after accepting the Prix Essential for The Photographer at the Festival International de la Bande Dessine (French for "drawn strip") in Angouleme, France.

Guibert eventually plans to create graphic books based on Lefèvre's work in Kosovo, Malawi and Cambodia, but his next project is a graphic/photographic book about ethnic minorities in Europe with photographer Alain Keler, the 1997 W. Eugene Smith Award winner and one of Didier Lefèvre's traveling companions.

"All the friends he had became close to each other after his death," says Guibert. "It's like we all have a little piece of him. Being together is like putting the pieces of Didier back together."