A dream city, a labyrinthian apartment block, living works of art, caped crusaders, a dark cloud, a disappearance...

This is Edifice, the latest from the legendary illustrator, designer, and graphic novelist Andrzej Klimowski. Naturally, such a surreal tale warrants some questions, so read on as we try to pull back the curtain!

Andrzej Klimowski studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and is now Emeritus Professor at the Royal College of Art. He has designed posters for theatres and film distributors in Poland, and book covers and illustrations for UK publishers. He is the co-author (with Danusia Schejbal) of Behind the Curtain, The Master and Margarita, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Robot. His own graphic novels include The Depository, The Secret, and Horace Dorlan. His image of the visionary Somnambulist has been SelfMadeHero’s logo since its foundation in 2007.

SelfMadeHero: Andrzej, you’ve been working with us at SelfMadeHero for quite some time now; even your Somnambulist serves as our logo. Your first book to bear that particular logo was the 2008 adaptation of The Master and Margarita by yourself and Danusia Schejbal. This newest title, Edifice, is wholly original. What are the biggest differences involved in developing adaptations as opposed to original works?

 Andrzej Klimowski: There is a fundamental difference between working on an adaptation of a literary work and creating an original graphic novel. The latter implies working from scratch, relying totally on your imagination and following your own specific interests or obsessions. The former requires the artist to stay faithful to the original author’s vision.

When my wife Danusia Schejbal and I embarked on our graphic novel adaptation of The Master and Margarita we wanted to express the visual richness of Mikhail Bulgakov’s imagination. His writing evoked vivid images; it lent itself to a pictorial interpretation. Danusia originally worked for the theatre as a stage and costume designer, I worked as a graphic designer creating theatre and film posters. We were familiar with interpreting existing works of literature. Our graphic novel adaptations were an expression of our love for the authors, whether it was Bulgakov, Robert Louis Stevenson or Stanislaw Lem.

SMH: Edifice, “a pan-European Pandora’s Box”, takes place in a hazy and mysterious dream city named Engelstadt. In another collaboration with Schejbal, Behind the Curtain, you explore your own past as an artist who travelled from England to then-Communist Poland. Was this journey, this experience of fractured and yet artistically thriving Europe, an inspiration for the amalgamated pan-European Engelstadt?

Andrzej: Both Danusia’s and my parents had to leave Poland after the war for political reasons. They emigrated to England where we were born. Since childhood we have been absorbed in both cultures. We are bilingual, but above all we feel European. After graduating from art schools in London we decided to continue our studies in Poland, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Despite political constraints the arts in Poland were vibrant and thriving. Artists had to be cautious in not aggravating the authorities and did this by circumnavigating the censors using clever metaphors and allegories in their work. The visual arts were often narratively driven and closely related to literature. We both felt at home fraternising with writers, poets, film and theatre directors, spending time with them in cafes and publishing house canteens. Even though the economic realities were dire, cultural life flourished. Everyone lived in drab blocks of flats but artistic activity more than made up for the greyness of everyday life.

Several years ago, Danusia and I were sitting in a restaurant in Canterbury after having attended a concert of Krzysztof Penderecki’s St Luke’s Passion in the cathedral. It struck us how much had changed in Europe. Poland had fully regained its independence and was able to break free from Russian influence. We started to reminisce about our years spent in a communist country. We could not refrain from laughing when talking about the absurdities of everyday life. One could call it surreal. It then dawned on us that for the new generations growing up in a democratic country this would all sound like fiction and that it would be a good idea to register this bygone era by creating a graphic novel depicting this absurd and surreal reality.

The city of Engelstadt in Edifice is a fictitious place; it is an amalgam of locations that originated in my dreams but also from the various places I have lived in or visited. I live in a block of Edwardian flats in London. In Warsaw I lived in apartment blocks. I am attracted to the monumental cities of Italy that appear in De Chirico’s paintings and in Antonioni’s films. I speculate what may take place in such locations. I observe the tenants in the apartments facing mine or the people passing by on the stairwell. Their behaviour gives little away, I have to imagine who they really are and what they do. These surreal places and absurd situations linger in my imagination and may well be present in Edifice.

SMH: Another major draw for Edifice is its distinctly weird cast of characters. Were any of these also drawn to some extent from your own artistic and academic travels around Europe as a changing socio-political landscape?

Andrzej: The characters in Edifice are invented, but some come from observation. Professor Dorlan previously appeared in my graphic novel Horace Dorlan. His character personifies the activities we pursued at the Royal College of Art, in the Communication Art and Design department. We blurred the line between design, fine art, film, performance art and sound art. There was much experimentation. We were under pressure to be more academic to justify our curriculum; more students were to undertake PhD research. I delighted in the somewhat chaotic and improvisatory approach to making art. Thinking through making would be a good way to describe it. This led me to focus on working in a stream of consciousness mode. Some of the characters originate from people I have known but once the drawings started to accumulate the characters took up a life of their own and led me into uncharted territory.

Other characters originated in a more prosaic fashion. The photographer Pipistrello came from a series of drawings I made of bats that were flying above and around me on an evening walk in the countryside. They became an obsession; I made them into characters that were half bats and half humans. They then appeared in woodcuts and etchings that featured them at cocktail parties and photo shoots.

SMH: Integral to the story, the cast, and the mystery in which they all find themselves involved focuses on a key feature of the dream city: the apartment block. This is an almost magical realist network of between-places, a “nightmare labyrinth of corridors and secrets”. Was Edificealways going to be centred on such a structure, such a space? Where did the apartment block come from?

Andrzej: The apartment block is a good place in which to set a story. One featured in my earlier graphic novel The Secret in which the main protagonist’s family mysteriously disappears. Edifice also starts with a character vanishing from his apartment. I have a feeling that this recurring theme of an amalgam of characters grouped together in one location spring from an earlier experience.

When I was a child, I lived in a room with my parents and sister in a large house full of tenants. Most of them were emigres from Poland, Lithuania, Greece and France. We all shared a bathroom and a large kitchen. My sister and I would wander along the long corridors and up the staircases exploring the building. Some tenants would invite us into their rooms. A suave architect inhabited a wood panelled room full of low table light and unusual sculptures on the mantelpiece. A little bald man in the attic would show us his collection of religious paintings, statuettes of saints and relics that he brought back from his frequent pilgrimages. An old lady on the second floor attempted to teach us French. There were several retired army officers. Sabres, old engravings, maps and moth-eaten tapestries hung from the walls. In the evenings many of the tenants assembled in the kitchen where they recounted their memories of the war and speculated on what the future had in store. Would they ever return to their homelands? They smoked continuously. As the smoke rose towards the ceiling, I imagined that it contained their intimate thoughts full of longing and hope.

SMH: This book is very striking in how it blends dreams and memories and present moments, often with little to no dialogue. In that, it seems to harken back to the foundational surrealist films of the silent era, and even some later works such as the famous nightmare sequence in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Obviously you’ve amassed a very special portfolio when it comes to film – how much have the different mediums you’ve worked in bled into each other over time?

Andrzej: I communicate and express myself best through pictures. They are more ambiguous than words and leave much to the imagination and scope for interpretation. I have always been haunted by silent films, their illusive nature and visual magic. They cast a spell. Although it’s a mistake to call them silent because they were always accompanied by live music, usually the piano or organ. Nevertheless, their visual power comes from carefully considered lighting and composition. Once sound came to films, cinema became more static and theatrical due to heavy and cumbersome sound equipment. With technological advances film could return to being more dynamic. I like films in which dialogue plays a minor role, like the films of David Lynch or the French director Jean Pierre Melville whose nocturnal films focus on the visual. You are right to mention Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, it’s a good example of where dreams and memories meld into reality. His film The Silence is also an example of how location can generate the mood and the narrative development of a film.

I have made a few short films in which I attempted to depict an intense atmosphere and emotion rather than tell a distinct story, something a poem can achieve in contrast to prose. In Edifice I hope I managed to generate an intense mood and atmosphere but also a story, albeit an open ended one.

SMH: Briefly moving away from Edifice towards some other exciting news, you have some big events coming up! Something this year, and more next year – is that right? Could you tell our readers more about where they might be seeing your work soon?

Andrzej: Later this year I will be having an exhibition in Rome. Together with one of my old students and then teaching colleague at the RCA, Miguel Angel Valdivia, we will be showing our work at the Baba Jaga Comics Festival which takes as its theme the culture of Central and Eastern Europe. We will also run a visual narrative workshop and talk about our new graphic novels. At the end of next year, I will have a retrospective in China, it will take place in the beautiful G Art Museum in Fuzhou. I will be showing paintings, prints, drawings, posters, films and books.

SMH: Okay, one more question about Edifice: why a Christmas story? And why specifically “one of the strangest Christmas stories you will ever read”?

Andrzej: I started working on Edifice in the winter months. Trees started to shed their leaves, and it was cold. I could not help but be affected by what I saw outside my window and by the penetrating cold. The action therefore was to take place in winter. A climactic point in winter is Christmas and what better time to group all my characters than on Christmas Eve when they would all celebrate a common feast? Christmas Eve is traditionally celebrated in Poland and it’s always a great event. In many ways it’s pure theatre. Christmas carols are sung, twelve course dishes are served and a large Christmas tree is elaborately decorated. The perfect crescendo to the year and to my story. The events leading up to Christmas are strange, but Christmas itself is peaceful as the snow covers the sleepy City of Angels.

Edifice arrived in the UK on November 14th, and arrives in North America on December 17th!

October 10th marked the UK release of Madame Choi and the Monsters, the incredible-yet-true story of celebrated South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, abducted in 1978 by North Korean secret agents on the orders of their film-crazed future leader Kim Jong-il.

Ahead of the North American release on November 26th, we sat down with Patrick Spät (author) and Sheree Domingo (illustrator) for a brand-new Q&A about how they wove elements of myth, reality, and Cold War legend together into this real-life tale that's so much stranger than fiction!

Patrick Spät lives as a freelance author and editor in Berlin. He studied philosophy, sociology and literary history in Mannheim, Leipzig and Freiburg, ultimately receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 2010. As an author, he mainly deals with historical and socio-political topics. He was a finalist for the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize in 2019 with the graphic novel Der König der Vagabunden (The King of the Vagabonds), published by Avant Verlag.

Sheree Domingo studied at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel and at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels. As a cartoonist, she works and lives in Berlin. She was a finalist of the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize in 2016 with her graphic novel Ferngespräch (Long Distance Call), published by Edition Morderne. In 2022 she and her collaborator Patrick Spät went on to win the same prize with the German edition of Madame Choi and the Monsters.

SelfMadeHero: This is an absolutely astounding true story that, with its spies and despots and kaiju, feels like it’s right out of a movie. With the tale of Choi and Shin’s abduction having been retold a few times in a few forms, what inspired you to adapt it into a graphic novel? The shared reliance of films and graphic novels on visual language? The surreal but real nature of the story?

Sheree Domingo: For sure, the shared visual language that you mention has been important for us in making this comic. Because in part it’s about filmmaking – and we’ve included film-like back and forth jumping cuts in order to connect our two interwoven storylines: one is the actual abduction story, the other is about the myth of the monster Bulgasari.

When Patrick approached me with the script (he had already worked on it for several months) it was in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was mainly the monster that made me want to draw this comic. Throughout history, monster stories were often told when the world was in upheaval and full of uncertainty; maybe that's why I had this strong feeling of wanting to breathe life into Bulgasari.

Patrick Spät: And this monster was also the biggest inspiration for me to retell the story. Not only is it just fun to create a scenario with a monster, it also opens up new spaces. Monsters can be ambivalent and difficult to grasp regarding their deeper meanings, which makes them all the more interesting as a metaphor. Who else is a monster, as the plural in our comic’s title suggests? The dictator’s son and Head of Propaganda Kim Jong-il? Madame Choi’s former husband who beat her up? Maybe sometimes even Choi’s later husband Shin? The public, with their harsh opinions?


SMH: Films and graphic novels – as discussed, two particularly visual mediums. Part of the mystique surrounding this whole cinematic scandal comes from the origins of the most famous film backed by Kim Jong-il: the Godzilla ripoff Pulgasari. For those who don’t know, it was based on a notoriously lost South Korean Godzilla ripoff Bulgasari. When you present parts of the Pulgasari/Bulgasari plot in this book, are you making your own adaptation of one film, the other, or even both?

Patrick: The South Korean film Bulgasari, shot in 1962, is still missing today. Some historians suspect that Kim Jong-il, being a movie addict who owned over 15,000 film reels, had the original film reels stolen from Seoul. Therefore it’s likely that he knew the film’s plot intimately. Both Bulgasari and the North Korean remake Pulgasari(1985) by Choi and Shin are based on a centuries-old Korean myth about the iron-eating and ever-growing monster Bulgasari.

Sheree: In our comic, we use the lost film reels as a starting point and then we give our own interpretation of this monster. The most interesting part of doing this was to play with the monster's ambivalent morals: on the one hand Bulgasari helps the weak and oppressed, on the other hand it acts destructively and uncontrollably. Like many monsters it is beyond the binary of good and bad. Furthermore, we didn’t like the trope of the female martyr in the film Pulgasari, where the heroine sacrifices herself to save her country. No spoiler alert here, but we tell another story.

SMH: Obviously the eponymous ‘Madame Choi’ is Choi Eun-hee, the famed actress who was abducted first before her then-ex-husband Shin Sang-ok. Not only a protagonist, her bewilderment at the bizarre and insular world of North Korea mirrors that of the reader, and we see her uncanny imprisonment through her eyes. Was it always the plan to focus almost entirely on her point of view rather than Shin’s?

Sheree: This was clear from the beginning: the comic deals with feminist topics and toxic masculinity, so we wanted to tell it entirely from Madame Choi’s viewpoint. Too many stories are told from men’s perspectives.

Patrick: And storytelling wise, you have more cliffhangers if you don’t have an omniscient but a personal viewpoint: the reader only knows as much as Madame Choi does. What’s new for her is new for the reader as well. We also hope that this will help the reader empathise with the discomfort and the horror that Choi feels.


SMH: Your book also explores Choi’s life before her abduction. We see her go back and forth between states of poverty and wealth, ostracisation and stardom, all before her ordeal in North Korea even begins. She is effectively betrayed and mistreated by her home nation, and then made an unwilling trophy of that nation’s rival. How did you come to recognise and highlight this particular bit of irony?

Patrick: Choi has been straightforward throughout her life, as she herself said: “I have always strived to live truthfully and transparently. While some may fabricate tales to suit their desires, I have chosen the path of honesty in my life.” But we didn’t want to make this too 0n-the-nose. Instead, we just followed the good old maxim: show, don’t tell. If you simply look at Choi’s life, with all its ups and downs, you can observe Choi’s character traits as well as the bitter irony in her life.

Sheree: When drawing Choi Eun-hee’s character I tried to imagine her pain. Throughout her entire time in North Korea her kids had thought that she left them on purpose. She never even had the chance to explain what happened until she and Shin escaped. They even saw her at international film festivals telling journalists that she was in North Korea of her own free will. (Even long after the escape, most of the South Korean public didn’t believe Choi and Shin’s abduction story!) And despite all this pain, her character is much stronger and more solid than Shin’s. She often kept a cheeky smirk on her face. I admire her.

SMH: The influence of gender on Choi’s various misfortunes as opposed to those of the men in her life is also very clear. In South Korea her ex-husbands aren’t shamed like she is. In North Korea Choi endures a "luxurious" princess-in-the-tower form of captivity while Shin is tortured in a concentration camp. However, Shin seems to toy with embracing the directorial power he’s ultimately offered by Kim Jong-il while Choi is more unwavering. Is this something you wanted to emphasise for the readers of today?

Patrick: Yes, that’s on purpose, because in part it’s a timeless topic. I’m bored of the old fashioned trope of the rock-solid, unshakeable male hero and the wobbly, shy, and insecure heroine who threatens to ruin everything. What Choi had to endure during her life is unbelievable. I mean, she was Asia’s most famous movie star, and after her divorce she fell from grace. Part of the reason for this suffering was simply that she was a progressive woman in a very conservative society.

Sheree: Choi was very morally stable. She wanted to escape and she developed a clever plan to do so, whereas Shin was really tempted by Kim’s power. So Shin dangerously wavered and at times he really felt the urge to collaborate with the dictatorship. 


SMH: Either thanks to or in spite of some iconic imagery that has come out of North Korea since the 1950s, its public image in the outside world often toes the line between menacingly mysterious and absurdly odd. What was your specific approach to depicting this nation as it was in the 70s and 80s, when the modern North Korean state was still new?

Patrick: Even the Covid lockdowns, during which we made this comic, weren’t the biggest obstacles; North Korea is in a quasi-permanent lockdown. It’s hard to get objective facts. So, we researched Choi’s and Shin’s personal accounts and the tape recordings they secretly made during their conversations with Kim. We also researched stories from North Korean refugees.

Regarding Kim Jong-il in particular, we’ve tried to portray him in a more subtle way because, according to various reports, he was known to be both irascible and cruel but also  intelligent and humorous – all of which makes him even more monstrous.

Sheree: Of course, we had to work with the material that is already out there about North Korea while trying not to simply repeat the same narratives that exist about that country here in the West. The focus of this story is on the people and not so much on North Korea itself. For the rest: we worked together with a Korean expert in cultural studies, Choo Young-Rong. She lives here in Berlin as well and she helped us to get things right regarding Korean history, customs, and daily life. She even checked the look of 1970s police cars and the castle’s historical architecture.

SMH: It’s easy to hand-wave the story of Choi and Shin’s abduction as comically freakish, the anomalous project of a madman which its subjects ultimately escaped. But, naturally, things are never so simple. While researching for and creating this book, was there anything that you realised about Korea’s unique history that had never occurred to you before?

Sheree: In Asia, Madame Choi is a movie icon, comparable to Marilyn Monroe in the West. But while  Monroe is also famous in Asia, nearly nobody knows about Choi in the West. That’s really a pity. In the first drafts of the comic (sorry, spoiler alert!) when Choi and Shin flee to the US Embassy in Vienna, the American diplomats greet Choi and Shin by saying “Welcome to the West”, implying that they are entering the free world. Although this quote is historically accurate, we decided to omit it, since we did not want to fall into the usual (Western) narrative there either. The fact that Korea is still a divided country is still painful. Korea was occupied by Japan for a long time, and after the Second World War the USA fought one of the cruellest proxy wars seen during the Cold War, which led to the ongoing division of the country. The monstrosity of the West would be a topic in itself.

Patrick: One has to recall that the USA dropped more bombs during the so-called Korean War (1950–1953) than in any other war of the 20th century, the Vietnam War included. Korea was reduced to ash and rubble. Three million people lost their lives. But the Korean War is a largely forgotten war, and while researching for this story I painfully realised how little I knew about it. In a sense, the Cold War isn’t over. Both sides have arsenals of weapons to protect themselves from each other – or, at least they think they do. It’s a sad stalemate and we’ve got a glimpse of how it turned out like this. In a way, this faraway story helped me to better understand what a separation of a country does to its people: before I was born, my family had been torn apart when the GDR built the Berlin Wall in 1961. One part of my family fled to the West, the other part stayed in Berlin. So in making this comic, I got another glimpse of what this forced separation really means for the people it affects.

Madame Choi and the Monsters is out now in the UK, and pre-orders are open for the North American release on November 26th!

Dear SelfMadeHero readers, 

Out of an incredibly… eventful spring and summer we are very excited to tell you all about our upcoming titles for autumn 2024! Falling with the leaves we have:

They Shot the Piano Player: A Graphic Novel by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal

Madame Choi and the Monsters: A True Story by Patrick Spät and Sheree Domingo (translated by Michael Waaler)

Adieu Birkenau: Ginette Kolinka’s Story of Survival by Ginette Kolinka, Jean-David Morvan, Victor Matet, Ricard Efa, Cesc F. Dalmases, and Roger Surroca Sole (translated by Edward Gauvin)

Edifice by Andrzej Klimowski

They Shot the Piano Player is another comic-animation double feature from Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, the award-winning duo behind Chico and Rita! 

At 3 a.m. on 18 March 1976, after giving a concert at the Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, 34-year-old samba-jazz legend Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior went out to get some cigarettes. He was never seen again. What happened that night? This is the question that moves the narrator of this documentary graphic novel to initiate an investigation into the fateful events that led to the death of a musician destined to change the course of Brazilian music forever.

The Observer called Chico and Rita “a work of art in its own right: exuberant, passionate and melancholy”, and of the film version of They Shot the Piano Player, The Boston Globe says “See it more than once, and hope the theater plays it loud.”

Patrick Spät and Sheree Domingo, another award-winning duo, bring into graphic novel form one of the strangest true stories in the history of cinema. 

In 1976, celebrated South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee was abducted by North Korean secret agents on the orders of their film-crazed future leader Kim Jong-il. Filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hee’s ex-husband, is abducted 6 months later. Under Kim’s watch, Choi and Shin must pose as willing servants of North Korea while making films to survive. These abductees’ most famous work? The kaiju cult classic Pulgasari (1985). Madame Choi and the Monsters is a decade-long story of love lost and rediscovered, Cold War machinations, ego, art, madness, and perseverance. 

The 2022 German edition of Madame Choi and the Monsters won Patrick Spät and Sheree Domingo the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize.

It is April 1944. 19-year-old Ginette Kolinka arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Her father and little brother are immediately gassed. Ginette is selected as a worker. She survives. It is October 2020. 95-year-old Ginette takes advantage of a lull in the COVID-19 epidemic to accompany a group visiting Birkenau one last time.

Adieu Birkenau is a life story told in its own parallels; stolen youth and old age, loss and memory, a tragic past and a hopeful future. We follow holocaust survivor and French national hero Ginette Kolinka as she enters and leaves Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first and last time. She tells the story of the camp; completely, honestly, without seeking pity. We see her today, how she still shares her story with the world, how she still stands and bears witness.

Recording and portraying Kolinka’s remarkable life takes a team: journalist Victor Matet, award-winning comics writer JDMorvan, and illustrators Ricard Efa, Cesc F. Dalmases, and Roger Surroca Sole. 

Latest from legendary artist Andrzej Klimowski is Edifice, one of the strangest Christmas stories you will ever read…

At the heart of the dream city of Engelstadt stand the tall storeys of an ancient apartment block, home to a nightmare labyrinth of corridors and secrets. Christmas is coming, but the mysterious disappearance of one of its tenants causes a cast of characters (or suspects?) to be assembled before us. An elderly aristocrat, a young mother and her hallucinating child, a moon-struck photographer, caped crusaders (or marauders) wandering the park… A dark cloud threatens to envelop the city, but the eccentric Professor will surely solve the enigma on Christmas Eve… Or will he?

Klimowski is widely celebrated for his huge body of work: films, posters, book covers, illustrations, graphic novels, and more. EYE Magazine named him "one of Britain's most haunting image-makers", and Starburst Magazine wrote that the Klimowski Poster Book "strikes directly at the subconscious and defies us to find out more."

As always, a huge thanks for reading, and we hope you’re as excited as we are for these amazing graphic novels!

The SelfMadeHero Team

Today marks the UK release of George Sand: True Genius, True Woman, the graphic biography of the 19th-century literary pioneer and social revolutionary George Sand (a.k.a. Aurore Dupin).

So, here we've asked some questions to Séverine Vidal (author) and Kim Consigny (illustrator) about what brought them together on this project, the research and collaboration involved, and what the real-life legend known as George Sand means to them.

Kim Consigny was born in 1991 in the south of France, and qualified as an architect there in 2015, but has increasingly devoted herself since to a full-time celebrated career in illustration, including a long-standing collaboration with Séverine Vidal.

Séverine Vidal was born in 1969. She lives in Gironde in the South of France, and has worked as a full-time writer for over ten years. A prizewinning author of Children’s and Young Adult fiction, her debut online work, A Tale Off the Top of My Head, illustrated by Claire Fauchet (2012), was described as an “outstanding” work of “poetic writing”.

SelfMadeHero: To start at the beginning, the life story of a literary and political pioneer like George Sand / Aurore Dupin speaks for itself, but what inspired you to tell it specifically as a graphic novel?

Kim Consigny: I had already worked with Séverine when she told me she wanted to adapt George Sand’s life as a graphic novel. I was immediately hooked – I wanted to be involved as soon as she mentioned it! I asked her if she already had someone, and she didn’t, so we decided to go for it. I hardly knew anything about George Sand, but she already was a figure that I thought was strong and inspiring, and I knew it would be a wonderful project.

Séverine Vidal: In the summer of 2019, a friend of my son gave me a biography of G. Sand by Joseph Barry. I ‘swallowed’ it in two days – fascinated. I knew immediately that I wanted to make a comic book biography for her. What a woman!


SMH: Sand was endlessly controversial in life, as this book demonstrates so well, which sadly came to dominate her posthumous public image despite the memoirs she herself published. Were there any challenges involved in deciding how to narratively balance these controversies (interpersonal or otherwise) while also recentering Sand within her own story?

Kim: The controversies had to be a part of the book, because they were a part of her life. The idea was to show a balance, to try to show the full personality of an incredible woman who didn’t want to be reduced to a scandal, but still wanted to live her life as she felt.

Séverine: That's true. Scandal is part of her life. But these controversies are directly linked to her commitment to defending women's rights (her separation from her husband Camille Dudevent, for example, her firm stance on her work, her desire to be published and to make a living from her writing despite strong reactions from her male colleagues), or to defending the rights of the people. She was committed. Despite her aristocratic origins (half of them), she always took the side of the people, which also earned her mockery (and even harsh criticism). So I think these were controversies that Sand herself took on board.
What she took less responsibility for were her love affairs – free, independent. In her autobiography, none of this is mentioned. We read about her love affair with Musset between the lines, in the ellipses. Nothing is said.
I tried to show that, all her life, she fought against prejudice, against the straitjacket imposed by the 'stiff' patriarchy of the 19th century. But I've also told the story of what she tried to hide. This could be seen as a form of betrayal, but I see it more as a desire on my part to show 'my' George Sand. The one who fights, takes on challenges, assumes herself. Never shying away from anything. She chose life.

SMH: When it came to researching gender relations and dynamics in Sand’s own time, was there anything that you were surprised to learn? Are there lasting traces of her impact on French discussions of gender that people living elsewhere might not be fully aware of?

Kim: In France she is well known for dressing up like a man. Actually, she still is very modern in the way she lived her life. What impressed me most was the fact that she was able to live from her work, and help others create as well because she was such a hard worker. Chopin for instance wouldn’t have been able to create as much as he did if it weren’t for George. THIS is quite impressive, because it’s so hard to achieve even now (she acted sometimes like a sort of sponsor), and it’s usually something men are more able to do (because they had the money and influence, which is also still more common today). This is perhaps not the most visible thing about her and her gender, but it’s the most striking to me.

Séverine: In France, George Sand remains "the wife of", "the muse of"... Chopin, Musset... It's so simplistic. She is studied very little, if at all, in class. She is often reduced to a few clichés: Sand in trousers, cigarette in mouth, imposing herself in the literary world with this male pseudonym. That's what I wanted to do with this book: show what an artist, writer and campaigner for women's rights she was. I also wrote a novel for teenagers, George Sand l'indomptée (Rageot), to make her less invisible to young people.
In fact, George (we feel so familiar with her that we used to call her Jojo between us, with Kim and our French editor, as if we'd become friends with her) surprised me all the time during our research work. I discovered what she had managed to do, to build, as a woman in the 19th century, at a time when the Civil Code gave women the same civil rights as minors, the intellectually disabled, and criminals! She worked, was successful, owned an estate (Nohant), separated from her husband, won custody of her children, and was a militant, always on the side of the people, during the revolutions of the 19th century.

SMH: This book makes much of fantasies and dreams and nightmares – both those imagined or endured by Sand and by those she knew. What drew you to that element of the story? Did representing those immaterial things pose a different kind of artistic challenge?

Kim: She was an artist and a writer, and we really needed to show her imagination. I had to find a way of showing it without drawing the reader out of the story. It is also something to do with the era, the Romantic century. We had to make that palpable.

Séverine: The challenge of this adaptation was to make the often epistolary exchanges more readable (a succession of letters sent and received is impossible in comics!). We had to find graphic ways of telling the story by inventing encounters, scenes, and dialogue based on the letters that didn't take place in real life. Or, we show Sand in the act of writing or saying her letters aloud to vary the narrative. By plunging into her imagination and daydreams and nocturnal reveries, I wanted to show the richness of her inner world. Even as a child, she was already inventing worlds for herself, a philosophy, a god... she mixed her games with poetry, theatre... That fascinating Aurore.

SMH: Did any specific aspects of Sand’s works lend further inspiration as to portraying Sand herself – narratively, visually? Were you admirers of her writing before collaborating on this book?

Kim: I had actually never read anything of George Sand beforehand! I started just when we decided to work on the book. I especially loved her letters, because they feel so much closer to her. They are perhaps what inspired me the most.

Séverine: All I knew of George Sand were the clichés I mentioned before, so, very little… We studied La Mare au diable in class, just a few extracts. What touched me the most when I did discover the committed artist, I think, was her way of both living life to the fullest and also living like a tightrope walker: her life as a woman in love, her life as a writer, her life as a political activist. She touches me in the way she loves and shares.
On the other hand, I don't know if she was a good mother to her daughter Solange. Maurice was luckier... I think this quote from Sand that I've hung in the bathroom at home represents her well: "The mind seeks but it is the heart that finds".

SMH: Can you share anything about your respective creative processes for this book? Did you develop a particular process or system for your collaboration? Was it an entirely digital creative process?

Kim: Séverine sent me the script and I started working on the storyboard, which is smaller than the final pages. I like to draw a lot at that stage to save time later. It’s also the moment when I look for visual references: period-appropriate paintings, drawings, furniture, dresses... I consulted books, the internet of course, and I watched movies. It was quite a long process... When everything was validated, I started working on the final pages. It’s black ink on paper (I never work digitally for a graphic novel). But the very first thing we did was actually meeting in the Berry region to visit George Sand’s house!

Séverine: So, as Kim tells it, the two of us got to know each other through other projects in children's publishing. We also visited Nohant together (with my mother!). I first spent about eight months doing the research (radio programmes, film, reading biographies, correspondence, novels and plays by Sand...). I also renewed my historical knowledge about the 19th century, whose political issues are so complicated to understand.
I wrote the script and sent the cut-out plates to Kim in packs of ten or twenty plates, once they had been approved by our French publisher.
As the book shows, I chose a simple, chronological narrative. I didn't want a complex, elaborate set-up that would have obliterated George Sand. Her life is enough.
Then, for each period of Aurore’s life, I went back to my pages of notes, my notebooks, my photos taken in Nohant and I listened to what she had to say. It was a continuous dialogue with her, as if we were sharing a good meal in her kitchen.

SMH: Finally, has crafting this particular piece of graphic non-fiction about this particularly significant woman lent any new perspective on your own creative roles today?

Kim: Haha! I wish I was as talented and successful as she was. George Sand became a sort of role model to me; she managed to be an artist as well as an activist, and she was so vivacious. She didn’t forget to live fully while creating and working for the people. How did she manage it all?!

Séverine: I think it was partly because of this work that I began to deconstruct a number of patriarchal reflexes and habits. My work has included other projects about strong female figures that are both biographical (Naduah, Colette, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Martha Gellhorn...) and fictional. Now I’m currently working on a large comic book project on the history of feminist struggles in France (from 1789 to the present day).
Naturally, I’m a strong advocate for women’s rights; I put more and more sorority in my life, my exchanges, my choices.

Kim & Séverine: Since the release of George Sand, we have been working together on another biography: that of the writer and music-hall artist, Colette.

George Sand is out now in the UK, and pre-orders are open for the North American release on July 16th!

Ahead of Jean-Marc Rochette's next appearance at VanCAF, come meet some of the real-life figures who helped inspire (and even feature in) The Last Queen!

This former student at Bordeaux’s Academy of Fine Arts kept company with Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle in Paris and made her name as a sculptress of animals. She and American sculptress Anna Ladd would go on to create new faces for the gueules cassées, soldiers who had been disfigured during World War I. These two facets of her life can be found in the character of Jeanne, who becomes the lover of the book’s protagonist, Édouard Roux.

Aristide Bruant (1851-1925)

This famous singer-songwriter delivers his hit "Dans la rue" in The Last Queen. A king of slang, Bruant purchased the famous Montmartre cabaret Au Lapin agile in 1913, and it features as a setting in this book, providing an occasion for a winking cameo of animal sculptor François Pompon, creator of a famous statue of a polar bear.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

This highly gifted poet makes a notable appearance in The Last Queen. At the opening for a gallery show, he lauds with his flamboyant words the sculpture of a bear made by Jeanne, the “fairy.” Rochette had fun cobbling this speech together from various well-known quotes by the writer. Rochette depicts Pablo Picasso by Cocteau’s side: it is said these two artists were the only two to be found in the funeral procession of Chaïm Soutine, whom Rochette admires greatly.

JEAN-MARC ROCHETTE was meant for a life as a mountain guide but left the climbing world in 1976 after a serious accident sustained from falling rock. He then began a career as a comics creator, working with the Grenoble-based anti-nuclear newspaper Le Casse-noix (The Nutcracker), and publishing in such magazines as Actuel, L’Écho des savanes, (A Suivre), L’Équipe, and Okapi.
Among his most famous works were the series Edmond le cochon (Edmond the Pig) and Snowpiercer, adapted for the screen in 2013 by Korean director Bong Joon-ho. After seven years in Berlin (2009 - 2016), where he devoted himself almost exclusively to painting, and several shows in France and Germany, Jean-Marc Rochette returned to France. Meanwhile, Terminus was released in 2015, bringing an end to the Snowpiercer saga before it was given new life in Extinctions, a prequel series in collaboration with Eisner-nominated writer Matz (The Killer). Two volumes have appeared so far.
However, the Rochette renaissance then found the artist devoting himself to projects of a more personal nature. The release of Altitude in 2018 was a genuine event for press and public alike. One year later, Le Loup became a bestselling graphic novel translated into over 10 languages, confirming the anointment of Jean-Marc Rochette as one of the most important contemporary comics creators.
The Last Queen is very likely his most personal project to date. It celebrates a landscape dear to him and probes subjects he is passionate about: the mountains, the balance between humans and nature... However, with The Last Queen, Rochette also surprises us, for it is first and foremost a beautiful love story.
For a few years now, Jean-Marc Rochette has made his home in the Vallée du Vénéon, deep in the Écrins national park.

The Last Queen is out now in the UK, and available for pre-order in North America (release date May 28th)!