In this interview, we ask author and journalist Victor Matet about the creative process behind Adieu Birkenau.
Victor Matet is a journalist and presenter at France Info. He produced several reports on Ginette Kolinka before co-creating a comic strip about her.
SelfMadeHero: Collaboration is essential to creation, to storytelling. In Adieu Birkenau the challenge wasn’t just to tell any story, but to give due reverence to the incredible life of an extraordinary human being. What was it like assembling and working with so many collaborators on this very unique book?
Victor Matet: It was a real challenge. The illustrators were based in Spain. My co-writer lives in eastern France and I live in Paris. But this resulted in a real wealth of culture, with all our ideas being mixed together. Everyone knew exactly what to do. The illustrators had the most trouble because they were waiting for the text and ended up with little time to draw. They are superheroes 😊
SMH: How did Ginette Kolinka’s personal involvement and your own experience as a journalist play into the artistic production of this book? Was there a particular process or structure when it came to bringing history and memory to life in graphic novel form?
Victor: Ginette is not a writer, in the sense she didn’t write this book herself. But without her there would be no story and no book at all. She hosted us many times, and we would talk for hours; she is the narrator, after all, and the protagonist. And, most importantly, we’ve been to Birkenau with her!
My journalistic approach was both an advantage and a disadvantage. What helped was the rigorous way of working and representing history. But sometimes we had to fill in some details and I would find myself thinking: “No, it’s not exactly and strictly the truth”.
For the structure, we chose to show her first and last time in Birkenau. The idea to interweave these two parts of her life came quite naturally.
SMH: Depictions and accounts of tragedies and atrocities like the Holocaust are such a key tradition in the history of graphic novels, and have led to huge advancements in the medium. How did it feel for you and your collaborators to be participating in that?
Victor: It’s a kind of honour to contribute to people’s education about the Holocaust, especially the education of children. We had no ambition to be compared to such incredible books as Maus by Art Spiegelman. But using less intense imagery was a deliberate choice; even when the descriptions are horrible, you don’t shut the book and stop reading because at least the illustrations aren’t so upsetting.
SMH: Going back to your journalistic background, you had produced reports about Ginette Kolinka before going on to work with her on Adieu Birkenau. Did you already have a working relationship with her when working on those reports? What was it like to share this responsibility for her memory, her testimony?
Victor: I love working with Ginette because of how much she smiles. She’s a real ray of sunshine, despite her tragic history. In France a lot of people talk about “duty of memory.” But she prefers the phrase “desire of memory.” I prefer that as well. She doesn’t have to tell her story, but she chooses to. And that’s the same for me. I write books, articles, and everything else because I want to. As she says to the children: “Now, you are ambassadors for memory too.” And so am I.
SMH: Are there any elements of Ginette Kolinka’s life story, or the Holocaust itself, that you now look at in a different light because of this book?
Victor: Her story shows that there isn’t just one story of the Holocaust. There are millions of them. When we say “one million, six million…” it’s impossible to imagine all those lives. But in this testimony, you see family and friends who become victims, and you can identify with them. What was incredible about Ginette as a young woman was her naivety. It could have killed her. But it saved her.
SMH: Part of Ginette’s story is that she stayed quiet about her experiences as a survivor for many years before going on to do all this incredible work in later life. Adieu Birkenauopens with something of a preface from Ginette’s son Richard Kolinka, who reflects on how as a boy he thought “all mums had numbers on their arms!” Do you, as a journalist, see any similarities between that memory of Richard’s and how public recognition of the Holocaust has changed over time?
Victor: When Ginette was working in a market, a woman asked her about the number on her arm. “Is it so you don’t forget your phone number?” Ginette was shocked, and it's one of the reasons why she started bearing witness. In France, Holocaust remembrance changed in 1995, around the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII. More survivors began to talk. It changed how everyone looked at this part of history.
SMH: Ginette is particularly known for maintaining both total honesty and her own sense of humour while choosing to revisit the most painful years of her life time and time again. What do you hope that readers of Adieu Birkenauwho might be unfamiliar with Ginette’s legacy will learn from not only her story, but how she chooses to tell it?
Victor: Readers must know that Ginette loves life. She loves laughing, joking, drinking (sometimes vodka), and she smiles a lot. She’s a living life lesson! When people become conflicted in their daily lives, they just need to think of Ginette. And life will be better!
Thank you for joining us on this day of remembrance.
How has January found you? Cold and reluctant? Understandable. But now it’s time for the reassurance you surely need most: the Spring 2025 list from SelfMadeHero! Here’s what’s coming up…
Kusama: Polka Dot Queen by Simon Elliott.
Monarch’s Journey: A Story to Color by Peter Kuper (North America only).
Low: Bowie’s Berlin Years by Reinhard Kleist.
The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, adapted by Gareth Brookes.
Following on from his previous works on David Hockney and Vincent Van Gogh, we are very happy to welcome Simon Elliott to our Art Masters series with Kusama: Polka Dot Queen.
From her days in 1960s New York as a proponent of free love and peace to her current position as internationally recognised Queen of Polka Dots and creator of infinity, Yayoi Kusama’s life is an extraordinary story of triumph over struggle through art.
Elliott’s new graphic novel vividly portrays Kusama’s unusual youth and family troubles, her discovery of a new style of painting, her struggles with mental illness, and her rise to international art stardom. For those seeking an introduction to this incredible artist or searching for a fresh take on her story – this is Yayoi Kusama’s life as you’ve never seen it before.
Of Vincent: A Graphic Biography (Frances Lincoln, 2024), Frost Magazine wrote: “I learned a great deal about the family Van Gogh, about painting, about the torments of genius, about the graphic novel. I think I’m in love…”
OUT IN UK: 10th April! 🇬🇧
After his Eisner-winning eco drama Ruins successfully returned in paperback last year, Peter Kuper is back with Monarch’s Journey: a colour-in story about this beloved but endangered butterfly and the environmental challenges it faces on its yearly flights.
Now Read This! on Ruins: “Clever, charming, chilling and compulsively engrossing, this delicious exercise in interconnectivity is a brilliant example of how smart and powerful comics can and should be.”
OUT IN NORTH AMERICA: 29th APRIL! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇲
Having explored the stardust years in STARMAN, the legendary Reinhard Kleist concludes his Bowie duology with Low, detailing the former Thin White Duke’s legendary time in Berlin as he searches for inspiration and records his 1977 album LOW.
In 1976, David Bowie escaped the frantic madness and substance abuse of his life in Los Angeles for the Wall of the divided city of Berlin. With his friend Iggy Pop in tow, Bowie quit drugs and created LOW, the first album of his “Berlin Trilogy”. But even here, during some of the happiest days of his life, Ziggy Stardust would not let him go…
Paper Phoenix Ink called STARMAN “a masterful synthesizing of all those changes and forces that assisted in the first birth of the artist that we know as David Bowie.”
OUT IN UK: 22nd May! 🇬🇧
In 2021 Gareth Brookes gave the world The Dancing Plague – no, not the plague itself, but a graphic novel the New York Times called “visually stunning … With fire and needle, Brookes crafts a book the likes of which we’ve never seen before.” This year Brookes returns with another mixed-media masterpiece: his graphic adaptation of Izaak Walton’s Civil War-era classic The Compleat Angler.
A foundational environmentalist text centuries ahead of its time, The Compleat Angler is one of the most reprinted books in the English language. From the ruins of the English Civil War to today, this adaptation is lovingly rendered in both linocut engraving and hand-drawn pen-and-ink to contrast the meditative and the instructional in Walton’s writing. As a guidebook on how to fish, this 350-year-old manual makes the perfect gift for any angling enthusiast, and its reflective writing connects with post-pandemic desires for calm, mindful pursuits and a return to nature.
OUT IN UK: 19th June! 🇬🇧
Thank you again for joining us this year! We hope you are as excited as we are!
It’s been another eventful year here at SelfMadeHero – 8 new titles, conventions, the next First Graphic Novel Award – so thanks for coming along with us for our 2024 wrap-up!
Migrating back onto shelves, the new paperback edition of Peter Kuper’s Eisner-winning eco-drama Ruins ushered us into 2024 on gentle butterfly wings…
We also started joining in with the worldwide celebrations of 100 years of surrealism by giving the spotlight to some of our own surreal titles like Armed with Madnessand Art Masters: Magritte!
Public appearances were aplenty this year! March kicked things into a new gear: Mylo Choy’s North American tour promoting Middle Distance (including MoCCA NYC), the Rickard Sisters at Cartoon County – and that’s just for starters!
Our next title wasThe Last Queen, the legendary Jean-Marc Rochette’s “saga of love and extinction.” (Comics Review)
May kept us busy as well, and busy in Canada no less! TCAF and VanCAF brought us back to the Great White North, so we brought Peter Kuper, Mylo Choy, and Jean-Marc Rochette with us!
What else came in May? Well, everyone got to know the legend that is George Sand, which was later named The Observer’s June graphic novel of the month!
Summer is a good time to self-improve and keep healthy, right? Our new “accessible, wise and understanding” (The Slings & Arrows) graphic medicine title The Anxiety Club arrived in July, with a special foreword from Dr Ian Williams, founder of GraphicMedicine.org!
September doesn’t have to be sad! We got to hang out with Peter Kuper again at Small Press Expo, and with the dream team of Oscar Zarate, Aimée de Jongh, and the Rickard Sisters at LICAF!
To further spite the season, things heated up even more in October: three titles in one month! First came They Shot the Piano Player, “a graphic novel to rival Maus or Persepolis” (The Indiependent) from the creators of Chico and Rita!
Next came the graphic Holocaust memoir Adieu Birkenau: Ginette Kolinka’s Story of Survival. The Morning Star called it an “invaluable educational testament” and “highly readable and engaging for adults and young people alike.”
Now we come to our last title of the year, and quite possibly the strangest. Edifice by Andrzej Klimowski is “comfortingly macabre… a sinister social comedy of errors if not terrors.” (Comics Review)
What? You thought that we were done for the year just because we’d launched its last title? Far from it! At Thought Bubble we were so excited to announce the return of the First Graphic Novel Award! Submissions open on January 9th 2025!
Now, at last, we’re about ready to leave you to your holiday preparations… unless you’re looking for some help! You might have heard about our exclusive SelfMadeHero gift packs, and if you’re still looking to get your hands on some of our graphic novels, it’s not too late! Email [email protected] for info on prices and shipping, or come THIS SATURDAY to Broadway Market and find Pete's book stall on London Fields, E8 (by Franco Manca 🍕)!
That’s it for now! Thank you to everyone who’s read along with us this year, and to all: Happy Holidays!
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 Monstersis out now in the UK, and pre-orders are open for the North American release on November 26th!
