Q&A with Patrick Spät and Sheree Domingo, Author and Illustrator of Madame Choi and the Monsters

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!