SelfMadeHero New Season Autumn 2024

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