Madame Choi and the Monsters
It’s a strange story but true. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, father of the country’s current “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-un, kidnapped two of South Korea’s leading film stars. His agents seized them while they visited Hong Kong in 1978 and flew them to North Korea where they were forced to make movies. Kim was a cineaste. He gave actor Choi Eun-hee and director Shin Sang-ok bigger budgets than they often enjoyed in South Korea.
Germany’s Sheree Domingo and Patrick Spät have turned their story into a fact-based graphic novel, complete with cutaways to one of Choi and Sang’s productions, Pulgasari, a Korean answer to Godzilla that achieved international cult acclaim. The artwork is superb, with simple lines and white spaces evoking without copying traditional East Asian printmaking. The chronology in the back of the book details the tumultuous lives of the two protagonists. Although Pulgasari was a hit in Japan, Choi and Shin never earned a penny. Spoiler alert: They were able to escape captivity in 1986.
Get Madame Choi and the Monsters at Amazon here.
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