Graphic Novel Review: Madame Choi and the Monsters: A True Story

 reviewed by Cord A. Scott, UMGC-Okinawa

Patrick Spät and Sherce Domingo; translated by Michael Waaler. Madame Choi and the Monsters: A True Story. London: Self-Made Hero Publications, 2024. ISBN 978-1-914224-22-5. $22.99. https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/madame-choi-and-the-monsters-a-true-story

Sometimes true historical stories seem so outrageous that they can feel like a fictional script. When visuals such as comic art are added, the stories become even more engaging. Madame Choi and the Monsters is one of those stories -- so engaging that it seems that it must be fake. Here is the book’s advertising blurb:

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. Six months later, filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hee’s ex-husband, is abducted in turn. Choi and Shin remain unaware of each other’s fates until they meet again at a dinner hosted by Kim Jong-il in 1983. Kim forces Choi and Shin to make films, including the infamous kaiju cult classic Pulgasari (1985), all while convincing the world that they serve North Korea willingly. Choi and Shin’s love rekindles slowly in this reunited captivity. Only at the 1986 Vienna Film Festival do they escape, fleeing in a daring car chase to the American embassy.

The script of Madame Choi was written by Patrick Spät. He took the approach of weaving in the script of Pulgasari, as well as biographies of Choi and Shin, as an effective way to give readers exposure to each creator as well as their most famous movie. Some additional liberties were taken with the storyline, particularly the spirit within the Pulgasari arc that allows for a conscience and narrator device. Both Spät and Domingo are based in Berlin, and this book is translated from German.

Spät’s script also allows readers to understand the other quirks within the North Korea (DPRK) regime of the 1970s. Kim Jong-il was so obsessed with movies that he had amassed a reported 20,000 film library, and the first part of the graphic novel shows that obsession as Kim sent infiltrators into the South to steal movies and bring them back. Eventually, Kim decides to take the next logical step of making his own films, but with South Korean (ROK) creators.

While Choi Eun-hee was well known as an actress, she was also from a conservative country. Soouth Korea had traditional expectations for people, and when Choi divorced her abusive first husband, she felt repercussions. She met Shin, a director, and they fell in love and married. While unable to have their own children (another stigma in South Korea) they adopted two children and continued to produced films that were both popular as well as critically acclaimed. They produced 60 films throughout the 1960s and 1970s. (48) However, the South Korea of the 1970s was a military dictatorship, and not the free democracy of today. They fell afoul of government censors, and this led to strain on the two, both professionally and personally. (63) This constant tension of creativity and morals is one that now seems oxymoronic compared to North Korea and its repression, and while the censored events in the films may seem quaint by today’s standards, within South Korea at that time they were serious.

Purportedly, the strain in the marriage from censorship caused Shin to engage in an affair with another actress. This is critical to the story as it set in motion their divorce, their problems with each other’s careers, and the lure by which Kim brought the two at different times to Hong Kong, when they were then kidnapped and brought to the DPRK to make films for him. They re-met in North Korea in October 1983. (127-129) As Shin noted, he had the ability to do things like blow up an actual train on film (140-141), but at the same time, he suffered far more degradation than Choi did, although both were held in North Korea for years.

The story of Pulgasari is a folk legend in Korea, and the film is a monster movie made with both Japan and China. The film itself also had themes of the corruption of power, the need of a supreme (and ultimately ineffective) weapon to defeat monsters, and the idea that enemy forces would be defeated on the strength of traditional values. In the end, it was this movie, made with some of the crew who worked on the Toho Studio-era Godzilla films, that served as the basis for their escape. The film was sent to the Vienna film festival, and Choi and Shin carefully planned their escape from the hotel where they were staying. After a high-speed chase through the streets, the two ended up at the US Embassy.

While the graphic novel ends with the destruction of Pulgasari, and the real-world result of the guards being shot for allowing Shin and Choi to escape, there is a timeline which gives the further movements of the film-making family, from their reuniting with their adopted children in Virginia, their time in Hollywood, and their eventual return to South Korea, which was also a time of clarifying the stories about their time in the North. Both have since passed away, without gaining any residual rights or money from Pulgasari, which is now considered a cult classic.

In all, the book is a quick overview of geopolitics and monster movie making, that also gives insight into a closed society, one that is led by dictators obsessed with the very culture they deride. It gives one pause to think about what other stories might be out there to tell.

Book Review - Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon by Terence McSweeney

Reviewed by Jason D. DeHart, PhD

Terence McSweeney. Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, University Press of Mississippi. 978-1496836090. $20. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Black-Panther

I am not sure of the point at which I became acquainted with T’Challa, the Black Panther superhero and hereditary King of Wakanda. The character was introduced in a 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, as a support player whose unsteady allegiance was reflected in other characters such as Namor, but who was Marvel’s first black superhero. As originally created by Kirby & Lee, Black Panther’s interests have always been mostly closely aligned with Wakanda, his fictional futurist African nation; it is only when the concerns of this nation and the wider world intersect that he springs into action. He first battled the Fantastic Four, and then became a regular member of the Avengers. This was all established well before I was acquainted with the character, whose first introduction to me was likely through a collectible Marvel trading card or action figure.

            These days though everybody knows the Panther, largely due to the success of the 2018 film starring the late Chadwick Boseman which is the focus of this book. That is not a surprise as the film is amazingly well done, and addresses social and cultural issues whose resonance was only just beginning to spread in wider circles of white privileged culture. The original movie storyline, when pitched in the early 2000s, was going to be along the lines of an Indiana Jones adventure featuring a lost relic. In the film that was made, that lost relic McGuffin transformed into the interaction of Wakanda and the wider world as T’Challa sought to reconcile an unsteady and misrepresented past with the hope of being a good king.

            In spite of the title, much of the book’s focus is on the film, rather than the comic book origins of the character, reflecting the author’s interest and research. McSweeney knows the film world well, but this reviewer wonders to what degree can he speak to the vicissitudes of Black experience? In the first chapters, the reader is offered a brief history of the character with nods to the comics, as well as the story of the film’s opening. All of this sets the stage and provides the background knowledge that the reader needs, although more information from the comics would have been helpful for knowing more about the 50-year-old character, in terms of his origins, motivations, and changing interpretations over time.

            McSweeney also analyzes moments in the film featuring the supporting characters and villains, almost in summary form. Both the relatability and unappealing aspects of the characters, particularly in the Panther's rival and political antithesis, N’Jadaka, aka Eric Killmonger, are mentioned, but only briefly explored. McSweeny’s focusing on the film in itself reveals too much to uncover both in terms of historical context and character analysis – it seems each moment in the story deserves a full volume’s worth of summary and exploration, especially relating back to the foundational comic books.

            A reader will encounter the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s view of Wakanda’s world, leading to what will hopefully become a fuller view upon reading the comics and engaging with what will certainly be an entire film series (at the time of this review, production on the second film is well underway). In sum, what McSweeney offers is more than a primer or appetizer, but still not a full course on one particular aspect or dimension of this transmedia character. This is understandable given the depths of how much information would have to be consumed, summed up, and explained to produce a more complete treatment of the Black Panther. I recommend reading this book alongside a stack of Black Panther comics, including the work that has been done by writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Christopher Priest, and Don McGregor who created much of the underlying sources of the stories that the film redevelops.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA.