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: Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters by Shawn Conner

 reviewed by Edward Whatley, Georgia College & State University

Shawn Conner. Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21^st Century Blockbusters. McFarland & Company, 2023. 238 pages, $39.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9781476676661. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/superheroes-smash-the-box-office/

In contemporary cinema, superhero films have become a monolithic genre, capturing audiences and box office revenues with unprecedented fervor; however, when superheroes first made the leap from their native comic books onto the big screen, their early appearances were not in feature films but in Saturday serials.  In hindsight, the transition seems logical given the similarities between comic books and serials.  Both formats were aimed at younger audiences.  Both featured episodic storytelling and cliffhanger endings.  In Superheroes Smash the Box Office, author Shawn Conner provides a rather breezy 238-page journey along the long and winding path from cheaply produced 1940s Saturday afternoon superhero serials to the 21^st century blockbuster superhero feature films.

Covering almost nine decades of cinema history is an ambitious undertaking, and Conner explains in his introduction that he found it necessary to restrict the book’s scope to “live-action American movies.” (2)  Chapter one begins in 1941 with the first superhero to appear in a live-action production: Captain Marvel (Shazam to later readers), soon followed by Batman and Captain America. This chapter is easily one of the most interesting in the entire book, as it covers territory that will be unfamiliar to many readers.

Moving on from the serials, Conner expands the scope of the book by spending the next two chapters discussing superhero television shows, namely: Superman starring George Reeves, Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter. He also covers the 1970s Marvel television shows and movies featuring the Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Doctor Strange.

With chapter 4, Conner returns his focus to the big screen to discuss the 1978 film Superman starring Christopher Reeve.   From this point on, the book sticks with feature films through its concluding discussion of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Conner explores how each adaptation—be it a serial, television show, or feature film—contributed to the evolution of superhero cinema. The discussion includes the influence of specific characters and storylines on the genre's development, as well as the impact of technological advancements on special effects and storytelling techniques. Fans of the original comics will also enjoy his discussions of how the screen adaptations adhered to or diverged from the comics source material. 

How successful Conner is in his telling will depend largely on the expectations of the reader.  His writing style is engaging and entertaining.  His deadpan plot synopses are often laugh-out-loud funny. But readers should not expect a very deep dive into any specific films. As I stated earlier, this is a rather breezy reading experience despite the enormity of the topic.  While early chapters offer more (relatively) extensive discussions of their subjects, the pace seems to quicken and the amount of space devoted to specific films seems to dwindle as the number of films grows in more recent years. As the narrative progresses, it feels like Conner is increasingly rushing toward the finish line.

And the finish line approaches rather abruptly. In his two-page epilogue (written in the summer of 2023), Conner mentions eleven recent films that had been released by that time but are not discussed elsewhere in the book.  He cites most of the films’ mixed reviews and lower than expected box office performance as evidence that the superhero film is “at a crossroads, or perhaps at a portal.” (189) Making such a claim but offering so little elaboration on what possibly lies beyond the crossroads/portal makes for a frankly less than satisfying conclusion.

Conner cobbled his narrative together “through books, articles, editorials, audio commentaries, podcasts, reviews and the movies and comics themselves.” (2)  And his bibliography is indeed impressive, although some original interviews might have added to the book’s value. While the book may lack depth, it succeeds in condensing almost a century of film and television history into an engaging and humorous narrative that should appeal to both longtime fans of the genre and general audiences.

Book review: Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero

Chesya Burke. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero. Rutgers University Press, 2023. 172 pps. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/hero-me-not/9781978821057

Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

When I teach X-Men comics I teach the Dark Phoenix saga, Uncanny X-Men 129-137 (1979-1980), one of the story arcs that established Marvel’s mutants as A-list heroes. And when I teach these comics, to high school and college students, I have learned the hard way that they absolutely require a warning: not about the destruction of an entire species of sentient humanoids; not about suicidality, gaslighting, or mind control, though I warn about them too. At the cost of whole two hour class sessions, I have learned that I must warn students about the two panels in Uncanny X-Men 133 where Jean Grey, manipulated by the evil Mastermind into believing herself an eighteenth century lady, hallucinates that her teammate Storm is enslaved. Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the white men who fashioned this story, likely never expected that two frames of Ororo Monroe in a headscarf and choker would dominate modern students’ take on their work. And yet it can, and will: it’s a sign—as casual as such things often are—that white supremacy is everywhere, that you can’t dig very far into any story without finding some trace of the horrors and crimes on which the West was built.

Storm-- Ororo Munroe—is surely the most famous Black female superhero, and has been since the early 1980s. With her literally planet-shaping (see Planet-Sized X-Men [2021]) [https://www.polygon.com/comics/22537362/x-men-planet-size-marvel-comics-universe] weather control, her status as an Omega Level mutant, and her history as a local goddess and a Wakandan queen, she’s also been the most powerful Black woman in the Marvel  comics universe, both in political and in physical terms. Other characters admire and trust her, as a mother-figure, a best friend, or a romantic and sexual ideal. She is, as one podcast has it, “better than you and always will be.” [https://www.xplainthexmen.com/tag/this-might-be-jays-favorite-cold-open-to-date/] She also lives, most of the time, in mostly white spaces, and works with a mostly white team, written, when she’s in a starring role, mostly by white creators (Eric Jerome Dickey, Marjorie Liu and Greg Pak are the exceptions). Is she a role model? Can she be? Is that page from Uncanny X-Men 133 an outlier? Or does it illustrate her consistent failure to do what Black women need and demand?

Chesya Burke says she’s largely a failure. Her new study of Storm, in the comics and in the X-Men films, argues with consistency and clarity that Ororo Munroe has been, almost always, confined to stereotypes that keep Black people (real and fictional) subordinate: stories about Storm display her “containment.” Much of the book—the first fifty pages—does not cover Storm directly. Instead, citing such titans of African American studies as Hazel Carby and bell hooks, Burke introduces major concepts from the study of race and racism, showing how “those with power often use it to create harmful stereotypes against those without power.’ [34] Black women characters fit invidious tropes: the nurturing, asexual, older mammy; the sexually threatening jezebel; the magical Negro, there to inspire white characters; the strong Black woman, “taking care of the community” [24] without complaining. Citing Anna Saini, Burke lists three more “dominant stereotypes that Black women inhabit within comic books” (that is, company-owned superhero comics): “the quiet queen,” close to nature; “the dominant diva,” impulsive, perhaps revolutionary; and “the scandalous soujourner,” “often the center of a cautionary tale.” [47]

It’s easy to find, in the comics, panels or plots that match most of these roles.  Often Storm shows up as a strong, “magical” or maternal supporting character, what Burke calls “the spiritual Negro woman.” [28] Burke’s take on Storm supports the much broader critique provided by Allan Austin and Patrick Hamilton’s All New All Different? Race in American Superhero Comics (2019), which argues that company-owned cape comics, generally, have not done as they should.  Burke’s argument might also feed the persuasive take on Storm advanced by andre carrington in Speculative Blackness (2016). For carrington, “it becomes useful to interpret the story of Storm as a negation of the negations involved in constructing Black womanhood as a figment of the normative imagination.” [carrington 91] Certain moments and plots in comic books about Storm, written and drawn largely or wholly by white people, cannot present Black women’s lived experience, but those moments and plots (so carrington argues) can negate, complicate, or overwrite the harmful stereotypes that the comics also display.

Storm is, at first, in Len Wein and Dave Cockrum’s Giant Size X-Men 1 (1975), an “African” “magical Negro,” in touch with the land and governing “primitive” tribes: as Burke rightly says, this earliest appearance makes Storm “the ‘good’ Black woman who is wild and needs to be.. brought down from her own high ideas of herself,” by Charles Xavier, a white dude. [65] In 1980s stories written by Chris Claremont, however, Ororo “is auditioning for various performances of race, gender and power.” [carrington 107]   Within these comics Storm finds affinities with (and in fact flirts with) the Japanese anti-hero Yukio. She battles, and then befriends, a leader of underground outcast mutants, Calisto. She proves her courage, in the famous “Lifedeath” (Uncanny X-Men 186), after she loses her weather powers (which she would later regain). And in Uncanny X-Men 180 she tells the teenage white mutant Kitty Pryde, who’s shocked by Storm’s new punk rock appearance, “I am not—must not be—your mother… I must keep learning, striving to find my true self… I must live my life as I see fit.” As carrington says, Claremont’s Storm is not “a coherent vision of Black womanhood,” and cannot be—but she can grow and change. [110] Burke mentions neither Austin and Hamilton, nor carrington: of her five case studies—Giant-Size; Storm (1996); Ororo: Before the Storm (2005); Astonishing X-Men: Storm (2006); and Storm (2014)— none come from the seventeen-year Claremont run. (Burke promises to discuss “Lifedeath,” but never does). [60]

It is obviously not for me—a white woman-- to say that a Black woman should feel empowered when she does not, or see empowerment where she does not. As Burke says, Marvel should hire Black women to write Storm: it’s a shame and a scandal that the company has not done so already. Burke’s caustic take on the Fox X-Men-films includes delightful, and accurate, quips: “Jean Grey is the ultimate Karen.” [104] “Xavier is the villain.” [118] (Hero Me Not spells her name as Gray, and Mystique as “Mystic,” over and over: [103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 111] all authors make errors—this one’s on the editors.) I see no way and no reason to defend the treatment of Storm in these films, where she’s “simply irrelevant,” [90] comparatively “silent and seemingly less powerful” (to quote Burke) than in X-comics. [52]

That said, after re-reading carrington, and re-reading a stack of Storm-centric X-comics, I found myself wondering what Burke would make of comics she does not discuss.  For example, Burke opines: “Black woman superheroes, such as Storm, are not offered the sexual freedom that their white female counterparts are given.” [51] In X-Men comics, at least, I’m not sure that’s true: consider Storm’s thrilling courtship in all but name with Yukio; her troubled, soap-operatic romance with Forge; and her much-remarked tension with Callsto, recapitulated in a much later story by Claremont and Igor Kordy, X-Treme X-Men: Storm; The Arena, which ends with Ororo, Yukio and Calisto in a hot tub. She’s also been the sexual ideal, the unattainable perfect woman, for charismatic villains as diverse as Dr. Doom, Loki and Dracula, all of whom try, and fail, to make her their queen.

When Storm has a sex or romance problem in X-comics, it’s one also faced—alas-- by highly successful women in real life: few potential partners are her intellectual, social or physical equal. T’Challa, the Black Panther, is one of the few: Burke discusses their courtship (in Astonishing X-Men: Storm, written by Eric Jerome Dickey) but not their divorce. I also wonder how Burke’s view of Storm as a figure subordinated to mutant causes would hold up in “Lifedeath,” where Ororo has lost her powers, breaks up with Forge, calls him (in essence) a tool of Western industrial patriarchy, and walks away from the superhero life: “my feet may never leave the ground,” she resolves, “but someday I will fly again.”   If Storm does conform to a consistent stereotype about Black women, all the way through Claremont’s seventeen-year run, it’s the one where non-black fans expect Black omnicompetence: compare the real-life reverence, among non-black listeners, for another queen, Beyoncé.

Is it OK for a queen to be wrong? That’s the question writer Greg Pak and penciller Victor Ibañez ask in Storm (2014) no. 1, which Burke does discuss: here a mutant teen named Marisol wants to quit the X-Men’s school and go home to her family in Mexico. Storm tries to argue her out of it, fails, and creates an indoor rainstorm out of frustration. Burke finds that in encouraging loyalty to a science fictional group (mutants) over a real one, Ororo is “conforming to whiteness and invoking white supremacist ideas.” [83] But Ororo draws the same conclusion: Storm brings the girl back to Mexico and to her mother, and leaves without trying to get her to return.  Storm was wrong to recruit other people, especially people of color, into a project they may not share: that’s Pak’s point, and Ororo’s realization that she blew it drives the story.

Burke asks not only for figures of survival, for story arcs involving pathos and pain, but for figures of Black women’s power as such. Dickey’s Astonishing X-Men: Storm fails because “many images of Black women other than Storm in this series are negative.” [76] Pak and Ibañez’s Storm (2014) reveals “several positive aspects of the character”; she displays sexual agency and cares for children without becoming either a jezebel or a mammy. [84] Still, she chooses to care for mutants, and for the Earth, rather than attending to “her people.” [64] “Because Storm is Black, working with the X-Men is repressive because she is supporting the very status quo that is oppressing her as a Black woman.” [88] She should, she must, overthrow that status quo instead: anything less is containment, or complicity.

Here Burke makes not so much an argument against particular portrayals of Storm but an argument that Black characters, perhaps any nonwhite characters, or disabled characters, or even trans characters, should not be superheroes at all: protection against external, criminal, and science fictional threats (what superheroes normally provide) is at worst betrayal, at best inadequate. Storm “is not a threat to white America,” and she should be. [130] Fictional heroes with exceptional powers who belong to subaltern groups should either overthrow that status quo themselves, or work directly for its overthrow, or else work primarily within their group.  X-comics have heroes, and anti-heroes, and villains, who try to do so: Sunfire quits the X-Men (more than once) to protect Japan; Magneto wants to protect all, and only, mutants. But Storm wants to protect, where she can, her friends, her students, and then the whole world, including mutants and humans, Kenya and Mexico and Quebec and Detroit.  On the one hand, Burke writes,  “Storm is not ‘free’ and she likely never will be until she is re-envisioned by Black female creators,” as she should be. [127] On the other hand, “in the comics, Storm is given the space to find love, fight for her Black community, and make decisions… in a way that is almost unimaginable for the film version.” [114] That’s Burke’s verdict, too: maybe that has to be enough.

Stephanie Burt is a Professor of English at Harvard University