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 at 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!

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

Today marks the UK release of George Sand: True Genius, True Woman, the graphic biography of the 19th-century literary pioneer and social revolutionary George Sand (a.k.a. Aurore Dupin).

So, here we've asked some questions to Séverine Vidal (author) and Kim Consigny (illustrator) about what brought them together on this project, the research and collaboration involved, and what the real-life legend known as George Sand means to them.

Kim Consigny was born in 1991 in the south of France, and qualified as an architect there in 2015, but has increasingly devoted herself since to a full-time celebrated career in illustration, including a long-standing collaboration with Séverine Vidal.

Séverine Vidal was born in 1969. She lives in Gironde in the South of France, and has worked as a full-time writer for over ten years. A prizewinning author of Children’s and Young Adult fiction, her debut online work, A Tale Off the Top of My Head, illustrated by Claire Fauchet (2012), was described as an “outstanding” work of “poetic writing”.

SelfMadeHero: To start at the beginning, the life story of a literary and political pioneer like George Sand / Aurore Dupin speaks for itself, but what inspired you to tell it specifically as a graphic novel?

Kim Consigny: I had already worked with Séverine when she told me she wanted to adapt George Sand’s life as a graphic novel. I was immediately hooked – I wanted to be involved as soon as she mentioned it! I asked her if she already had someone, and she didn’t, so we decided to go for it. I hardly knew anything about George Sand, but she already was a figure that I thought was strong and inspiring, and I knew it would be a wonderful project.

Séverine Vidal: In the summer of 2019, a friend of my son gave me a biography of G. Sand by Joseph Barry. I ‘swallowed’ it in two days – fascinated. I knew immediately that I wanted to make a comic book biography for her. What a woman!


SMH: Sand was endlessly controversial in life, as this book demonstrates so well, which sadly came to dominate her posthumous public image despite the memoirs she herself published. Were there any challenges involved in deciding how to narratively balance these controversies (interpersonal or otherwise) while also recentering Sand within her own story?

Kim: The controversies had to be a part of the book, because they were a part of her life. The idea was to show a balance, to try to show the full personality of an incredible woman who didn’t want to be reduced to a scandal, but still wanted to live her life as she felt.

Séverine: That's true. Scandal is part of her life. But these controversies are directly linked to her commitment to defending women's rights (her separation from her husband Camille Dudevent, for example, her firm stance on her work, her desire to be published and to make a living from her writing despite strong reactions from her male colleagues), or to defending the rights of the people. She was committed. Despite her aristocratic origins (half of them), she always took the side of the people, which also earned her mockery (and even harsh criticism). So I think these were controversies that Sand herself took on board.
What she took less responsibility for were her love affairs – free, independent. In her autobiography, none of this is mentioned. We read about her love affair with Musset between the lines, in the ellipses. Nothing is said.
I tried to show that, all her life, she fought against prejudice, against the straitjacket imposed by the 'stiff' patriarchy of the 19th century. But I've also told the story of what she tried to hide. This could be seen as a form of betrayal, but I see it more as a desire on my part to show 'my' George Sand. The one who fights, takes on challenges, assumes herself. Never shying away from anything. She chose life.

SMH: When it came to researching gender relations and dynamics in Sand’s own time, was there anything that you were surprised to learn? Are there lasting traces of her impact on French discussions of gender that people living elsewhere might not be fully aware of?

Kim: In France she is well known for dressing up like a man. Actually, she still is very modern in the way she lived her life. What impressed me most was the fact that she was able to live from her work, and help others create as well because she was such a hard worker. Chopin for instance wouldn’t have been able to create as much as he did if it weren’t for George. THIS is quite impressive, because it’s so hard to achieve even now (she acted sometimes like a sort of sponsor), and it’s usually something men are more able to do (because they had the money and influence, which is also still more common today). This is perhaps not the most visible thing about her and her gender, but it’s the most striking to me.

Séverine: In France, George Sand remains "the wife of", "the muse of"... Chopin, Musset... It's so simplistic. She is studied very little, if at all, in class. She is often reduced to a few clichés: Sand in trousers, cigarette in mouth, imposing herself in the literary world with this male pseudonym. That's what I wanted to do with this book: show what an artist, writer and campaigner for women's rights she was. I also wrote a novel for teenagers, George Sand l'indomptée (Rageot), to make her less invisible to young people.
In fact, George (we feel so familiar with her that we used to call her Jojo between us, with Kim and our French editor, as if we'd become friends with her) surprised me all the time during our research work. I discovered what she had managed to do, to build, as a woman in the 19th century, at a time when the Civil Code gave women the same civil rights as minors, the intellectually disabled, and criminals! She worked, was successful, owned an estate (Nohant), separated from her husband, won custody of her children, and was a militant, always on the side of the people, during the revolutions of the 19th century.

SMH: This book makes much of fantasies and dreams and nightmares – both those imagined or endured by Sand and by those she knew. What drew you to that element of the story? Did representing those immaterial things pose a different kind of artistic challenge?

Kim: She was an artist and a writer, and we really needed to show her imagination. I had to find a way of showing it without drawing the reader out of the story. It is also something to do with the era, the Romantic century. We had to make that palpable.

Séverine: The challenge of this adaptation was to make the often epistolary exchanges more readable (a succession of letters sent and received is impossible in comics!). We had to find graphic ways of telling the story by inventing encounters, scenes, and dialogue based on the letters that didn't take place in real life. Or, we show Sand in the act of writing or saying her letters aloud to vary the narrative. By plunging into her imagination and daydreams and nocturnal reveries, I wanted to show the richness of her inner world. Even as a child, she was already inventing worlds for herself, a philosophy, a god... she mixed her games with poetry, theatre... That fascinating Aurore.

SMH: Did any specific aspects of Sand’s works lend further inspiration as to portraying Sand herself – narratively, visually? Were you admirers of her writing before collaborating on this book?

Kim: I had actually never read anything of George Sand beforehand! I started just when we decided to work on the book. I especially loved her letters, because they feel so much closer to her. They are perhaps what inspired me the most.

Séverine: All I knew of George Sand were the clichés I mentioned before, so, very little… We studied La Mare au diable in class, just a few extracts. What touched me the most when I did discover the committed artist, I think, was her way of both living life to the fullest and also living like a tightrope walker: her life as a woman in love, her life as a writer, her life as a political activist. She touches me in the way she loves and shares.
On the other hand, I don't know if she was a good mother to her daughter Solange. Maurice was luckier... I think this quote from Sand that I've hung in the bathroom at home represents her well: "The mind seeks but it is the heart that finds".

SMH: Can you share anything about your respective creative processes for this book? Did you develop a particular process or system for your collaboration? Was it an entirely digital creative process?

Kim: Séverine sent me the script and I started working on the storyboard, which is smaller than the final pages. I like to draw a lot at that stage to save time later. It’s also the moment when I look for visual references: period-appropriate paintings, drawings, furniture, dresses... I consulted books, the internet of course, and I watched movies. It was quite a long process... When everything was validated, I started working on the final pages. It’s black ink on paper (I never work digitally for a graphic novel). But the very first thing we did was actually meeting in the Berry region to visit George Sand’s house!

Séverine: So, as Kim tells it, the two of us got to know each other through other projects in children's publishing. We also visited Nohant together (with my mother!). I first spent about eight months doing the research (radio programmes, film, reading biographies, correspondence, novels and plays by Sand...). I also renewed my historical knowledge about the 19th century, whose political issues are so complicated to understand.
I wrote the script and sent the cut-out plates to Kim in packs of ten or twenty plates, once they had been approved by our French publisher.
As the book shows, I chose a simple, chronological narrative. I didn't want a complex, elaborate set-up that would have obliterated George Sand. Her life is enough.
Then, for each period of Aurore’s life, I went back to my pages of notes, my notebooks, my photos taken in Nohant and I listened to what she had to say. It was a continuous dialogue with her, as if we were sharing a good meal in her kitchen.

SMH: Finally, has crafting this particular piece of graphic non-fiction about this particularly significant woman lent any new perspective on your own creative roles today?

Kim: Haha! I wish I was as talented and successful as she was. George Sand became a sort of role model to me; she managed to be an artist as well as an activist, and she was so vivacious. She didn’t forget to live fully while creating and working for the people. How did she manage it all?!

Séverine: I think it was partly because of this work that I began to deconstruct a number of patriarchal reflexes and habits. My work has included other projects about strong female figures that are both biographical (Naduah, Colette, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Martha Gellhorn...) and fictional. Now I’m currently working on a large comic book project on the history of feminist struggles in France (from 1789 to the present day).
Naturally, I’m a strong advocate for women’s rights; I put more and more sorority in my life, my exchanges, my choices.

Kim & Séverine: Since the release of George Sand, we have been working together on another biography: that of the writer and music-hall artist, Colette.

George Sand is out now in the UK, and pre-orders are open for the North American release on July 16th!

Ahead of Jean-Marc Rochette's next appearance at VanCAF, come meet some of the real-life figures who helped inspire (and even feature in) The Last Queen!

This former student at Bordeaux’s Academy of Fine Arts kept company with Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle in Paris and made her name as a sculptress of animals. She and American sculptress Anna Ladd would go on to create new faces for the gueules cassées, soldiers who had been disfigured during World War I. These two facets of her life can be found in the character of Jeanne, who becomes the lover of the book’s protagonist, Édouard Roux.

Aristide Bruant (1851-1925)

This famous singer-songwriter delivers his hit "Dans la rue" in The Last Queen. A king of slang, Bruant purchased the famous Montmartre cabaret Au Lapin agile in 1913, and it features as a setting in this book, providing an occasion for a winking cameo of animal sculptor François Pompon, creator of a famous statue of a polar bear.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

This highly gifted poet makes a notable appearance in The Last Queen. At the opening for a gallery show, he lauds with his flamboyant words the sculpture of a bear made by Jeanne, the “fairy.” Rochette had fun cobbling this speech together from various well-known quotes by the writer. Rochette depicts Pablo Picasso by Cocteau’s side: it is said these two artists were the only two to be found in the funeral procession of Chaïm Soutine, whom Rochette admires greatly.

JEAN-MARC ROCHETTE was meant for a life as a mountain guide but left the climbing world in 1976 after a serious accident sustained from falling rock. He then began a career as a comics creator, working with the Grenoble-based anti-nuclear newspaper Le Casse-noix (The Nutcracker), and publishing in such magazines as Actuel, L’Écho des savanes, (A Suivre), L’Équipe, and Okapi.
Among his most famous works were the series Edmond le cochon (Edmond the Pig) and Snowpiercer, adapted for the screen in 2013 by Korean director Bong Joon-ho. After seven years in Berlin (2009 - 2016), where he devoted himself almost exclusively to painting, and several shows in France and Germany, Jean-Marc Rochette returned to France. Meanwhile, Terminus was released in 2015, bringing an end to the Snowpiercer saga before it was given new life in Extinctions, a prequel series in collaboration with Eisner-nominated writer Matz (The Killer). Two volumes have appeared so far.
However, the Rochette renaissance then found the artist devoting himself to projects of a more personal nature. The release of Altitude in 2018 was a genuine event for press and public alike. One year later, Le Loup became a bestselling graphic novel translated into over 10 languages, confirming the anointment of Jean-Marc Rochette as one of the most important contemporary comics creators.
The Last Queen is very likely his most personal project to date. It celebrates a landscape dear to him and probes subjects he is passionate about: the mountains, the balance between humans and nature... However, with The Last Queen, Rochette also surprises us, for it is first and foremost a beautiful love story.
For a few years now, Jean-Marc Rochette has made his home in the Vallée du Vénéon, deep in the Écrins national park.

The Last Queen is out now in the UK, and available for pre-order in North America (release date May 28th)!

To celebrate the North American release of The Last Queen (on May 28th), Jean-Marc Rochette will be undergoing a Canadian tour and attending two festivals in May: TCAF (11-12th) and VanCAF (18-19th).

In case you can't make it (or even if you can), this new interview with the acclaimed author and illustrator gives unique insight into the creative process behind this stirringly personal graphic novel.

“And the day the Last Queen dies, then the time of darkness will be upon us.”
This time, Jean-Marc Rochette did it all by his lonesome. On Snowpiercer (1984), the legendary comic made into a movie by Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the script was credited to Lob. With Terminus (2015), he finished the series more than forty years later, this time with Olivier Bocquet writing. On Altitude (2018), an autobiography set among snowy peaks and a clean break with past work, he still had help from Bocquet. For Le Loup (The Wolf, 2019), the second book in what would become his “mountain trilogy,” he handed the task of colouring to Isabelle Merlet. But with The Last Queen, Jean-Marc Rochette knew he had to give his all — utterly, unreservedly — and even run the risk of emerging from such a long-haul project wholly exhausted. Story, dialogue, layouts, art, and colours: he did it all. It took three long years. The result? A 240-page graphic novel, entirely the work of a single creator.

A singular, encompassing work, I say, for Rochette’s ambition is to lead us through time — from prehistory to the trenches of World War I, from the Middle Ages to the Roaring Twenties — and space — from the pinnacles of the Vercors Massif to the cabarets of Montmartre, from a bear’s den to Les Halles in Paris. Encompassing, for it asks questions about humanity’s future even as it lambastes the pettiness and hypocrisies of the art world. Visionary, even, for last but not least, through his hero Édouard Roux and his lover Jeanne, our human fate as hunter-gatherers collides with the follies of a despotic consumerist society that in Rochette’s hands proves to be a mirror image of our own.

Since Altitude, Jean-Marc Rochette has stepped out from the apocalyptic tunnel of Snowpiercer to scale the luminous alpine heights of his adolescence. It is on these slopes, depicted almost abstractly, that The Last Queen begins. In 1898, a shepherd kills the final bear on the Vercors Massif. From this actual news item, Rochette proceeds to unfurl his flowing plot and probe the vexed relationship between humans and nature. We will cross paths with bears and foxes, naturally, but also Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Chaïm Soutine, so closely are art and nature wedded by Rochette’s hand.

This environmental fable is also the story of a couple joined unto death. Its hero emerges from the Great War with a face as haunting as the Elephant Man’s before rediscovering his humanity, and above all — in an event rare until now in Rochette’s work — finding love in the form of a sculptress specialising in animals. A communion not only between hearts but with nature ensues, one that seems to point a path toward happiness in these troubled times we know so well.

Magnificent silent pages with cinematographic pacing — let us not forget that Netflix turned Snowpiercer into a series — allow Rochette to glorify the natural settings in which (no coincidence) he now lives, away from the world, with his own partner. In fact, The Last Queen could also be a fictionalised autobiography of Altitude’s creator.

Rochette even had a bit of fun by slipping in his grandfather Maurice, a great rugby player from the interwar years, in the form of a child.
By playing on the contrast between the somber colours of Paris and the blue-tinged light of the Vercors slopes, between nature’s purity and humanity’s cruelty, Rochette delivers a singular, visionary graphic novel of a kind rarely found in the comics medium.

JEAN-MARC ROCHETTE now makes his home among the blue and white landscapes of his comics. A few years ago, he and his partner alighted in a former coaching inn at the far end of Vénéon, an alpine valley in Écrins National Park. He has set up a studio beneath these imposing stone spires, and when he’s not busy drawing, has taken up permaculture in anticipation of the three winter months a year when snows cut off the route some four miles from their dwelling and the couple live off the grid. In this majestic setting, the artist conceived his latest comic, The Last Queen, as if he had mentally and pictorially merged with his environment.


Why call it The Last Queen?
For me, the bear is king, at the top of the food chain. Which makes the she-bear queen, of course. When I take a walk in the woods where I live in the mountains, I know there’s a pack of five wolves out there, but that never keeps me from going out. But if there were a bear, I’d think twice: there’s nothing you can do against the sheer power of such a predator. What first set this book into motion was the story of the final bear hunted down in the Vercors in 1898. It wound up taxidermied in a museum in Grenoble — a sordid story. Those creatures had been living out there for hundreds of thousands of years, and humans methodically wiped them out of existence.

A single phrase is reprised like a leitmotif in the book: “And the day the Last Queen dies, then the time of darkness will be upon us”…
It’s a belief all developing peoples share: once you’ve driven your mammal brethren from existence, you definitively cut all ties with nature. When I gaze out on France from my mountains, I get the feeling that 90% of its citizens already live in this darkness. I think only a tiny fringe of the population will disentangle themselves from this world to live in the mountains, in harmony with nature.

Isn’t that what your protagonist, Édouard Roux, has done?
Yes, I imagined a character, at once tough yet gentle, who would try to protect bears. As a child, he witnesses the death of the final she-bear in 1898, which makes him of age to be sent to the front in 1914. He returns with his face disfigured — an experience I myself went through after a climbing accident I recount in Altitude (2020). In fact, it’s quite simple: I put all my life into this book, from my fascination with the mountains to my experiences in the art world. I worked on it for almost three years, doing everything: story, dialogue, art, colours. It really took it out of me.

Indeed, over the course of these 230 pages, we go from the mountains of Vercors to the trenches of 1914, the cabarets of Montmartre to Parisian art galleries: how did you do it all by yourself?
Once I had the she-bear and my protagonist in place, I recalled a woman who rebuilt the faces of gueules cassées (literally, “shattered faces”) after the Great War. Her name was Jane Poupelet, and she, too, specialised in sculpting animals. From there, I imagined her sculpting a she-bear, and everything — art  and nature — dovetailed perfectly.

The scenes where she reconstructs your hero’s face are awe-inspiring.
When he first meets her, he’s wearing a bag on his head. It’s like the Phantom of the Opera, or an American superhero. I wanted him to be frightening, like some of my characters in Snowpiercer: Terminus, who were masked as well. But she goes on to palpate his face in a highly sensual way, crafting a supple mask of leather and beginning a more intimate relationship.

Such female characters are rather new to your recent work, aren’t they?
I’ve been criticised for devising very masculine worlds in my last two books, Altitude and Le Loup (The Wolf). This time, with Jeanne, a woman proved central to the story and from there, a new theme asserted itself: love. Love as a feeling able to lift us higher than society.

In The Last Queen, you’re not exactly kind to the art scene…
It’s a world I know well, because at one point in my life, I moved to Berlin to paint. And then, a few years ago, I felt like I’d been a bit cheated by a gallery that had filed for bankruptcy before paying me. The art scene is, above all else, a social marker: collectors feel like they’re part of an exclusive club, and while they might talk art, they’re often only thinking money. I wanted to depict the kind of wheeling and dealing so common to the art world, of which artists are usually the victims.

Why make the painter Chaïm Soutine a character in the book?
I have immense admiration for this penniless Jewish artist from Vilnius who came to Paris and believed in his destiny. His paintings move me deeply. I had fun having him cross paths with my protagonist and imagining the hidden backstory to his famous painting, Carcass of Beef. It is said that when he died in 1944, only Cocteau and Picasso followed his hearse to the graveyard. That’s why I included them in my book as well.

In fact, the influence of painting makes itself more strongly felt in this book than any influence from comics.
I have a great deal of admiration for some cartoonists. For instance, what Moebius was able to pull off in that famous two-page spread from Arzach, with his titular hero flying over a swarming crowd, just blows me away. Some pages by Richard Corben and Alex Toth impress me just as much. In my view, my style has grown slightly more supple in this last book, even if it obviously has nothing in common with my rounder period from Edmond le cochon (Edmond the Pig). My line remains sharp, marked by German Expressionism. Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann — the world disgusted and outraged them. Otto Dix’s work on the Great War, with those worm-eaten bodies, is so powerful it’s almost unbearable to look at. I am also susceptible to Emil Nolde’s watercolours and Land Art, the movement that uses natural elements to create works.

What made you decide to do the colours for The Last Queen yourself?
I’d done the colours for Altitude in the classic fashion, working on blue lines, then entrusted colouring on Le Loup to Isabelle Merlet. But with The Last Queen, I really wanted to do everything on the book from start to finish, so I tackled it myself. I have only to look up from my drawing table to see the light on the mountains all around my house. I used a graphics tablet, which was new, but I tried to work in “substance” to counteract the somewhat cold aspect that tool can have. My idea was also to play on the dominant colours in a scene, depending on whether it took place in the city or the mountains. I think I even almost managed to find that specific blue of the alpine sky — so hard to capture, as it is both somber and luminous at once.

Is The Last Queen a call to activism?
Yes, of course. I’ve been a member of the Ecologist Party ever since environmentalist René Dumont’s 1974 presidential bid. I firmly believe that if we keep going the way we’re going, we’re headed straight for disaster. That’s why I got into permaculture, even though when you live a mile above sea level, you only have a few months a year to grow any vegetables. The idea is to grow things without depleting the earth. It’s not about turning your back on progress: I’ve got a car, a Godin woodburning stove, etc. But I do believe that a barter-based economy can exist in certain places. In fact, that’s how my protagonist lives, in a way, trading his labour — his “arms” — for wheat or cheese. We are, originally, all hunter-gatherers…

Do you think a graphic novel can make a difference in this world?
I hope so. I go up to Paris ever more rarely these days, but each time I do, I get the feeling people there are living like zombies. The artist’s role is to bring a bit of enchantment back into this age of ash.

The Last Queen is out now in the UK, and available for pre-order in North America (release date May 28th)!