For their comic version of a love story between South and North Korea, Sheree Domingo and Patrick Spät received the comic book award 2022. The award is endowed with 20,000 euros and is to be presented on May 2, 2022 in Stuttgart. The prize of the Ditzinger Berthold Leibinger Foundation has been awarded every year since 2015 for German-language comics that have not yet been published and is intended to promote this art form. The now recognized comic book “Madame Choi and the Monsters” by the two Berlin-based artists will be published next September. It tells the love story of a South Korean actress and a film director, her ex-husband. Both were kidnapped to North Korea in 1978 and forced to make films for the regime. This also includes the Korean monster classic “Pulgasari”, which was actually shot in 1985 in the style of the Japanese Godzilla films. The love of the two flares up and they can escape together. “The intertwining of life and film history not only demands a lot from the narrative choreography of the comics and the handling of historical sources, but also from the way of aesthetically shaping the intertwined stories, for example by using their own color scheme,” the jury praised the book on Monday. Copywriter Patrick Spät received his doctorate from the University of Freiburg. Today he lives as a freelance journalist and book author in Berlin. The illustrator, draftsman and author Sheree Domingo, known for example through her graphic novel “Long Distance Talk”, lives and works in Berlin.
Prize of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation – Culture
