My Friend Kim Jong Un
Translated by Janet Hong
About
From the Island of Ganghwa, just an hour outside Seoul, North Korea is visible across the water. Cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim lives and works in this borderland, walking her dogs through rice paddies while artillery fire and helicopters remind her of what sits a few miles away. Her graphic novel attempts something audacious: to imagine the human being behind the world's most inscrutable public figure. The author of Grass brings her empathetic, documentary-style approach to a subject that resists empathy. This is not an apologia but an investigation — a cartoonist trying to understand how someone becomes Kim Jong Un, what forces shape a dictator, and what it means to live in a country where your neighbor is a nuclear-armed mystery. A graphic novel that looks across the border and asks the question South Korea lives with every day: who is the person on the other side?
