‘My Friend Kim Jong Un’ Tells the Truth About Korean Struggle

[Content note: The graphic novel excerpts in this piece contain explicit discussions of sexual harassment involving women.]

Kim Jong Un, the current leader of North Korea, inherited a mantle of total power and control from his father, Kim Jong Il, the former supreme leader of the country.

But long before he became one of the most feared men on the planet, Kim Jong Un was a kid, a teenager and a college student.

Graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim sets out to better understand the leader of North Korea, as well as the historical and ongoing state of cultural and political division under his rule, in her new book My Friend Kim Jong Un , out Oct. 26 through Drawn & Quarterly.

Gendry-Kim takes a decidedly personal approach beginning with her own experience of being aurally bombarded by the military posturing between North and South Korea as the rattling reports of gunfire and sirens invade her home studio.

“Whenever there’s a South Korea-U.S. joint drill, North Korea responds immediately. Then South Korea answers back,” she writes. “Seventy years since the Korean War armistice and the cycle goes on and on.”

The past is extremely present in the small community, as the opening salvo of the story makes plain.

Gendry-Kim was born in Goheung County in South Korea’s South Jeolla Province. Her award-winning work has been internationally acclaimed and translated into multiple languages.

The first South Korean cartoonist to be named a Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, she now lives with her partner Loïc Gendry and their dogs Carrot and Potato on Ganghwa Island, an hour away from Seoul.

The threat of war and nuclear threat hang heavy over the small community.

But as a conversation with an elderly neighbour reveals, the island’s residents are oddly resigned to the tension.

The author and her French husband do their best to maintain some semblance of normalcy, whether that means walking their dogs or making dinner while the roar of heavy artillery fills the air.

It’s not just the noise, but the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that drives her to investigate the figure at the centre of it all.

Even before wars of the 20th century severed the nation in two, the Korean people had suffered considerably. In her previous book The Waiting , Gendry-Kim delved into the experiences of families searching for their missing loved ones across the border between North and South Korea.