My Friend Kim Jong Un
Creator: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Translator: Janet Hong
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Publication Date: October 2026
There’s something about a smaller, more personal view that can help us understand world events. It brings it home, reminding us there are real people affected, and they have to live with the consequences of conflict that exists beyond a news report, or a movie, or a graphic novel. That’s a large part of the power of My Friend Kim Jong Un, in which Keum Suk Gendry-Kim sets out to understand a dictator while showing what it means to have him for a neighbour.
For Gendry-Kim, North Korea is close enough to see from home. The cartoonist lives and works on an island an hour from Seoul, with artillery fire, helicopters and sirens from a nearby military base providing something less than peace and quiet. It’s a setting that makes the division of Korea a wee bit unignorable throughout, and it adds power to the author’s voice right from the start.
But this is a personal story, in more than one way. In My Friend Kim Jong Un, Gendry-Kim turns her attention to the man on the other side: his childhood, his education abroad, his hobbies and relationships. How does someone become that person? She approaches the question through her own experiences and interviews with people ranging from North Korean defectors to former South Korean president Moon Jae-in, and even Kim’s former chef.
Gendry-Kim has explored the pain of Korea’s history before, in her award-winning Grass and The Waiting. Here, she turns to the present, although of course the distinction isn’t quite that simple. The division created after the Second World War is still there, shaping daily life, and this time her subject is the man responsible for maintaining the North Korean side of it. It’s a shift from documenting history to examining an individual first.
And that means looking beyond the title and the familiar figure to consider a life: childhood, education abroad, interests and relationships. Gendry-Kim combines that examination with her own experiences of living within sight of North Korea, and accounts from people with very different kinds of access to the country and its leader.
The approach is to build a biography of the individual, set against the major events in North Korea, including his succession to power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il. And it’s fascinating to watch Gendry-Kim dig deeper and deeper, although sometimes it’s unclear how much she already knows and how much she is learning along with us. Through personal accounts and interviews, she introduces the current dictator and the people around him, especially his own family. There’s a particularly disturbing account of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, and his downfall, which takes us into rather different territory from the usual difficulties of getting along with your relatives.
That title has some substance behind it, too. These are interviews with people who really knew the man, including connections to his time living and studying quietly in Europe. It’s a way into the life behind the public figure, through people who encountered him in circumstances very different from the ones in which we usually see him. And yes, Dennis Rodman shows up.
What keeps all this from becoming a procession of facts and interview accounts is Gendry-Kim’s own story, running through the book as she works to complete it. She lives in more than one location dangerously close to the border with North Korea, and the consequences of that proximity are part of her daily life. They actually hear gunfire in the distance. There’s something distinctly unsettling about following someone’s research into a dictatorship while knowing that she can hear the shooting from over there.
And all of this is presented in an open visual style, with simple colouring that just pops on the page. There’s beauty here, sometimes in sharp contrast to the ugliness of what’s being described, and the combination is highly effective. As with The Waiting, this is expert-level comics craft: the mix of image and text gives the book a page-turning rhythm, with room to take in the artwork as well as follow the account. It’s a satisfying book to hold and read in real life, even when the story gives you reasons to pause. Let’s also take a moment to note this Korean perspective comes to English-language readers thanks to the translation by Janet Hong.
You can pick this up to learn about Kim Jong Un, and there’s plenty here to keep you turning the pages on that basis. But Gendry-Kim’s own story gives the book much of its weight, because the person asking the questions also has something at stake in the answers. It’ll give you a sense of what it means to live beside a disputed border long after the rest of us have moved on to another story.
My Friend Kim Jong Un is available now via Drawn & Quarterly
Read more great reviews from The Beat!
