Description
Long Distance Call
By Sheree Domingo
With one midnight phone call, a little girl’s world is shaken up. Her grandmother is seriously ill, while she and her mother have to stay in Germany. Sheree Domingo’s evocative character art and stark dialogue cut to the heart of the Filipino migrant experience with the searing emotional effect of longing for far-off times and people.
Long Distance Call is an intergenerational narrative set in a German retirement home. Set against the backdrop of a hot summer day, the story artfully interweaves the memories and dreams of its three protagonists: a recently widowed elderly lady, a Filipino nurse juggling the demands of her job with the impending loss of her mother on the other side of the world, and her young daughter, whose vague memories of her grandmother merge with the anonymous faces around her. Dreams and memories merge as the three central characters face a common dilemma - the ever-present feeling of being in the wrong place.
While her words address themes of loss, distance, poverty, migration, and gender, Sheree Domingo's blunt use of silence and ellipses gives the story a space for the unsaid. Lovingly drawn images tell the emotional journeys of the three women better than words could, inviting her audience to slip through the cracks and appreciate the story through their own sensibilities. Carefully chosen colors mark the narrative levels: Each story has its own color combination, and all echo parts of the author's life.
Long Distance Call is the winner of the 2021 Grimmelshausen Förderpreis für Literatur in Germany.
REVIEW:
“The whole world is told here in a tiny constellation, because poverty, migration, gender and age are the determining factors for the whole story. And all this in a plot that transcends borders and even continents. But Sheree Domingo never moralizes, she lets us draw our own conclusions on the basis of barely outlined and all the more interesting fates. That's a great achievement for a comic debut.”
— Andreas Platthaus, German journalist,
author, and expert on comic books
Size: 6" x 9"
Number of pages: 112
Printing/ binding: Full-color/ softbound
Publisher: Vibal Foundation, Inc.
Imprint: Agimat Comics
Editor-at-Large: Paolo Herras
Copyright: 2025
About the Creator
Sheree Domingo, *1989 in Böblingen (Germany). She studied at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel and at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels. Her debut Ferngespräch (Long Distance Call) was published by Edition Moderne in 2019, received the Grimmelshausen Förderpreis für Literatur in 2021, and was published in Korea 2023 by See Dosee. Together with author Patrick Spät, she published Madame Choi and the Monsters in 2022, for which she received the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize, and which has been published in English, French, and Korean. Her documentary comic Portrait of a Street Corner, published in the anthology “Gerne würdest du allen so viel sagen” (avant, 2023), won the sponsorship award of the International Lake Constance Conference 2023. In 2025 she received the Kalayaan Award for Literature by the Philippine Embassy in Berlin. Sheree lives and works in Berlin.