What is Katsuya Terada's The Monkey King?

The source is the sixteenth-century Chinese classic Journey to the West: the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India for the Buddhist scriptures, guarded by the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. Terada's Saiyukiden Daienō, first collected by Shueisha in December 1998, keeps the pilgrimage and changes the temperature. His Monkey is more ape than man, born of stone, chained under a rock for five hundred years for defying heaven, and violent in a way most adaptations sand down.

The monk becomes a nun, and the road west fills with demons from Terada's internal menagerie. The book is in full color throughout, still rare in manga, and reads like a European album that happens to be a Japanese comic: painted panels, baroque line, no interest in being tidy. It is a mature readers' work in every sense. A second Japanese volume followed in 2010, and the saga also ran in the pages of Ultra Jump.

Dark Horse brought it west as Katsuya Terada's The Monkey King, volume 1 in September 2005 at $16.99, his first manga published in English; a second English volume followed. For the books that grew out of this painted world, his English-language art book Dragon Girl & Monkey King waits on the Zenbu page of this hub.