![]() ![]() Now though, we have this excellent oversized hardcover from Dark Horse, and being an artbook, it’s best read as an artbook too. ![]() Without those Buddhist ‘hooks’, 'The Monkey King' is a visually stunning but thoroughly confusing comic… and best read as an artbook. Even as an Agnostic who turned his back on fundamentalist dogma as a teen, remnants of that faith still have their hooks in me. It's not a great read, at least for those of us without the same species of intimate connection to the sacred Buddhist text I think it requires a relationship to the material similar to the one Christians and ex-Christians have with the Bible. Terada's full-color manga adaptation of the Buddhist classic 'Journey to the West' is the 'Monkey King' referred to in the title, a visually spectacular epic that radically re-imagined it's source material, with a sexually-charged irreverence typical of his career. Yoshitaka Amano and Katsuhiro Otomo are likely his equals in terms of influence - Amano as an illustrator, and Otomo as the mangaka who reordered the sequential art universe with Domu and Akira - but Terada was one of the true pioneers of digital painting perhaps the first artist to create art from ones and zeroes that still felt organic and expressive. ![]() Katsuya Terada doesn't have many rivals in the world of Japanese illustration and manga. Terada Firma: Dark Horse Deliver the First Significant Art-book on Katsuya Terada for North American Markets ![]()
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