Origins of Chinese Martial Arts

Here's a graphic novel about the history of Chinese martial arts that I bought in a bookstore in Shanghai.

Title: Origins of Chinese Martial Arts
Publisher: Asiapac Books
Date: 2010
Artist: Jack Cheong
Editor: Loh Chong Chai

Nice overview of the Chinese martial arts, mixing prose historical passages with comic-format short stories. The stories are mostly mythical in nature, although some are more historical, including a short biography of Bruce Lee. My favorite of the stories was the origin of Yue Maiden Sword, a tale of a girl who matches martial arts skills with a stick-wielding ape, and goes on to create a whole new style of sword techniques.

If found the very beginning to be a bit shaky, as it gives some vague speculation about the prehistoric beginnings of the fighting arts (accompanied by silly illustrations), but once the book got into the founding of the Shaolin and Wudang schools, it definitely kept my interest.

Jack Cheong's illustration style is clear and vibrant, and nicely captures the martial arts technique. I appreciate his mixing of male and female martial artists on the exercise technique illustrations that the book concludes with.

Rating: 7.5/10

Sequel to the Journey to the West Volume 1

Here's an English-language graphic novel that I picked up at a used book table at a holiday bazaar in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in late 2014.

Title: Sequel to the Journey to the West
Issue: Volume 1
Date: 1998
Publisher: Asiapac Books
Writer: Tsai Chih Chung
Artist: Tsai Chih Chung
Translator: Wu Jingyu

This is an English-language graphic novel from a Taiwanese and a Singaporean publisher that I bought at a flea market in Vietnam. It's based on a classical Chinese novel with an unknown author, which is the sequel to an earlier classical Chinese novel by Ming Dynasty author Wu Cheng'en. The original Journey to the West novel is an adaptation of legends based on the historical journey of Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang to India.

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Cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung is known for his humorous interpretations of classical Chinese literature. He works in four-panel vertical comic strips, and his version of Sequel to Journey to the West has a definite newspaper comic strip feel to the jokes and the pacing. The story describes the first steps in the journey of a monkey known as the Lesser Sage and a monk known as Da Dian set out to retrieve the "expository materials" needed for the people of China to gain a better understanding of Buddhism.

This first volume mostly sets the stage for the journey. The writing is playful, ranging from slapstick to wordplay to political satire and thinly-veiled (and sometimes not veiled at all) references to current events.

There were some good laughs to be had here, but some of the jokes suffer a bit in translation, and the humor is a bit uneven. Tsai Chih Chung mixes in crude bits of toilet humor along with some really clever puns and sarcasm.

This volume is mostly background to the actual quest story to follow.

Rating: 6/10