Katsuya Terada’s The Monkey King vol. 2

Longtime readers know that I love to bitch about the long delays between certain manga from Dark Horse.  It’s a pet hate of mine that I doubt I’ll ever get over.  However, when it comes to the length of the wait between volumes, this second volume of “The Monkey King” has them all beat.  Had it arrived just two months later, we would’ve waited an even SEVEN YEARS for this.  I didn’t wait that long, as I picked up the first volume some time after it came out at a deep discount, thinking, “Hey, it’s a mature-oriented full-color manga from Dark Horse.  It can’t be that bad.”  It wasn’t, but the title still wasn’t that good either.

Katsuya Terada is probably best known here as the character designer for the “Blood:  The Last Vampire” OVA from over a decade ago.  The man also has a lot of pin-up work to his credit, which Dark Horse has also seen fit to release as well.  As far as I can tell, this adaptation of the classic “Journey to the West” story represents his only long-form work.  The original tale represents one of the best-known Chinese stories and has been adapted into numerous forms and mediums over the years — it even served as the original basis for Akira Toryiama’s “Dragonball.”  Terada’s take, however, is far less family-friendly due to the sheer amount of exposed flesh and body-pulping violence on display here.  

Goku, the titular Monkey King, is a brutish vandal who agrees to guide the holy nun Sanzo, in full bondage to Tenjiku after he is freed by her male form who then regresses into an embryo.  Believe it or not, that was probably the most coherent part of the first volume, which spent most of its time jumping around in time and space from each bite-sized chapter.  Terada’s art is lush and detailed, and full of creative grotesqueries to go along with his gorgeous women… who, more often than not, usually wind up turning into one of these grotesqueries.  His work here is good enough to keep holding your eye for most of this and it’s one of the VERY FEW mainstream titles I’ve read where the art can be said to have a real erotic charge to it.  That said, the whole package is still pure style over substance that can only be appreciated on a chapter-by-chapter basis and not as any kind of ongoing narrative.

After that, many years passed and I read other stuff.  I did hear from Carl Horn, who once again provides not only the English adaptation, but copious notes on the story as well, that this title hadn’t been put on hiatus.  Terada was just taking a really long time to complete the second volume.  So when the second volume finally came out, admiration of the fact that they actually brought it out after such a long wait and morbid curiosity about its very existence got me to pick it up.

To my surprise, I actually enjoyed this one more than the first volume.  I’m sure that lowered expectations helped, but there’s actually more coherence to the story here.  Things actually progress in a logical manner, the characters are more clearly defined, and the narrative builds up some nice momentum to the point that by the end of the volume I actually found myself looking forward to the next volume.  Terada’s art is still the main reason for checking things out, and while I doubt he spent all of these (nearly seven) years working on this the results are even more pleasing to the eye.  Goku’s rages are more visceral, the women are even sexier, and there are some real moments of strange beauty, such as when a half-insect girl freezes to death along with her beast brother in the snow.  Even though there’s not a whole lot of dialogue here, Horn even gets some of his trademarked wittiness in at a few key points.  This second volume is easily a better package all around.

Of course, the rather high levels of sex and violence mean that this certainly won’t be for everyone (that parental advisory sticker is there on the cover for a very good reason).  Terada’s “The Monkey King” marches to its creator’s own distinctive beat, which can also very easily be interpreted as self indulgence.  However, this second volume has it all going down a whole lot smoother.  It’s different, but I can now say that this is the “good” kind of different.