Guideways Through Mountains and Seas

This is a comic book adaptation of a play written by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian.

The play is called Shan Hai Jing Zhuan (《山海經傳》), which roughly translates to “The Story of the Collection of Mountains and Seas”, and was first published in Hong Kong in 1992. The story is an adaptation of the classic Shan Hai Jing (《山海經》), one of the first written texts on Chinese mythology.

An English adaptation of the play was published in 2008 under the name Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts (translated by Gilbert Fong), however I was not aware of its existence when I started drawing the comic book, so I translated every line of the dialogue by myself. I consulted the book A Chinese Bestiary by Richard E. Strassberg for proper name translations. I only learned of Gilbert Fong’s English adaptation until about a year after I had completed the comic book.

Please read this document (PDF format) for a more thorough explanation of my reasonings for drawing this comic strip. The whole book may also be downloaded from here (zipped PNG files).

The comic book is drawn in the style of a Japanese manga, which means that the reading direction goes from right to left instead of the other way around.