The Monkey King and the River Dragon
Sun Wukong takes on a black dragon that will not let the pilgrims cross its river — and finds out why it guards the water.
The cast sheets behind this chapter
About this chapter
The pilgrims reach the Black Water River and there is no bridge. The monk Tang Sanzang waits on the bank while Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, steps forward with his iron staff — and a great black dragon rises out of the waves, roaring that no one crosses its river. They fight until the water runs backward. When Wukong finally pins the dragon, he asks why it guards a river no one wants to cross, and the answer changes how the chapter ends.
The chapter is drawn in the Chinese ink wash style with the Cinematic page format: overlapping full-bleed panels on five 3:4 pages, misty mountains in loose brush strokes, and sound effects such as KRA-WHOOM, CLANG and SHIMMER lettered into the art.
How it was made: Tang Sanzang and Sun Wukong are public-domain characters from Journey to the West, and the story was written for this sample. The comic was started with Skip, start from text, so Comic Studio found the monk, the Monkey King and the dragon in about 200 words of prose and drew an ink-wash reference sheet for each before splitting the story into five pages.
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Made by the LazyKiwi team in Comic Studio. The characters are in the public domain; the story was written for this sample.