King’s Warrior
Manga artist: Shuka
Publisher: Bulgilhan Press / $15
September 2024
A royal warrior. With a golden helmet and a bloody sword, she rides a great lion-horse. Her horse’s name does not do justice to its many forms. Mara. Leads a cavalry charge. Once, when she was a child, before her brother slept, before he took up arms, his cavalry stormed her town, battling creatures once unimaginable. A deal with the king ends his brother’s slumber. Her ferocity has won the kingdom over, but the king’s greatest threat lurks outside the realm. The alchemist. Hua Hua Ju’s dark, thin book tells of Mara’s final attempt to wake her brother, her journey with the lion-horse Growl to places no soldier or king dared tread, and what she finds there.
Tonally, it resembles Katsuya Terada’s legendary Zelda concept art, and is used to express the adventures of unconventional heroes in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea, the melancholy of The Last Shore, and the hope of Tehanu. It’s an Asian take on feudal European aesthetics. Chu uses delicate lines for dynamic combat, ornate weapons, and ancient locations. Soft watercolors are used for golden spires and shadowy corridors. Linnea Starte is another artist who combines these aesthetics. Emma Rios and Hoi Lim’s Mirror. Nagabe from Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle. It feels more like a manga period drama set somewhere else than a reimagining that would be more familiar to local audiences.
In the end, the king and his kingdom in this story remain mostly a mystery to us, but we all know what a fearsome being the king is, and what lies behind the mask has nothing to do with that.
There are elements of The King’s Warrior that recall Lord Dunsany. Over a century ago, the architects of cosmic horror were laying the foundations for what fantasy would become: a medieval world, the last age of monsters. Now monsters slip through the cracks and into ours, but then the world was theirs. Mara and Growl travel beyond the world of men, across the fields, into a land where monsters could not take root after the forests had grown taller than time. On this side of the bridge is the bed of the demon’s orgy, on the other side is the castle. Mara meets a man on the road, but his words of warning are interrupted by spitting black tentacles, his open arms stretching like hot taffy, his fingers turning into claws.
It drifts into more cursed darkness and deeper monsters. But gradually, and intertwined with memories of an earlier time, a time closer to the Golden King and the Kingdom. You get the sense that, despite the lion-steed, there was safety and normalcy in Hal Foster’s strife, the one world of human war. Safe and normal, of course, for the citizens of the Kingdom, but not for those trampled under the hooves of cavalrymen and on the points of spears. Normal in the sense that the monsters are soldiers, not Dante’s Divine Comedy demons at the foot of the castle.
The old-fashioned fantasy concept of straying from our world into a fairy world is further emphasized by the colors in Zhu’s book. Blue, gold, black. Memory is only blue and gold, while most of the waking world is blue and black. There’s a touch of green among the blue, yellow, and black of the kingdom’s borders, but that’s only at the beginning of the story. Mara and Growl ride off on horseback beyond the lush greenery. It’s one of many small details I absorbed as atmosphere on my first read, only to be revealed when I returned, and become even more so now that I’m no longer swept up in the emotion of the plot. The multitude of gallows. The rare coin Mara prepares as a gift for her brother Echo keeps its hue even as the other colors fade.
The limited palette resulting from the stylistic choices undoubtedly invites comparisons to Terada’s Zelda concept art, but the unique tonal choices demonstrate that The King’s Warrior is a device suited to its folklore nature (rather than a realistic record of the truth), a special treatment and presentation of the story, and a thoughtfulness in the narrative voice that wishes to convey it (again, suited to fairy tales and their oral history roots).
Zhu’s art is in dialogue with the elaborate intent of medieval manuscripts and illustrations. This is not a simple homage to the astounding visual detail of Cyril Pedrosa’s illustrations for The Golden Age. While King’s Warriors borrows concepts found in Dunsany’s early 20th century work and that of his peers, this Burgirhan Press book’s production is truly cutting-edge comics of the modern era, on par with Peow2 (the sci-fi fantasy of No Love Lost) and Gene Wei’s finest comics. It’s a pocket-sized work of art.
Then the question arises: how much is enough? There is the past, and there is the present, and the long intervening gap between, given context but barely explored, leaving us little to imagine what comes next. The fragments we witness paint a portrait: the solemnity of the warriors; the position they are trapped in and where it leads. This book could have been read at six times as long. But perhaps it would be better to leave all the untold stories alone. We, the readers, live in an age that has monetized (if not weaponized) the idea of folklore to the point that we would rather not see more stories filling the void. They are not voids. Zhu has told this story, but I am happier with confusion than resolution, mystery than history.
So it’s just the right length, rather than too short. The conclusions are cliffhangers of the imagination. They may be just glimpses or snippets, but they’re right, and they’re defining moments in Mara’s mind. There’s a meaning to their worldview that can’t be found in the fighting of men, the conquest of lands, the procedural elements of the quest. We spend most of the book on the cursed path to the alchemist’s castle. But the summit isn’t a physical one, it’s a mountaintop fortress. What Mara does has always been less important than why she does it. The King’s Warrior is the journey to understand what she did.
The King’s Warrior is available from Bulgilhan Press or wherever you buy cooler comics and books.
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