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.

Read this write-up (PDF format) for more background info and my thought process on drawing this comic strip. The entire book may be downloaded as PNGs in a zipped file.

This comic book was subject of a research article written by Professor Simona Gallo of Milan titled “Re-canonizing the Shanhaijing in the world (literature): the myth, the play and the comic book”, published in 2020 in the Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies journal.

The comic book was 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.