Yuen

Genre: Chinese (Historical) Fantasy
Status: Finished (2004)
Pages: 30 pages
Type: Side Story to a longer story

“Yuen” is the english pin-yin of the Chinese word for “destiny” or “affinity”.

This story was drawn for a competition entry for the Manga Academy competition, though It’s really part of a long historical fantasy epic I intend to do, based on one of my favourite periods of Chinese history. It’s historical because historical characters appear in it, and everything happens as it did in history; but it’s also fantasy because Chinese gods appear in it too. No historical character appears in this short snippet, but they will afterwards - this is just the beginning of the story. To say that it’s representative of the actual story itself is a mistake though - the actual story is a adventure story. This… is just a flashback sequence to set-up the characters.

This is different from what I normally do; both in subject matter and art style. This manga is very Chinese - it’s about a Chinese Taoist Boy God and/or folk hero who nearly every Chinese would have heard of… but which few non-Chinese would know about. The purpose of this story would be to give a brief introduction to him, and the main character Lu-wha. The god’s name is Nezha, or Li Nezha; other variations include Nazha (Na zha), Nata or Nataku (the Japanese variation) - and he has a place in Chinese mythology equal to that of Sun Wu-Kong, the Monkey King. Unfortunately, while everyone seems to know who the Monkey King is, not enough people know who Nezha is; nor do they know much about the world he belongs to, which would be the world of Taoist gods and immortals (2 distinct but overlapping categories in Taoist mythology).

That said, I have a great fondness for these characters, and had a lot of fun with the art… At least in February 2004 (when it was finished) I did. Looking back in June, I’ll have to say that the art wavers in its execution too much - probably a result of drawing with a brush pen for the first time. Could do with some work, but I did get an original drawing style out of it, and will probably develop it into something more sophisticated and balanced looking later on.

This reads in the Japanese way, from right to left.