Jonathon Dalton
is one of Vancouver’s local young guys starting up in this comic game. He has a handful a mini’s out, but one look at his work, and you can already tell that he is on the ball. He has a story in the upcoming Fablewood Anthology. Jonathon’s work is mix of personable surreal tales and fantasy taken beyond the normal expectations. I really enjoy his work, and you can tell alot goes into putting it together.
Re: The Journey to the West: this was one of my first exposures to comics in the form of a Disney version of a Japanese version of the Chinese stories: “Alikazam the Great”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alakazam_the_Great
Dalton was wrong about this being a “novel”, it’s very much like the modern Trekkie stuff. There was a base story that got spread around and then a cottage industry of additional, derived tales slowly sprang up. You could go to markets in ancient China and there would be booths where you could go and pay to hear some of these tales. There’s a 4 book box set in English available of this material containing 100 tales.
Here’s a link for the real monk, Tripitaka, who made the famous journey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang
A weird fun fact is that a British explorer found some of the original scrolls brought back by Xuanzang perfectly preserved in a cave in a Buddhist monastery in the middle of a Chinese desert.
There was a great Japanese TV series based on these stories called “Monkey”. It was a cult hit in the UK back awhile ago.