The King’s Warrior
Cartoonist: Huahua Zhu
Publisher: Bulgilhan Press / $15
September 2024
The King’s Warrior. Golden helmed, bloody sword, riding a giant lionsteed, a mount whose name does not do its variety of form justice. Mara. She leads the calvary’s charge. Once, when she was small, before her brother slept, before she picked up a weapon, the pit fights with underdescribed and formerly unimaginable creatures, the calvary raided her town. Her deal with the king would end her brother’s slumber. Her ferocity brought the land to heel, but the greatest threat to the king dwells beyond the realm. The alchemist. Huahua Zhu’s dark and slender tome concerns Mara’s last bid to wake her brother, her journey with her lionsteed Growl to a place where soldiers and kings dare not tread, and what she found there.
Tonally it is like Katsuya Terada’s legendary Zelda concept art, used to describe the unorthodox hero’s quests found in Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, the melancholy of The Farthest Shore and the hope of Tehanu. Feudal European aesthetics drawn in an Asian style. Zhu’s employs delicate linework for dynamic combat, ornate armaments, ancient locales. Soft watercolors for golden spires and shadowed corridors alike. Linnea Sterte is another artist who has synthesized these aesthetics. Emma Ríos and Hwei Lim’s Mirror. Nagabe, or the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle: the feel is manga period piece set elsewhere, rather than reimagined for a local audience’s familiarity.
After all, the king in this story and their kingdom remains largely a mystery to us. Yet we all know what awful creatures kings are. What’s behind the mask has nothing to do with it.
There’s an element to The King’s Warrior that recalls Lord Dunsany. More than a hundred years ago, the architects of cosmic horror were laying foundations told in fantasy. A medieval world, the last age of monsters- now they slip through the cracks into our world, but back then the world was theirs. Mara and Growl travel beyond the world of men, over the fields, after the woods grow taller than time, to the lands where they will not take root. A bridge, on this side bed to an orgy of demons, a castle on the other. Mara meets a man on the road and his words of warning are choked off by vomiting black tentacles, open arms stretching like hot taffy, fingers becoming claws.
It drifts into a more cursed darkness and deeper monsters. But gradually, and intercut with memories of before, times in closer proximity to the golden king and the kingdom. Despite the lionsteed you get a sense that there was a safety and normalcy in the one world, Hal Foster conflict, the wars of men. Safe and normal for the citizens of the kingdom, of course, not for those trampled beneath the hooves of the calvary or on the tips of their spears. Normal in the sense that the monsters are soldiers, not demons out of Dante’s Divine Comedy like at the foothills of the castle.
The old school fantasy concept of wandering into the realm of faerie from ours is heightened by Zhu’s colors for the book. Blue, gold, and black. Memories are blue and gold only, and most of the waking world is blue and black. There is a touch of green in the blue, yellow, and black at the borders of the kingdom, but only at the start of the story. Mara and Growl ride out beyond where green grows. One of many small details that I absorbed as atmosphere during the first read and revealed themselves upon returning, becoming bigger as I was no longer being swept along by the emotion of the plot. The quantity of gallows. The rare coin that Mara meant as a gift for her brother Echo retains its hue when other colors fade.
There’s something about the stylization choice to limit the palette that is definitely informing my comparison to Terada’s Zelda concept art. But choosing a distinctive color key both points toward The King’s Warrior being a contrivance (rather than a realistic documentation of truth) that suits the nature of folklore, and its special treatment and presentment of the story, a thoughtfulness in its telling that wishes to be communicated, again something that suits fairytales and their roots in oral history.
Zhu’s art is in conversation with the heavily worked intention of medieval manuscripts and illustrations. Not a straightforward homage like Cyril Pedrosa’s staggering amount of visual detail in his illustrations for The Golden Age. The King’s Warrior embraces the concepts found in Dunsany’s early 20th century work and the work of his peers, but the execution of this Bulgilhan Press book is totally a comic on the bleeding edge of now, at home beside Peow2 (fantasy to No Love Lost’s sci fi), or the magnificent comics of Jean Wei. Pocket-sized art object.
Which brings up the question, how much is enough? There is a then, there is a now, a long middle between them that’s given context but hardly explored, and a what’s next that one can scarcely imagine. The pieces we witness paint a portrait. The solemnity of the warrior. The position they’ve been trapped in and where it leads. I could read this book if it was six times as long. But all the stories untold are perhaps better left that way? We the readers live in an age that has monetized (if not weaponized) the idea of lore, to the point where I mostly don’t want to see more stories filling in blanks. They aren’t blanks. Zhu told this story, and I am happier in shambles than with closure, with mystery instead of history.
So it’s on the right side of too short. Conclusion a precipice for the imagination. They may only be glimpses and fragments, but they are the right ones- moments crucial to Mara’s heart. Their picture of the world has meaning that can’t be found in battling men, conquering lands, the procedural elements of the quest. We spend much of the book on the cursed road to the alchemist’s castle. But the peak isn’t physical, the mountaintop fortress. Why she’s doing it has always been more important than what Mara is doing. The King’s Warrior is a journey to understanding what she’s done.
The King’s Warrior is available from Bulgilhan Press or wherever cooler comics and books are sold.
