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Dragon Girl and Monkey King: The Art of Katsuya Terada
Dark Horse proudly presents the first English-language art-book showcasing one of Japan's most sought-after painters and illustrators, Katsuya Terada. Dragon Girl and Monkey King collects Terada's art in every mood: sexy, brutal, bizarre, and humorous, including his distinctive Hellboy figurine work, extensive commentary, and an exclusive interview with the artist.
- GenresArt
200 pages, Hardcover
First published August 5, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 30, 2014
Terada Firma: Dark Horse Deliver the First Significant Art-book on Katsuya Terada for North American Markets
Katsuya Terada doesn't have many rivals in the world of Japanese illustration and manga. Yoshitaka Amano and Katsuhiro Otomo are likely his equals in terms of influence -- Amano as an illustrator, and Otomo as the mangaka who reordered the sequential art universe with Domu and Akira -- but Terada was one of the true pioneers of digital painting; perhaps the first artist to create art from ones and zeroes that still felt organic and expressive. Terada's full-color manga adaptation of the Buddhist classic 'Journey to the West' is the 'Monkey King' referred to in the title, a visually spectacular epic that radically re-imagined it's source material, with a sexually-charged irreverence typical of his career. It's not a great read, at least for those of us without the same species of intimate connection to the sacred Buddhist text; I think it requires a relationship to the material similar to the one Christians and ex-Christians have with the Bible. Even as an Agnostic who turned his back on fundamentalist dogma as a teen, remnants of that faith still have their hooks in me. Without those Buddhist ‘hooks’, 'The Monkey King' is a visually stunning but thoroughly confusing comic… and best read as an artbook. Now though, we have this excellent oversized hardcover from Dark Horse, and being an artbook, it’s best read as an artbook too. A warning: Terada’s also famous for his improbably gorgeous women, erotic art that combines some fucked-up and light-hearted SF/fantasy themes. I'm not a fan of 'pin-up' art. Not because it's politically incorrect or wrong, I just find it repetitive, dull, and tacky. Usually. But Terada is far more than a pin-up artist, and even the small percentage of his output that might qualify as pin-up art is fucking incredible. Still, there will be unholstered nipples, and for some reason that’s still something that fries people’s brains. Or it freaks out people with pre-fried brains. Meh. Fuck them. I doubt GR is their thing.
Terada firma – I’m not a huge fan of SF and fantasy illustration, but that’s because so much of it is awful. Terada is one of the few who does great work with zero pretention, in a genre too easily dismissed:
The 'Dragon Girl' is a reference to one of his more recent paintings…
…representing his long and prolific career in illustration. His work is populated by demons and corrupted angels, wizards and hybrid monsters, astronauts and intricately rendered spacecraft. Dark fantasy is his wheel-house, but hard-boiled SF is also indebted to his unstained brushes and pens, his freely applied and completely illusory oils, his roughly layered tones of ones and zeroes; he is a true innovator, and was integral to the way digital painting has evolved... his art is often indistinguishable from oils and acrylics. Blowing up his virtual canvas to dimensions that dwarf even the massive scales employed by artists like Chuck Close or Gottfried Helnwein, this allows Terada the ability to apply the tiniest digital brushstrokes to every square centimetre of a work that would translate to a physical size of 10 metres across and 5 metres high, achieving a level of complexity and detail otherwise impossible. But his most impressive technique of the last few years has been to develop a digital painting style that replicates the unpredictable, flawed, and expressionistic qualities of oils.
Terada art, starting with a lovely pencil-on-paper erotic drawing, involving some kind of mishap with a Futurama-brand 'probulator'; and ending with a topless pirate-nurse possessing anti-gravity tits and a syringe:
His aesthetic approach is a fusion of East and West. Terada takes inspiration from the 'Metal Hurlant' generation of European bande dessinee, most notably Moebius, Enki Bilal, Juan Gimenez, Francois Schuiten, and Milo Manara. Some of Japan's greatest artist-illustrators have similar influences, blending Euro-comics with Tezuka-type classic manga, including Otomo, Satoshi Kon, Tsutomu Nihei, and Taiyo Matsumoto. The Euro influence also shows in his Manara-like gift for painting beautiful women. His 'cheesecake' or ‘pin-up’ art always employs elements from fantasy and science fiction: half-demon women with grotesque appendages show off their otherwise perfect, naked forms; space-girl astronauts in ridiculously impractical and very revealing spacesuits pose provocatively with phallic rayguns; a stunning young women wearing fuzzy pink kitten-ears and whiskers plays the role of Schrodinger's famous cat, frozen in a quantum super-position, simultaneously 'alive' and 'dead', both possible states scrawled on one of two sticky-notes barely concealing her nipples (see below). His color rendering makes for realistic skin and nearly 3D contours... if you're into that sort of thing. Many are, apparently; they just prefer their women to be imaginary.
Terada’s ‘pin-up art’:
Dark Horse has been in the Monograph business for years, and you can always expect to get a beautifully produced volume that is well worth the money. Having published art-books collecting the work of Hiroaki Samura, Yoshitaka Amano and Katsuhiro Otomo, this Terada collection is long over-due, but well worth the wait. At 9" x 12" and 200 pages long, it uses the thick glossy paper you'd expect if not demand, but with a less preferable binding-type. For the price, however, this is a small concession. The books design is excellent, from the cover to the layouts to the endpapers. Just as importantly, it includes a well-written introduction, over 10 pages of annotations and commentary from the editor and Terada, and concludes with an enlightening interview.
More art by Katsuya Terada; at the bottom is his popular take on Mike Mignola’s Hellboy:
In contrast, Dark Horse released the Amano collection 'The Sky' with absolutely nothing in the way of introductions, commentary, or interviews, despite having several hundred pages; the result was an impressive and exhaustive release that felt somewhat empty. DGaMK, in comparison, feels so dense the ink must contain osmium. It's also far superior to the PIE Books monograph 'Ten', an exhibition catalog for the show dedicated to his works of the last decade. I liked it as well, but the tankobon 5.5" x 8.25" format is too small, and only a fraction of the book is full-color. This is the Terada monograph to invest in, for fans and newcomers alike.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
Katsuya Terada doesn't have many rivals in the world of Japanese illustration and manga. Yoshitaka Amano and Katsuhiro Otomo are likely his equals in terms of influence -- Amano as an illustrator, and Otomo as the mangaka who reordered the sequential art universe with Domu and Akira -- but Terada was one of the true pioneers of digital painting; perhaps the first artist to create art from ones and zeroes that still felt organic and expressive. Terada's full-color manga adaptation of the Buddhist classic 'Journey to the West' is the 'Monkey King' referred to in the title, a visually spectacular epic that radically re-imagined it's source material, with a sexually-charged irreverence typical of his career. It's not a great read, at least for those of us without the same species of intimate connection to the sacred Buddhist text; I think it requires a relationship to the material similar to the one Christians and ex-Christians have with the Bible. Even as an Agnostic who turned his back on fundamentalist dogma as a teen, remnants of that faith still have their hooks in me. Without those Buddhist ‘hooks’, 'The Monkey King' is a visually stunning but thoroughly confusing comic… and best read as an artbook. Now though, we have this excellent oversized hardcover from Dark Horse, and being an artbook, it’s best read as an artbook too. A warning: Terada’s also famous for his improbably gorgeous women, erotic art that combines some fucked-up and light-hearted SF/fantasy themes. I'm not a fan of 'pin-up' art. Not because it's politically incorrect or wrong, I just find it repetitive, dull, and tacky. Usually. But Terada is far more than a pin-up artist, and even the small percentage of his output that might qualify as pin-up art is fucking incredible. Still, there will be unholstered nipples, and for some reason that’s still something that fries people’s brains. Or it freaks out people with pre-fried brains. Meh. Fuck them. I doubt GR is their thing.
Terada firma – I’m not a huge fan of SF and fantasy illustration, but that’s because so much of it is awful. Terada is one of the few who does great work with zero pretention, in a genre too easily dismissed:
The 'Dragon Girl' is a reference to one of his more recent paintings…
…representing his long and prolific career in illustration. His work is populated by demons and corrupted angels, wizards and hybrid monsters, astronauts and intricately rendered spacecraft. Dark fantasy is his wheel-house, but hard-boiled SF is also indebted to his unstained brushes and pens, his freely applied and completely illusory oils, his roughly layered tones of ones and zeroes; he is a true innovator, and was integral to the way digital painting has evolved... his art is often indistinguishable from oils and acrylics. Blowing up his virtual canvas to dimensions that dwarf even the massive scales employed by artists like Chuck Close or Gottfried Helnwein, this allows Terada the ability to apply the tiniest digital brushstrokes to every square centimetre of a work that would translate to a physical size of 10 metres across and 5 metres high, achieving a level of complexity and detail otherwise impossible. But his most impressive technique of the last few years has been to develop a digital painting style that replicates the unpredictable, flawed, and expressionistic qualities of oils.Terada art, starting with a lovely pencil-on-paper erotic drawing, involving some kind of mishap with a Futurama-brand 'probulator'; and ending with a topless pirate-nurse possessing anti-gravity tits and a syringe:
His aesthetic approach is a fusion of East and West. Terada takes inspiration from the 'Metal Hurlant' generation of European bande dessinee, most notably Moebius, Enki Bilal, Juan Gimenez, Francois Schuiten, and Milo Manara. Some of Japan's greatest artist-illustrators have similar influences, blending Euro-comics with Tezuka-type classic manga, including Otomo, Satoshi Kon, Tsutomu Nihei, and Taiyo Matsumoto. The Euro influence also shows in his Manara-like gift for painting beautiful women. His 'cheesecake' or ‘pin-up’ art always employs elements from fantasy and science fiction: half-demon women with grotesque appendages show off their otherwise perfect, naked forms; space-girl astronauts in ridiculously impractical and very revealing spacesuits pose provocatively with phallic rayguns; a stunning young women wearing fuzzy pink kitten-ears and whiskers plays the role of Schrodinger's famous cat, frozen in a quantum super-position, simultaneously 'alive' and 'dead', both possible states scrawled on one of two sticky-notes barely concealing her nipples (see below). His color rendering makes for realistic skin and nearly 3D contours... if you're into that sort of thing. Many are, apparently; they just prefer their women to be imaginary.
Terada’s ‘pin-up art’:
Dark Horse has been in the Monograph business for years, and you can always expect to get a beautifully produced volume that is well worth the money. Having published art-books collecting the work of Hiroaki Samura, Yoshitaka Amano and Katsuhiro Otomo, this Terada collection is long over-due, but well worth the wait. At 9" x 12" and 200 pages long, it uses the thick glossy paper you'd expect if not demand, but with a less preferable binding-type. For the price, however, this is a small concession. The books design is excellent, from the cover to the layouts to the endpapers. Just as importantly, it includes a well-written introduction, over 10 pages of annotations and commentary from the editor and Terada, and concludes with an enlightening interview.
More art by Katsuya Terada; at the bottom is his popular take on Mike Mignola’s Hellboy:
In contrast, Dark Horse released the Amano collection 'The Sky' with absolutely nothing in the way of introductions, commentary, or interviews, despite having several hundred pages; the result was an impressive and exhaustive release that felt somewhat empty. DGaMK, in comparison, feels so dense the ink must contain osmium. It's also far superior to the PIE Books monograph 'Ten', an exhibition catalog for the show dedicated to his works of the last decade. I liked it as well, but the tankobon 5.5" x 8.25" format is too small, and only a fraction of the book is full-color. This is the Terada monograph to invest in, for fans and newcomers alike.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
April 5, 2018
I really love how Terada-san illustrated hybrid creatures and bio-mechanic human through his drawing, and how he combines between Realism and Manga style on this book is really fantastic.
January 6, 2015
This was a wonderful collection of Terada's art. He's clearly a product of Bilal, most noticeably in his human women designs. There are pieces that are reminiscent of art from Berserk creator Miura, and the action pieces show great dynamism. This was a fine introduction to Terada's art, and I hope to check out his Journey to the West adaptation soon.
August 19, 2015
pick my jaw up off the floor.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews