
Monkey King and the World of Myths: The Monster and the Maze | Review
Monkey King and the World of Myths: The Monster and the Maze
Writer/artist: Maple Lam
G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $23.99
Publisher’s rating: Gr 3-7
The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, returns to comics in the first volume of a new series by Maple Lam, Monkey King and the World of Myths: The Monster and the Maze. As the title suggests, this is something of a mix-and-match of world mythology, with the familiar story of the Monkey King getting a retelling that positions the character for a story that interacts and interrogates other mythologies.
Lam starts with the basic origin of the Monkey King but overlays her own unified theory of mythology, which divides the universe into three worlds: The world of the gods, the world of the humans, and the world of the beasts, the last of which the Monkey King belongs to. The three worlds apparently all went to war once, the result of a mysterious dark force known as The Yao-Qi, which can possess individuals and turn them into monsters. As we’ll learn through the story, the world is in danger from this force once again.
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The Monkey King learns all of this while he infiltrates heaven by turning into a bug and hiding on God Venus, who he meets in a human city. There he causes no end of trouble, fighting heaven’s many warriors to a standstill until they overwhelm him with numbers and throw him into the dungeon.
He’s given a chance to redeem himself by the kindly Venus though, when the god explains Lam’s cosmology and offers Monkey King the job of monster hunter. If he fulfills it successfully, he’ll be rewarded with his heart’s desire—to be made a god, rather than being a mere beast.
His first assignment? The isle of Crete, far removed from his Eastern homeland…and the source of the stories he sprang from. After a stop in Hades’ underworld, where he picks up an unlikely traveling companion, the not yet potty-trained puppy Cerberus, he makes his way into the city of Athens, and thus into the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur…sort of.
In Lam’s remixing of myth, Theseus is still a baby and thus is in no shape to go fight the Minotaur. So Sun Wukong takes his place, and things unfold quite differently, as it turns out that the Minotaur isn’t quite as monstrous as he was made out to be (for one thing, he’s vegetarian, and thus doesn’t eat people after all), and, for another, there’s a far better candidate for monster on Crete.
Unsurprisingly, the Monkey King wins the day, and while this reads as a perfectly satisfactory book all on its own, not every conflict is resolved, so the adventure continues in a future volume. Who can say how many future volumes, really? The world of myth is, after all, a big one.
Lam’s Monkey King doesn’t cut the most heroic figure, being somewhat squat and abstract in design to the point of, well, cuteness. In fact, all of her creatures and characters tend toward cute, even such famous monsters as Cerberus and the Minotaur. That isn’t to say that the proceedings aren’t action packed, though; the Monkey King engages in several rather fierce battles, including when he takes on all the warriors of Heaven and his beast vs. beast match-up against the Minotaur.
Perfect for fans of mythology or those just learning these stories for the first time, The Monkey King and the World of Myths is an extremely fun comic that makes the most of its clever premise.
Filed under: Reviews

About J. Caleb Mozzocco
J. Caleb Mozzocco has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.
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