Concept Art for a Journey to the West Manga retelling I'll be making in the future
So, I'm a massive JTTW nerd, some may say I'm obsessed. (They'd be correct) Recently through things like the many adaptations with a multitude of different levels of accuracy to the book, to reading the book itself, OSP's videos on the subject, Toriyama's passing, and me overall just obsessed with drawing the characters with different designs, I've decided to try and make a JTTW Retelling/Adaptation in the form of a manga with the same name. While things like dialogue and exact scenes won't be the same, but the overall events will be mostly accurate with just a few things added. Some things that will be added is that things like different fighting styles will be added to the characters. For example: Sun Wukong in the og JTTW is trained in Kung Fu, but in this manga, he is still a master of Kung Fu, but he also has some aspects of Jujutsu with things like climbing onto his opponent, as well as him overall having some animalistic features in his fighting style (To see what I mean, watch the fantastically made Legend a Dragon Ball Story animation with their Super Saiyan Goku), as well as Sha Wujing a.k.a. Sandy being more of a brawler due to his size, etc etc.
There will also be plenty of easter eggs to different adaptations such as when Wukong's hair is wet it resembles Goku's sometimes, Wukong making a drawing when they have to cross water with them as pirates, with the pilgrims being dressed like members of the Straw Hat pirates in said drawing, etc etc.
There will be some things that are added from other adaptations, but those will mostly either be for parts of designs of characters or things I just consider interesting. However, while some things will be borrowed from adaptations, people who only know JTTW for the adaptations and not the story may be confused with some choices that will be made for characters like the Six-Eared Macaque and some others. For Example: In the book, Six-Eared Macaque is basically an actor who was trying to act as Wukong, LMK, where most people know him from who haven't read the book, he is Wukong's old friend, but in this manga, it takes the ideas from the book instead and expands them further, Macaque in the og book impersonated Wukong, then fought him, and then killed by Wukong when the Buddha outed him, this manga version depicts Macaque as a stalker who has been watching Wukong from a distance from the beginning over the entire story to that point, with him believing that he should have all that Wukong does due to him being just as powerful (In this anyway, in the book it seems Macaque gained him powers when he shapeshifted into Wukong) and his ears lets him have down-right omniscience, and loves to see Wukong and others that he stalks and impersonates suffer using the things that he learns about them from his stalking, leading to things like him mentally tormenting Wukong about his insecurities and regrets during their fight.
This was originally gonna just be a webcomic, but after time of working on some of the stuff for this, I'm gonna be putting the prologue volume stuff into the monthly Shonen Jump manga contest to hopefully have it be in Jump magazines and on their app/website, but that will have to wait until I physically get it done.
(Note: NONE OF THE CONCEPT ART WILL BE 100% ACCURATE TO THE FINAL PRODUCT, THINGS MAY CHANGE OVER TIME)
(Side Note: Because of how I drew Ao Lie's eyes, I accidentally made them look like a trap-)