The Chinese New Year is just around the corner. To celebrate the beginning of the year of the tiger, DC Comics is starting a comic series based on a new character: Monkey Prince. The series is written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Bernard Chang, and the first edition, due on Lunar New Year’s day, will enjoy numerous celebratory variations.
Monkey Prince is the alter ego of Marcus Sun. Son of the legendary Sun Wukong Protagonist of the classical Chinese literature “Journey to the West”, which inspired numerous derivative works: It is, for example, the basis on which the origins of Dragon Ball rest.
Although Journey to the West dates back to the 16th century, Monkey Prince is a recently created character from DC Comics: It debuted at the DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Superhero Celebration # 1 in July 2021, but the Monkey Prince series will be the first real comic book to see Marcus Sun as the protagonist.
“Marcus Sun has to move often because his adoptive parents are freelance henchmen“reads the abstract published by DC Comics.”This month he finds himself a new student at Gotham City High School, where a man with the features of a pig asks Marcus to walk on the water to show who he really is … Someone who goes on a trip in has gone west, he can transform into 72 different creatures, can make copies of his body with his fur and is called … prince monkey“.
Mokney Prince # 1 will be released on February 1, 2022. The publication of the first edition is accompanied by numerous variants (which we will publish below) by the artists Stanley “Artgerm” Lau, AnandRK, Dustin Nguyen, Zao Dao and Bernard Chang, who also wrote the regular cover. Oddly enough, Toei Animation has announced a film called The Monkey Prince, which is also based on Journey to the West.
