Tsai Chih Chung's Journey to the West Comic
Serialized in newspapers from 1987 to 1988, this four-volume comic adaptation of Journey to the West is among the most popular titles in Tsai Chih Chung's series of Chinese classics.
Tsai Chih Chung's Journey to the West is a manga adaptation of the Ming and Qing classical novel created by the national treasure of Taiwanese comics, Tsai Chih Chung (1948—). Following his series on Zhuangzi, Laozi, and the Records of the Grand Historian, this work was first serialized between 1987 and 1988 in Taiwanese publications such as the China Times and Zili Evening News, and was later collected into four volumes by the China Times Publishing Company. Using his signature rounded, minimalist line work and a modern sense of humor, Tsai condensed the original hundred-chapter epic into concise and punchy manga segments, focusing on classic episodes such as the "Birth of the Stone Monkey," "Havoc in Heaven," "Three Battles with the White Bone Demon," the "Kingdom of Women," the "True and False Monkey Kings," and the "Flaming Mountain." His narrative is succinct and his dialogue witty, often using modern colloquialisms to parody classical dialogue, making the work particularly accessible to young readers. The work has been translated into many languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, and French, with cumulative sales exceeding forty million copies across the Chinese-speaking world. It remains one of the most widely circulated works of Tsai Chih Chung's "Chinese Classics Series" globally. In 2014, the Shandong People's Publishing House released a large-format color edition in four volumes (totaling 628 pages). In 2023, a revised commemorative edition in Traditional Chinese was published under new authorization from Taiwan's Big Big Culture. In 2020, a bilingual Chinese-English single-volume edition (358 pages) was released in the United States.