THE ARCHITECT’S EPIPHANY

Aye-Shan City has already been reduced to ashes, its few remaining survivors sent scattering in the opening pages of Hong Kong brothers Chi-Ho (the author) and Chi-Kit (the illustrator) Kwong’s sweeping and kinetic saga about the nature of war. Aye-Shan City may have been destroyed by the dastardly Zhehe people, but that just means that the stage is set for a City Builder—in this case the young Ocean Hacklin, heir to the great City Builder Yishan Hacklin—to rebuild Aye-Shan City all over again, using his superhuman Naoyang skills. Before that can happen, however, Ocean must team up with Shaman Ling Tiber; together, the duo, along with a comical company of other Aye-Shan City refugees, set out to locate the fabled Guardian Beast. Readers may see parallels between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and the story of the fallen city of Aye-Shan: Both set technology and the natural world at odds with each other. The Kwong brothers take the premise one step further in positing that war itself is just part of the natural cycle of things. There is a lyrical quality in both the writing (“The fighting song is loud and clear, the sound of nature changes the world”) and the illustrations. The latter seem to shift and morph into varying styles, some vibrant and colorful, others stark and black & white. At one point, speaking through imaginative speech balloons in prose that gives it an ethereal air of nobility, the mighty Guardian Beast laments how it was overcome after the Zhehe people “tempted Aye-Shan people to engage in lewd acts, which generated negative energy and weakened my power.” Will the Zhehe people and the inhabitants of Aye-Shan City ever break free of this cycle of destruction and creation? That depends on what the Kwong brothers next have in store for readers.