Sun Knight Doujin Comic

posted in: Blog | 22

To those of you who have fallen head over heels in love with our new series, The Legend of Sun Knight, here’s a bonus treat from PR!. The following 2-pages long comic, which is set at the start of the series, was drawn by a doujin artist, Yukisora. She has very kindly granted us permission to translate and post the comic here. Do take a look at the beautiful artwork on her Deviantart page if you have the time!

Note: Please do not repost the scans elsewhere unless you have Yukisora’s expressed permission. Rabid fangirls should also refrain from posting messages for “moar scans” or “moar releases”. Failure to comply with our request will be seen as a sign that sourcing for and translating doujin artwork is more trouble than it’s worth. (It is easy enough to find doujin artwork, but it is not easy to contact them and obtain their permissions.)

That said, do enjoy the art.

22 Responses

  1. davide3156

    Indeed, ’tis…interesting. Any chance of having the art of some, um, *female* characters posted next?

    • Kazuki89

      Sorry to say, I highly doubt you’ll see any female characters in this novel – unless you’re talking about maids or so?
      It’s about knights (men) after all. :P

    • davide3156

      What about the “Undying Witch”? Unless it’s been mistranslated, and it’s actually a wizard or warlock or sorceror instead of a wizardess/witch/sorceress…

    • eilinel

      You mean Pink? We are trying to get artist permission to upload her avatar for the character page. Other than that, no, I don’t think we have any plan for female characters, unless you want to draw it yourself and let us post it =p.

    • davide3156

      So Pink is her name? Being illiterate in regards to most Oriental languages…I haven’t read the novels already.

    • erialis

      Yes. We’ll put up more artwork and links to great fanart in time, so you guys can see how they’re supposed to look like (as opposed to a very glitzy, girly, and altogether terrifying manhua adaptation of SK that’s coming out next week).

    • erialis

      Whatever gave you that idea? No, the manhua adaptation looks terrifying…terrifyingly girly, glitzy, and not at all like the Sun Knight that we (those of us who have been reading this series in Chinese) are used to.

    • Ksuysha

      Dear erialis,

      I really admire you and your team’s efforts to bring this work to the English-speaking world. You have the perserverance that I did not when I attempted to do this a year ago. However, after reading many of your comments regarding the manhua and looking at sample pages from the release posted on Yu Wo’s blog, I express the following concern:

      I believe you should let others have a chance to look at both the manhua and the novel cover art rather than instilling your own opinions into others who haven’t yet seen both of them. I agree with you that the art style of the manhua is not entirely suited for an action novel, yet it is still extremely beautiful and sophisticated. The fact that Yu Wo gave the artist copyright to her novel means that to a certain extent she approves of the artist’s art style as well as her designs. Both of them have put in a great amount of effort to bring the manhua to us, and as readers, we need to show support even when the results are not to our satisfaction.

      Please don’t misunderstand. I prefer Ya Sha’s art as well,as it is much cleaner with less excessive details, but we do not have the right to force others to have the same taste as us, nor call them rabid fangirls when they do not (I have read your comment on OSS, calling the manhua an “abomination” and such). Constructive criticism and objective analysis is much more appreciated than bashing.I find the artist actually quite talented.

      Furthermore, support for the artist means support for Yu Wo.The manhua would for sure prompt more readers to seeking the novel.

      Through your translations, you show yourself to be an adept user of languages. Please let your comments reflect the same level of maturity and consideration demonstrated in your writing.

      I am sorry if this seems like an over-reaction, but your comment above seems overly-reactive as well.

      Once again I would like to express my thanks for PR’s translating of this to English, as it is much easier to translate the novel to Russian based off of PR’s translations than the original manuscript.

      regards,

      Ksuysha

    • erialis

      OK. I wrote a really long reply to this, but accidentally deleted it, so I have to write it all over again.

      Hello, Ksuysha,

      I apologize (not to you, but in general to those who are concerned) sincerely for two things: one, implying that the artist’s work is so bad that all people who read it must be retards, and two, for almost-outright-stating that people who like the artwork are retards. I agree, that was a strong and very negative series of comments I made a month ago. The comments were largely, not completely, melodramatic, and they was written in the belief that people would be able to distinguish an opinion from a fact and take the opinions with a large pinch of salt. However, I must admit that it was not completely melodrama either, and I did think at one point that people who read the adaptation and liked it must be retards/rabid fangirls, and for that, I do apologize. It’s obviously disrespectful and rather immature, even if they were mostly said jokingly.

      I do have to point out, however, that I don’t agree with you on two other things. For one, I do not believe that supporting the manhua, either by keeping my opinions to myself or making them more nuanced, means that I’m supporting Yu Wo/ SK. If I care enough about the series/author to be concerned that the series is not drawn according the the image of the novels, or that the manhua does not live up to the novels, and to actually dislike it as a result, then so be it. Supporting SK does not mean that I should show support for everything about it, including the manhua. It’s not logical. I can still support the series even as I rant about the adaptation. In fact, if I didn’t give so much of a damn about SK, I wouldn’t have been half as pissed off as I was about the lousy adaptation (imo). Oddly enough, I’m not that hung up about it now, so perhaps I am less supportive of SK now.

      Note that I should and do respect the artist for putting in the effort, but it does not warrant my or anyone’s support. If I support someone for the effort they put into their work, then I would have to support a lot of people in this world. What I do agree is that it does warrant respect for the effort, which I haven’t shown, hence the apology. But I maintain that it does not warrant support.

      Secondly, if one argues that a manhua adaptation would help attract more readers, then I can always retort with an argument that a GOOD manhua adaptation would help attract more readers, even as it manages to preserve more of the author’s original intent, rather than losing it. I myself was more concerned with whether the artist has sufficiently considered the author’s intent when she drew the manhua and not whether the manhua will attract more readers – a concern not unfounded since Cai Hong Zhong has frequently failed to capture important aspects of the 1/2 Prince series and has thus diminished the enjoyment of a number of readers while reading 1/2 Prince, and even caused some to no longer support 1/2 Prince. Similarly, the art style of the SK manhua adaptation, as well as the way in which the characters were portrayed through their actions in the sample pages of the manhua, did heavily suggest that the artist may fail to adequately capture aspects of the series such as its anti-stereotypical nature, making the characters too effeminate in their behavior, and so on.

      As a translator yourself, surely you understand the difficulty that lies in capturing the author’s intent through word choice when translating. The same holds true for the artist. I do not doubt that she did make the effort to understand and capture the author’s intent, but whether she has successfully done so is another issue altogether. Even though PR! gets tons of good comments, I do wonder still if I do justice to the series when I translate and edit. But precisely because the author’s intent is everything to me as a translator, I was – and still am, a little – annoyed when I saw how greatly the artist’s characterization of the characters deviated from original. It is not a matter of whether I like the art style or not. I freely admit that if the series in question is not SK but a shoujo manga, I would definitely enjoy the art style. My quibble with the art style is that it fails to capture the essence of SK. However, such an argument really has no meaning, because ultimately when all is said and done, it’s largely a matter of taste, and “good” is subjective in this case. We could also debate all day about what Yu Wo intended when she wrote the two series and never quite figure out if Cai and the other artist have done/will do a good job on adapting the series.

      That said, I do think that people should be allowed to form their own opinions, and I know that my opinions might have a slightly bigger weight on some readers, so I’ll keep my opinions to myself for the time being to prevent myself from making people dislike the manhua before they’ve read it. Truth be told, though, I really have no more opinions to hand out, nor do I have any intention of coming across like someone hell-bent on forcing my opinions on others any further, which is what it looks like – even to me – now that I look back at it, despite knowing that I wrote most of them without such an intention, and that I did not feel any genuine resentment, ill-will or dislike for the artist and those who actually like the artwork.

      So Ksuysha, while I am not apologizing to you per se, I do need to thank you for making me think over this matter again. Although I still cannot completely agree with your reasoning, I do think you have a reasonable point.

      Regards,
      Eri

      PS: I have already re-written this three times, and don’t intend to re-write anymore, but if anyone wonders why I’ve rewritten it this many times, it’s because I do take the matter seriously enough to examine and re-examine my own opinions on the matter.

  2. tofu

    to be precise, pink is a necromancer ^^
    and yukisora really did a great job on creating a doujin of LSK.. ;3;

    • erialis

      A witch AND a necromancer…but better stop here, for fear of spoilers. I wish wordpress would give us spoiler tags for the comment system…

  3. Mega

    …i have to admit i stopped reading those long comments mid-way ;)

    anyways, great work on putting the doujin up!

  4. Aki

    Storm Knight, ahh, you are so cute! You are my ideal si–I mean, brother~~

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