About

“A Boy & his Ox” is a graphic-novel-in-progress. I am posting the thumbnail pages as I finish them. Once the entire book is thumbnailed, I will edit the text and begin drawing the full-size pages on Bristol in brush or brush pen. The images on this blog are 4.25″ x 6.25″ (including the borders). That is relatively large as thumbnails go, but I will be enlarging them later onto 9″ x 12″ paper in blueline and inking those directly. This saves me the usual penciling stage (since I’ve done rough pencils for the thumbnails already).

This particular take on the famous Buddhist “Oxherding” cycle is based on both the 16th-century Pu Ming version and the Kakuan version. The version attributed to Kakuan (Kuo-an Shih-yuan,12th century Sung Dynasty) traditionally has the empty circle at #8, while the Pu Ming version appears to have the empty circle at the end, #10. These two variants correspond to the Mahayana (Zen) and Theravada interpretations of Buddhism. I am using both as reference, since the Oxherding cycle is well-known throughout East Asia in a variety of forms. My own experience of the cycle is from seeing the paintings along the outside walls of Buddhist temples in Korea when I was a child.

I started this project in 2011 after initially considering a “fractal” text narrative based on the Oxherding cycle. Since I was (and am still) in the process of retranslating “The Nine Cloud Dream” (a 17th-century Buddhist novel by Kim Man-jung) and “The Emperor” (a syncretic Taoist historical allegory about Korea by Yi Mun-yol), I was immersed in the intersections of Korean religious and philosophical traditions. This graphic novel is also inspired by my attempts to approach the Zen poetry of Master Cho Oh-hyun as a form of koan.

— Heinz Insu Fenkl