The Pirate Queen - A Graphic Novel of Sworn Sisters, Sorcery and the Ming Coast

Ming China, the spring of the great invasion. The Hundred Flower Lady, magnificent in black lacquer and gold, is queen to the pirate king and brings a thousand ships against Hangzhou. Her sworn younger sister, Shen Lanxin, has been sent down the mountain to stop her.<br><br>

Against them stand the emperor's champion Zhang Kun, a young general who falls in love in the middle of a spear duel; a Daoist immortal with a feather fan; five women generals who fight as one; and the old master herself, who comes down to fight for the other side, because she has already worked out how the war ends.<br><br>

What follows is less a war than an argument between sisters, conducted with iron flutes, thrown spears, a flood raised over a city, a jellyfish the size of a mountain, a man who grows to eight times his height with small golden dragons coming out of his eyes, and an empty city with eight hundred divine soldiers hidden in it.<br><br>

<b>THE PIRATE QUEEN</b> is an 88 page full colour graphic novel adapted from chapters 42 to 44 of <i>The Jade Toad Chronicle</i>, a Ming dynasty novel of sworn sisters, sorcerers and the wars of the coast. Nobody is a monster except the monsters. The queen is never ugly and never a fool. She loses because the game was arranged before she sat down, and her last line is not defiance but a reproach to her own teacher.<br><br>

Nobody dies in this book. The killing outside the city offends heaven's harmony, so an immortal empties the whole battle into a bag.<br><br>