Deluxe Volume 7

(outer flaps of the box show the color portraits of Chen Gong, Gao Shun, Dian Wei, Xu Chu, “Crouching Dragon”, Hua Tuo)
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(Chen Mou talking about how he practiced art in class when his teachers didn’t punish him too harshly for doodling. He didn’t care about Three Kingdoms until he started playing KOEI Three Kingdom games, and he became a TK buff as a result of researching for the game; mainly a lot of old information he had mentioned elsewhere)
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Ravages Trading Cards
Ravages actually had released game cards in as early as 2001, it was when Chen Mou had just started to syndicate “Ravages” in “New Youth”, while a trading card company had also wanted to collaborate with Tongli for a series. Chen Mou took time out of his schedule to draw the line art of the characters who had made an appearence in his work, and that company hired colorists to color the illustrations. The first set of cards was produced within a very short amoung of time.
Due to popular demand, that company continued to produce a second (74 characters) and a third (61 characters) set. Many of these players went on to develope an interest in the comics series. Below (not shown in this blog post) are from the first set of 109 characters, with a few exceptions of later-shown characters that look different from their final design in the comics. How many do you recognize?
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Editor Comments
(I don’t want to translate this word-for-word, so will list out important bits)
* Chen Mou designed “wanted posters” for the Handicapped Warriors character concepts during Ravages’s initial marketing campaign; when this set of artwork was repurposed in a re-print of the “Unhuman” series, some fan mistakenly thought the second half of the reprint will introduce a new story about Sima Yi and Shan Wu Ling. So we need to clarify that it was a false rumor.
* More than a decade later, Ravages would be getting another gamification opportunity, this time with Gameone… They even invited Chen Mou to illustrate the 150 characters of the previous 3 sets, and that he had to take time out of his busy syndication schedule to produce the 4th set of 55 characters.
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