BURL BURLINGAME / BBURLINGAME@STARBULLETIN.COM Phil Yeh's famous Winged Tiger partners up with Jon J. Murakami's local-style dragons in a new book.

Here be dragons -- and
a winged tiger, too

SOME comics are drawn in a fever pitch -- papers flying, ink spattering, the reek of high-caffeine soda and sugar blasting through arteries, the air blue with brainsmoke -- and some are created in a more leisurely fashion.

The charming children's comic "The Winged Tiger and the Dragons of Hawaii" took, oh, about a decade to create.

Good thing it's a timeless story. The long-awaited collaboration between globe-hopping cartooniste Phil Yeh and Hawaii's Jon J. Murakami crosses Yeh's gentle tiger hero with some slapstick Pacific dragons and the result is entertaining and funny. Yeh's usual hidden agenda of teaching tolerance, education and reading skills is also in evidence.

But it's a slim book. What took so long? We've been waiting, man!

"Phil and I have been talking about doing something for something like 10 years," said Murakami. "Whenever he was in the islands, we'd have a ball working on stuff, and we discovered that we work well together. We have similar artistic and storytelling styles, and it just meshed."

BURL BURLINGAME / BBURLINGAME@STARBULLETIN.COM Jon J. Murakami not only reads, writes and illustrates books, he's a bookstore employee at Borders Books & Music.

Murakami, probably best-known in Hawaii for his Local Kine greeting cards and comic strip "The University of Diverse City" -- and numerous contributions to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin -- met Yeh in 1989, when the California-based artist was touring the world on a Wally Amos-inspired literacy campaign.

This book is actually a test model of an upcoming full-color collaboration between the two, maybe out next year.

"We had a kind of rough outline of the story, but I'd draw a page and send it to Phil, and he'd counter with something else in return. We were always trying to surprise each other with the direction the story took."

Directions? They're musical. These Pacific dragons include Lilly, who loves to play the violin but keeps sitting on bristly and jealous Urchie the Sea Urchin -- ouch! And there's flute-playing Erin the Asian dragon, whose heroism overshadows her musical ability -- yay! And Geo, the drum-playing jungle dragon who has on-the-job personnel hassles - bummer!

And there are others. We're talking saxophone-playing Red, a Dark Ages castle dragon. And Rusty, a robotic dragon (think Mecha-Godzilla's cute nephew) who lives on an asteroid and plays the keyboards. Well, that's logical.

In each of their lives, the Winged Tiger appears at an opportune moment and hustles them through a magic hoop that transports them to -- well, it seems they're forming a band in Hawaii.

Except for the covers, the book is presented in glorious black-and-white. That's good, because otherwise the intricately detailed artwork wouldn't be as visible. Kids can always color it themselves, as Yeh knows -- it's a deliberate way of making readers interact.

One thing that permeates the book is the sheer joy of drawing and storytelling. It inhabits every scratchy line, every word of dialogue, every overly decorated page. These guys have fun doing what they do, and what they do brings a smile to your face.