This is part of a two-page spread from Ramayana: The Divine Loophole, a marvelous retelling of the famous Indian epic story by Sanjay Patel.
Patel is a Pixar animator who earlier created The Little Book of Hindu Deities, also recommended.
The Ramayana is a story most people in India know something about. Vishnu, one of the three primary gods in the Hindu pantheon, needs to defeat Ravana, a powerful ten-headed demon, so he reincarnates himself on earth as the human Rama, a warrior-prince with blue skin. Rama falls in love with Sita, who gets abducted by Ravana, setting the stage for years of wandering and fighting. Along the way we meet the monkey god Hanuman, a golden deer (meeting Sita, above), shape-shifting demons, and an army of monkeys and bears.
I particularly enjoy Patel's drawing style. In the back of the book, he provides several pages showing his hand-drawn sketches, which he scans and imports into Illustrator, where he creates his final, ultraprecise geometric artwork. Also included is a sort of biographical dictionary of everything from gods to animals.
Here, Rama approaches the city gates of Ravana on the island of Lanka just before the final battle.
This would be a great book to read with kids, because the text is quite short, and each turn of the page reveals a discrete chunk of the whole story.
