Infinite Kung Fu (click for source) By Emlyn Roberts-Harry
Chances are good that you already know whether or not you want to read Infinite Kung Fu purely based on the title. It's a beautifully drawn martial arts adventure by the hugely talented cartoonist, Kagan McLeod, and if you have any fondness at all for classic kung fu movies, you really ought to give it a look.
It's set in an unspecified time and place called the "Martial World", implied to be our Earth in the far future after the total collapse of civilisation. Our hero is Lei Kung, a soldier in the emperor's army who ends up being recruited by the Eight Immortals to, naturally, save the world. Cue "wax on, wax off" training montages, a trip to prison where he perfects his skills, and all the ridiculously violent kung fu action you could possibly hope for.
Chances are good that you already know whether or not you want to read Infinite Kung Fu purely based on the title. It's a beautifully drawn martial arts adventure by the hugely talented cartoonist, Kagan McLeod, and if you have any fondness at all for classic kung fu movies, you really ought to give it a look.
It's set in an unspecified time and place called the "Martial World", implied to be our Earth in the far future after the total collapse of civilisation. Our hero is Lei Kung, a soldier in the emperor's army who ends up being recruited by the Eight Immortals to, naturally, save the world. Cue "wax on, wax off" training montages, a trip to prison where he perfects his skills, and all the ridiculously violent kung fu action you could possibly hope for.
Click for source That is one of the more notable things about the book: as stylised as the art is, it is remarkably bloody. Pretty much all of it is played for laughs, though, the sort of splatstick comedy you find in Peter Jackson's Braindead, and it's often accompanied by some of the funniest onomatopoeias you're likely to see in a comic. This is a book where people get punched so hard they explode, and the noise they make when they explode is "BLOOSH". It's pretty fantastic.
It's not a book which is particularly concerned with making sense, and it’s all the better for it. Where most of the classic kung fu films of the '80s were fairly restricted in their budget, McLeod takes full advantage of the fact that you can do whatever you want in a comic and really lets the craziness take over. The world is largely inspired by imperial China, but there's also a city straight out of a '70s blaxploitation film, complete with a master fighter called Moog Joogular, who will probably be quite familiar to fans of genre pastiches like Black Dynamite.
Moog ends up being probably the most memorable character, in no small part due to his fighting style, which involves pulling off his own arms and throwing them at his enemies. Lei Kung himself is, if anything, the book's weak point, since the story closely follows the Campbellian Hero's Journey and so requires a fairly archetypal character as the focus. Then again, considering how mad everything and everyone else in the book is, it is quite nice to have a centre of relative normalcy from whose perspective we can experience the story.
It's not a book which is particularly concerned with making sense, and it’s all the better for it. Where most of the classic kung fu films of the '80s were fairly restricted in their budget, McLeod takes full advantage of the fact that you can do whatever you want in a comic and really lets the craziness take over. The world is largely inspired by imperial China, but there's also a city straight out of a '70s blaxploitation film, complete with a master fighter called Moog Joogular, who will probably be quite familiar to fans of genre pastiches like Black Dynamite.
Moog ends up being probably the most memorable character, in no small part due to his fighting style, which involves pulling off his own arms and throwing them at his enemies. Lei Kung himself is, if anything, the book's weak point, since the story closely follows the Campbellian Hero's Journey and so requires a fairly archetypal character as the focus. Then again, considering how mad everything and everyone else in the book is, it is quite nice to have a centre of relative normalcy from whose perspective we can experience the story.
Click for source Since this is a kung fu story, and probably a third of the book consists of fight scenes, it's fair to say that it's the action we're really here for, and Infinite Kung Fu delivers as much as any reasonable person could expect on that front. The stylised nature of the art means it can be much more exaggerated and expressive than if it were aiming for realism, and that's what really makes the fights work. They're gorgeously drawn, hilariously ultraviolent and hit the perfect balance between chaos and comprehensibility, particularly the 100-page brawl involving hundreds of fighters that is the finale.
The inclusion of zombies is perhaps a step too far in the mash-up of kung fu, Westerns, horror and assorted other B-movies that the book's going for, but that's really only because zombies are so ridiculously ubiquitous these days. And there's no denying that they work very well as the bad guys here, since the heroes can slaughter as many of them as they like and the reader need never feel guilty about enjoying watching them get brutally dismembered.
If you're a fan of the absurd in comics, if you're tired of creators who try to make their work "realistic" and "grounded" and miss the sheer preposterousness innate to so much in the medium, then Infinite Kung Fu is for you. It's an epic hero's journey, an amazingly pretty piece of cartooning and, at 400+ pages, a steal at any price.
The inclusion of zombies is perhaps a step too far in the mash-up of kung fu, Westerns, horror and assorted other B-movies that the book's going for, but that's really only because zombies are so ridiculously ubiquitous these days. And there's no denying that they work very well as the bad guys here, since the heroes can slaughter as many of them as they like and the reader need never feel guilty about enjoying watching them get brutally dismembered.
If you're a fan of the absurd in comics, if you're tired of creators who try to make their work "realistic" and "grounded" and miss the sheer preposterousness innate to so much in the medium, then Infinite Kung Fu is for you. It's an epic hero's journey, an amazingly pretty piece of cartooning and, at 400+ pages, a steal at any price.
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