Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
“The Martial World is ruled by a mysterious emperor whose five armies are each headed by a cruel and highly skilled kung fu master. Lei Kung, a soldier in one of these armies, grows tired of his master’s evil ways and seeks enlightenment elsewhere. However, he soon finds that he’s been chosen as the one who will put an end to the emperor’s tyrannical rule, personally! Allegiances are blurred as techniques are perfected, and Lei Kung becomes less certain who’s friend and who’s foe in each chapter.
Fists fly, limbs are lost and blood vessels burst in this tale of furious rivals, supernatural masters, walking corpses, and above all, raging kung fu!”
This is the story of Infinite Kung Fu, a new release by Top Shelf Productions. It is written and illustrated by Kagan Mcleod who has worked as an illustrator for Entertainment Weekly, GQ, People, and Time. He has been publishing Infinite Kung Fu since 2000 and it was previously distributed internationally by Diamond Distributors. This new release is the first time the complete work has been collected into a single volume and includes 200 new pages.
The story might sound all-too-familiar to those versed in Kung Fu cinema, whether from the Shaw Brothers’ era or the Kung Fu movies of the 70′s Blaxpoitation era. But by taking inspiration from these sources, and more, Mcleod has created something greater than the sum of its parts.
“Here, the corpses pile high as Kung Fu is found in its most lethal form.” — Infinite Kung Fu
Mcleod’s illustrations are, expectedly, gorgeous. The watercolour technique he has used is reminiscent of East Asian ink and wash paintings, with each frame and page composed with an eye for dynamism and cinematography that many film-makers would kill to have.
Did I mention yet that the story contains enough zombies and gore to satisfy even the most hardcore horror movie fan?
The story centres around the conceit that the cycle of rebirth has been disturbed due to the dwindling of life on Earth. The newly deceased who have not attained significant power during life have taken to occupying the bodies of corpses in an effort to fight their way back into human bodies. The Eight Immortals are trying to find the mortal students that they can train to fight this growing evil while they take care of the spirit plane, but every student they train turns to the forbidden poison Kung Fu and becomes corrupted. Meanwhile, a young soldier is recruited by an old hermit inhabiting the body of a corpse as it was the nearest body he could find after the soldier accidentally tore his soul away in the last moments of a long meditation. This soldier is tasked with finding the Immortals and learning from them what is required to right the balance of the world.
“Infinite Kung Fu is glorious and deranged in the way that all comics should be” — Warren Ellis
The pacing is excellent and Mcleod makes very good use of its 460+ pages. The book starts with an introduction by Gordon Liu, a Chinese Martial Arts movie actor who has starred in film since the 70s, and was recently seen in Kill Bill, and ends with a history of Kung Fu and Kung Fu cinema, and clearly demonstrates that Mcleod has approached this work with the kind of obsessive compulsive attention to detail that we have come to expect from the greats like Moore and Miller.
This is a one-of-a-kind book and deserves a place on the shelf of any graphic novel lover who has ever seen a zombie or Kung Fu movie. In other words, all of you.
