Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin

CBR spoke with Geof Darrow about the newest installment of Shaolin Cowboy, kung fu movies and his artistic process.

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Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

Between his animation work, his collaborations with Frank Miller and his work on The Matrix — Geof Darrow’s art has made an incredible impression on popular culture. His innovative approach to action and world-building has made his series Shaolin Cowboy a fan favorite since the release of its first issue in 2004. Darrow is returning to the saga of his nameless warrior next week with the release of Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin #1 from Dark Horse Comics.

Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin #1 follows the titular hero as he rescues a young Komodo Dragon from almost certain death and battles a new group of villains in the desert. CBR recently spoke with Darrow about the upcoming series and his impressive tenure working on Shaolin Cowboy. He also discussed his love of kung fu films, his creative process and the way he approaches drawing his epic, intricate fight scenes.

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

CBR: You’ve been writing and drawing Shaolin Cowboy since 2004. What is it about the character that has sustained your interest over the years?

Geof Darrow: I like it because I can do whatever I want with him. He’s kind of a catalyst. He doesn’t have an agenda, really. And it goes back to Western samurai films, where you just have a guy that wanders into something, and things happen, and he has to get himself out of it. But I’ve always liked that he doesn’t have a lot of baggage attached to him other than everybody wanting to kill him for various reasons. Everybody’s got a grudge against him because he killed somebody’s cousin or it’s just ridiculous stuff. Like, he cut somebody off in line or he took their parking spot. You hear about these stories where people get killed for things like parking spaces or stupid stuff happens. That happens quite often. Just using violence to resolve anything is pretty stupid, although it’s what I draw all the time.

Has your view of the character changed over the years, or have you always had a constant desire to throw him into any sort of situation?

It’s been pretty constant. I mean, I should have him take off in space at some point. I’ve always wanted to have him fight a superhero. Maybe I’ll do that sometime. Because I really like kung fu movies and those kung fu movies. It always cracks me up because there’s so many of these points — these are pretty special points in the body — and if you touch them, you can free somebody or paralyze their power or put them to sleep or make them laugh or make them itch uncontrollably.

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

Is that in Shaolin Cowboy: Who’ll Stop the Reign where he uses those points to heal from a bullet wound?

Yeah, and he does it in this one too, but for different reasons. I think most people’s knowledge of martial arts films from China are Enter the Dragon, the Bruce Lee stuff, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And that touches on it a little bit, but some of them are really crazy.

If you go all the way back to the Tale of the Monkey King — which is an amazing book — It’s like 1000 pages, and he’s like a superhero. He can do anything. He fights monsters he flies. He’s got this cloud that he flies around on and a staff that was taken from a Pole of the Earth and weighs 10 tons. And he can shrink it down and put it in his ear! I mean, it’s just absolutely nuts. And it was written, I don’t know, around 600 AD or something like that. Dragon Ball started out as the story of the monkey king. It’s a really great, great, great book. And they made God knows how many versions of it.

Do you have a favorite version of it?

Actually, I’d seen it as a kid but it was a cartoon that the Japanese made. It was called Alakazam the Great. It was that great Toei ’60s animation that really had a certain style. And I think because it was in America, there’s no way they were going to talk about Buddha or any other kind of god other than Jesus. So they turned it into magic. And I saw it as a kid. The voices were all the voices that dubbed the Godzilla movies. But that was my first introduction. I didn’t realize it was the Monkey King because he was called Alakazam. And he wasn’t a god on earth.

Then, Stephen Chow, who did Shaolin Soccer, did a version that’s great called Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. It’s a comedy, but it’s so crazy. That was a real good one.

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Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

You’ve been working with colorist Dave Stewart since the second arc of Shaolin Cowboy. Has the way you two work together changed over the years? What’s your collaboration like?

Originally at Dark Horse, I was having trouble with the colorists that were quitting. And so, I knew Dave is really good. I asked the editor if I can work with Dave, but they said “Oh, no, he’s too busy.” But, I got his number anyway from Mike Mignola. And I called him up and asked him if he’d be interested. He said yes, so I sent him books that had the type of color I liked, which were woodblock prints from Japan. I love those values. And he was the first guy that really asked me what I wanted.

I can’t color. it’s just too much work. I don’t know if I would do a very good job, but it’d just be too much work. And I like seeing a fresh eye on something. Because every time I get pages from [Dave Stewart], it’s like Christmas because he’s really intuitive. My drawings are very complicated and I don’t know how he always managed to figure out that this little triangle on the back is part of somebody’s neck or their thumb.

Even I have trouble when I’m inking it. Because I ink on a lightbox. I draw it on a sheet of paper. And then I put a piece of Strathmore over that and ink on the lightbox. And sometimes I can’t figure out what I drew. I have to lift it up and look at it follow the line to say, “Oh, this connects Oh, that’s his elbow sticking up there.” Because I draw a lot of overlapping figures and things and that can be a problem. But he always knows. I just let him go.

And when he sends it to me, most of my comments are, “Could you put more blood? Put more blood on his socks.” But otherwise, he’s very intuitive. If I had to change four things in a whole issue, I’d be surprised. Like. I just got issue #4 from him, there was only one thing I wanted him to add — which was once again blood on somebody’s face. And that was it.

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

At seven issues, Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin is set to be almost twice as long as the previous two arcs. Did working on a longer series change your approach?

I didn’t plan it that way. What you see in the first issue was originally just going to be him with those various characters. And it was going to be maybe three issues or four issues. But then I got this idea and then it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It was just one thing after another, and I kept adding stuff — especially at the end of the last three issues. There’s a kind of revenge motif in it. Except this time, he’s the one that wants to get revenge. He’s supposed to be a monk, but he’s not a very good one. For the first time, he really gets angry. And that was only going to be like one issue too, but it turned into three issues. I make way too much work for myself.

My biggest mistake was, that I always say I’m going to pencil an issue, then ink it, then start the next one. But once I got the drawing part going, it was going pretty well. I got some rhythm going. And I drew like 205 pages without stopping. Like “Oh, man, I gotta ink all this.” But it was during COVID So there was nothing else I could do.

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

Could you talk a little bit about your decision to tell the story as a flashback from the Komodo Dragon’s point of view?

I saw some special on National Geographic, and they were talking about the Komodo Dragons and how the mother has to protect the nest because there’s a limited food supply and the males see the babies as later day competition for food. So they’ll eat the babies. I’d talked to my good friend, the late Andrew Vachss, who was a child rights activist, amongst other things, and he would often talk about “family of choice” and how blood doesn’t always have to dictate who you choose as your family. And that always stuck with me. I thought, “What if I do something about that?” It has to do with a lizard who decides the Shaolin monk is his dad, because his own dad wants to kill him. I thought that was funny, so it just went on from there.

I’d already drawn these Komodo Dragons in the prior issue on the roofs of buildings. I don’t know if people noticed them, but I always kind of thought that they’d introduced the species into the city to take care of carrion and all the homeless people nobody cared about, so the streets were clean. That gets mentioned a little bit in this one, but it’s just a weird idea. This place where he’s at is not a nice town. It’s a fictional Texas. I like Texas. But there are things about Texas politics that I do not like.

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Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

Having the Shaolin Cowboy become a father figure to the baby dragon, while everyone is trying to kill them both feels almost reminiscent of Lone Wolf and Cub. Were you intentionally paying homage to that series?

Not intentionally. I mean, I love those movies. I had seen the first one in like 1973 because they released the first film during the whole kung fu craze. I thought it was a kung fu movie when I went to see it. There’s a big difference between a kung fu movie and a samurai film. And it was called Lightning Swords of Death. And the trailer cracked me up because it said something like “If you raise a kung fu fist to Itto Ogami, he’ll chop it off!” Trailers like that had really funny dialogue. I went with my brother who was in Chicago going to art school and oh, my God! These movies are crazy.Like, even in the trailers you see he cuts this guy off at the ankles and the body falls like it’s a tree. And the feet stay planted. It was so cartoony.

And then a comic artist named Doug Rice, who now works in animation and teaches animation. But he told me that there’s a series of these called “the baby cart movies.” I managed to find a book on samurai films and then I found out that it was based on a comic book. And so in the late 70s, I moved to Los Angeles, and I found a Japanese bookstore in Gardena, California. I remember looking up and seeing the binding with this tiny little head of this kid that looked like Daigoro, and I bought the first ten. I had them all in Japanese and looked at them. I still have them all. I still am all in Japanese. I bought a lot of manga. I have a lot of manga still that’s just in Japanese because I just like looking at the drawings. The storytelling is fantastic.

Geof Darrow Dives into the Absurd Kung Fu World of Shaolin Cowboy Cruel to be Kin

You can definitely see some manga influence in your work.

I like that they can take five pages to do something that most comics do in two panels or one panel. In Lone Wolf and Cub, the last fight goes on for like 100 pages. It’s just fantastic.

Could you talk a little about what makes a good action scene to you, and how you go about crafting the fights in Shaolin Cowboy?

A lot of it comes from watching samurai films and westerns and kung fu films. I always try think of a gag. It kind of started in Hardboiled, I think. There’s a sequence in there where he’s fighting that old lady and we came up with this gag where she reaches into the car and grabs his tie, and he’s still trying to drive the car and she’s like, pulling it up, and strangling him. That and watching Buster Keaton films where they have you just have a grain of an idea and you just keep expanding on it. It’s not ad-libbing, but it’s kind of ad-libbing as I draw it, but I like to choreograph it as I’m doing layouts. A lot of it comes from watching films.

How detailed are your scripts for the fight scenes? Are you putting it together at the drawing table?

I’m making it up at the drawing table. I just know he has to fight this guy. And that’s why I kind of go off on tangents. For instance, when he’s fighting the dragon — originally was just going to be him having a kung fu fight. And then it occurred to me that he’s got this tail, so what if he reached around and grabbed the gun and pulled it out of his holster? But I didn’t write any of that stuff.

What can you tell fans about the Shaolin Cowboy’s adversaries in the new arc?

Oddly enough, it’s sort of the end of a trilogy. Something that started in the first book gets tied up in this one finally. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but if you went back, maybe you’d figure it out. I was very bothered by some of the hate towards people of color in the US, and it has to do with how at the end, the real bad guys are these white supremacist guys that he runs afoul of. I mean, there are still monsters and stuff. It’s not heavy-handed — I mean, maybe it is heavy-handed. It’s still pretty crazy and goofy. But the bad guys are hate mongers. That particular hate manifests itself in one person who happens to be related to the character on that giant jellyfish. It’s pretty action-packed!

Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin #1 is due out from Dark Horse Comics on Wednesday, May 18.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/geof-darrow-dives-into-shaolin-cowboy-cruel-to-be-kin/

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