“Seconds Cover” by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Original image here. | Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

 


Thanks to my brother and his wife for their Christmas/birthday gift of Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley, he of Scott Pilgrim fame. It’s not nearly as epic a read (in the sense of length), but it had things to say that resonated with me. Sometimes you need that more than another paperback about dragons and magic. (Which I’m also currently reading, guiltily.)

I needed a break from writing about stuff for the past month, since it has been pretty crazy. I have work-coming-to-an-end-stress, family stress, holiday stress, and creative stress, so the blog just needed to not happen for a bit. I plan to unveil a bit more about what I wrote about my grandfather in the near future, but for right now, I am much more excited to be embarking upon a new project with somebody who has been a great help to me in crafting a keepsake for friends. I have to mention something about it here, because it is just plain ludicrous the degree of labor I’ve put into it.

A great long while ago, I ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with some good friends downstate. We had a ridiculous amount of fun, and I even met several new people through it. Since it came to an end a couple of years ago, I have felt nostalgia like no other. In part to give a keepsake to my badass party members and in part to assuage these yearnings, I slowly set about creating a book of the campaign. Key to this was the addition of some art. Sadly, none of our players really drew any of us while we were playing, so in addition to sketches of maps and notes I’d made about the adventure already, I figured I should commission some art revealing our characters.

I’d love to reveal some of the art I used, but the fact is I paid for single-use for it and I don’t want to make it available to anybody on the internet who can Google Image search. The point, however, is that I partnered with a few great artists to illustrate the work, including one who I am pleased to say I will be working with on an upcoming project.

One of the images I made myself in the interest of speeding up production. Click to enlarge. | Kenneth Lowe, 2014.

One of the images I made myself in the interest of speeding up production. Click to enlarge. | Kenneth Lowe, 2014.

The project will be a comic book, one that will truly delve into the Asian influences on my fictional sensibilities. Explaining more right now is to invite disaster, but we are planning a four-page pilot project, and I’m even comfortable showing you the script. It’s wide open right now. The idea here is to provide people with a glimpse of what the art style will look like. The story of the comic itself will have a similar feel, but focus on other specific characters. I’ll talk more about my collaborator once we have something to show for ourselves.

Have a gander at the script in the meantime. Some things you should know going in:

  • The narrator’s name, “Li Jun Fan” (Properly: 李振藩, or “Lǐ zhèn fān”) is actually the birth name of Bruce Lee. I had thought this meant “Little Dragon,” but, silly me, that’s another name of his. This one means “Return Again,” and his mother so dubbed him with the hope he would return to the United States after his parents took him to Hong Kong as an infant. This does nothing to dispel my belief that Bruce Lee is some sort of once-and-future dragon deity.
  • Li Jun Fan, while quite a character, is just a supporting member of the cast in the book. As you can see, however, he invented Kung Fu all by himself, so he’s very important.

Enjoy the script.

http://bit.ly/1xZUQau | Li Jun Fan Invents Kung Fu! A pilot project by Kenneth Lowe.