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DW: Now, the hero of the story is Kyrie, who is oblivious to everything going on when the story starts. He seems like a good kid who hasn’t gotten a lot of breaks in life. Who is he before he meets Master Fong and was he destined to be a hero or was he made one by the events?
JL: Like I said earlier, I’ve always wanted to create a truly iconic character and it’s my hope that once the book comes out, and then, fingers crossed, the movie, Kyrie will have the kind of impact on people that a character like Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen had on me. I’ve always been a sucker for the ‘regular person finds out that they’re so much more’ kind of story. I mean, orphaned kid living under the stairs finds out that he’s really a wizard? How freakin’ cool is that, right? So yeah, Kyrie is a good kid when we first meet him who has been dealt a pretty bad hand in life. As far as he knows his mom died while giving birth to him after his dad skipped out on her. So like a lot of people, he’s just going from one paycheck to the next, working at a sandwich shop while he tries to find his footing as an artist.
The second part of this question is really interesting to me because the answer is actually both. Kyrie was destined to be the Son of Shaolin because of who his father was but it’s ultimately up to him to decide if he wants to be an actual hero.
DW: Kyrie is from Harlem, and though it’s popular to say, the city really does become a character in the book. How well do you know Harlem personally and what do you think it is about that city that makes it unique from other places in the world?
JL: I’ve spent some time there over the last couple of years but far less than you’d probably expect. The first love of my life wasn’t books or movies. It was basketball. I played in college and then professionally for a season in Mexico and the now defunct USBL here in the States, and I was obsessed with both Rucker Park in Harlem and The Cage on West 4th. I would read everything I could about those places and the culture, and I would daydream about a road trip to NY to play there one day. I’m from Atlanta and could have easily set the book there I suppose but there’s just something about New York that feels so cinematic.
From the jump, music was going to play a huge part in the project, obviously the film more so than the comic, but hip-hop was a huge influence on the creation of both. I did most of the writing with either ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’, ‘Illmatic’, or ‘Ready To Die’ on repeat in my office. There’s also this new cat out of Hell’s Kitchen named Marlon Craft who I like so much that I wrote him into the movie, although he doesn’t even know that yet. New York just has that thing, you know? The subways. The alleys. The bodegas. The idea of juxtaposing the Eastern philosophies of kung fu against such a Western back drop was just really appealing to me.
As far as being more specific to Harlem, that came from a couple of different things. One, Kyrie is an artist so with the Graffiti Hall of Fame being in Harlem, it seemed like a good fit. Two, there’s obviously been a lot of gentrification in Harlem and I thought it would be cool to use the backstory of one of the characters in the book to explain what’s been going on in the neighborhood as opposed to the typical theories on gentrification. Again, I don’t want to give too much away now but hopefully that last sentence will make sense once someone has read the book.
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DW: I really like the art on the book, it has a clean, classic style but also has that edge you associate with a street-level book set in New York. Who is your art team and how did you put it together?
JL: The art absolutely blew me away when I first saw it. And it still does. Caanan White is the illustrator and I will forever be indebted to him for the work he put in on this. Ryan was a fan of some of his earlier stuff and was the one who recommended him. I knew after one phone call that he was the guy as we just really clicked. And now we have this shorthand that makes the writing so much easier as he really knows what I like and what I don’t like from a visual standpoint. I’ve actually started a small company called Size 13 Comics with my manager Bernie Cahill and we’re already in production on three other projects with Caanan penciling and inking all three.
As far as colors, same thing with Diego Rodriguez in that he just blew me away with how much energy he brought to the inks. I was a little naive at first as to how much effect the colors could have on the emotion and mood of a page but Diego’s work woke me up to that fact pretty quickly. Same with Simon Bowland who lettered the book. He just came in and nailed it on pretty much his first pass. There were a couple of instances where I’d look at a page and think there was no way to really make it flow and he’d prove me wrong every time.
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I also got a lot of help from Louise Simonson and Shahriar Fouladi who edited the book. Certainly couldn’t have done it without them.
DW: Okay, so let’s end with you putting your marketing hat on. What is the two-sentence pitch that will get readers to pick up Son of Shaolin?
JL: I’m a little biased but I think the cover image of Kyrie does way more to sell the book than any two sentences. A guy with a Shaolin sword in one hand and a can of spray paint in the other?! I see that and I immediately want to know who he is and what his story is. But again, I’m a bit partial to those kinds of things so how about this — and I’m actually going to crib this from Aisha Tyler who wrote an absolutely incredible introduction for the book:
“In this story, and in others like it finally emerging, there rests an expanded universe that doesn’t just represent our world more accurately, but the essence of the superhero saga more perfectly — that there is a hero in ALL of us, and that any of us could be a Jedi Knight, or a galactic law enforcer, or the very last descendant of an ancient Shaolin master.”
If you look at what’s happening on our Facebook page right now, we’ve gained over 20,000 followers in the last month since I posted the first image of Kyrie and I think that really speaks to Aisha’s point. People are ready for all kinds of heroes. Not just the ones we’ve been getting for the last couple of decades.
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(Last Updated July 10, 2017 2:49 pm )
About Dan Wickline
Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
