Immortal Studios has come a long way in the past three years. When The Adept Kickstarter launched in 2020, COVID-19 took the world by storm and greatly affected everyone. Despite these setbacks, this company believes in how everyone can “Awaken Your Hero” and managed to successfully release this comic. With this, four more successful Kickstarters were released. These four titles represent the four pillars of our Immortal Storyverse. Immortal presented a panel at both WonderCon 2022 and San Diego Comic Con 2022 where each hall was filled at near capacity. Seeing these successful moments made us realize that we had to do something meaningful for the start of 2023. It was time to acknowledge our community and announce that we will transition from “Immortal 1.0” to “Immortal 2.0” to mark upcoming changes that go beyond releasing comics through Kickstarter.
The Immortal community is important to us, and we wanted to host a live event where we can celebrate both the company and the supporters. Knowing that our supporters believe in the power of our stories, we hosted a special event near the home of The Adept and Chronicles of the Immortal Swordsmen: Los Angeles.
As a martial arts practitioner who attends various martial arts events, it dawned upon me that the Los Angeles area is home to a place that is truly the only one of its own kind in the world: the Martial Arts History Museum in Burbank, CA. The museum focuses on the history and influence of martial arts worldwide, especially how it influenced media such as movies and comics. As we are creating history by bringing both the works of Shiao Yi and the Wuxia genre to a global home, this felt like an obvious choice.
After discussions between our team and museum president Michael Matsuda, we held our event on February 11, 2023. Besides being our very first in-person community event, this would also be the museum’s first event of the year. Nearly two months of planning went into this event, and we made it very clear from the beginning that we wanted to focus on our supporters. As such, we created a program that would involve the audience.
Hosting our event was our very own Head of Publishing, Hank Kanalz. He is a veteran with over 30 years of experience in the comic industry (including Marvel Comics and DC Comics). We were happy to have him host the event throughout, as he kept the audience and speakers thoroughly engaged.
With our comics and the museum embodying the spirit of martial arts, we decided to start off appropriately with a martial arts demo on the red carpet in front of the museum. Unbeknownst to many, our Immortal logo was created by martial arts expert Celina Duffy. Celina demonstrated the art of Filipino weaponry with her friend Guro Alvin Catacutan. Once the demo concluded, the audience took photos at the red carpet.
After the red-carpet photography moment, everyone went inside the museum for the rest of the program. The capacity for the event section is 75 people; we had nearly 100 guests and there were no more seats available! We were very surprised at this outcome, and Michael Matsuda confirmed to us that it was the first time any event went over capacity at the museum. It was a real testament to how far we have come from having exclusively done online interactions to our first in-person event.
Next was an introduction from our CEO ‘Peter’ Payhuan Shiao, first presenting a special video commemorating both the legacy of his late father Shiao Yi, and our journey up to now. Shiao Yi was one of the most prolific novelists and screenwriters of the 20th century. He wrote 55 novels, and his stories were adapted into hundreds of hours of TV and movies. His scripted movies featured martial arts actors such as the late Jimmy Wang Yu and Wei Pai (of Five Deadly Venoms fame). On the journey front, Payhuan discussed the difficulties that came with starting a new company right when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Uncertainties loomed over everyone, as then-potential investors changed their priorities of backing us when they had their own problems caused by the pandemic. We started Kickstarters for our comics without prior experience. These should have been setbacks, yet we managed to carry on releasing more comics through Kickstarter and set up a Wefunder campaign. Special thanks were given to our backers on the aforementioned platforms, as it proved that people believed in us and wanted to give us the chance to prove that we can create a global home for the world’s first interconnected Wuxia storyverse. That chance led up to this moment of thanks, and to our storyverse being established.
With the first issues of each four pillar of the Immortal Storyverse out, we proudly presented and celebrated the four writers of each title: Charlie Stickney The Adept), Payhuan Shiao Chronicles of the Immortal Swordsmen), Rylend Grant Fa Sheng: Origins), and Jen Troy Assassin G). Charlie spoke first about his experience writing other comics, and how he came to writing our first comic, The Adept. Rylend was next and discussed his experience as an ordained Soto Zen priest being most useful when he wrote for Fa Sheng. Afterwards, Jen spoke about how she was happy to write a story featuring a heroine who does not wear high heels in Assassin G. Payhuan spoke about how all these stories interconnect with one another and opened up a Q&A session where select members of the audience asked for more details on the stories shared. Towards the end of this segment, we presented our special surprise guest to a positive reaction from comic book fans. Our audience got an exclusive look at him, and we will reveal him to the world shortly (from this time of writing).
The event neared its end, and we presented a special homemade cacao drink to everyone courtesy of Payhuan’s friends. Once everyone tried this, we served Vietnamese spring rolls and duck buns brought from Brodard Restaurant, a famous Vietnamese restaurant located in Little Saigon. Our community was strengthened, and we now have a historic moment to prove how much support we continue to have.
We have more upcoming events, and we are so excited to share even more great news with everyone as we move onto the next stage. Stay tuned for more news from Immortal!
About
Brian Chansy :
Brian Chansy is the Brand Ambassador & Special Projects Coordinator at Immortal Studios. He has been a lifelong fan of the Wuxia genre, all thanks to a loving aunt who owned a video rental store carrying countless Hong Kong movies and TV series on VHS and eventually VCD & DVD. Besides movies and TV series, he also enjoys video games, comic books, and novels of the genre. He is also a huge fan of the Japanese Tokusatsu genre and pro-wrestling. On Sundays, he practices Yang Style Tai Chi with the community in Little Saigon in Orange County, California.
He can be contacted at: brian.chansy@immortal-studios.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wuxiaman/
Immortal Studios’ Website: https://www.immortal-studios.com/
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