Last year’s review: The Kung Fu of Fan Expo San Francisco
Fan Expo San Francisco pulled out all stops for their sophomore outing. Held once again in the expansive Moscone West Exhibition Hall, the fan gathering drew some major celebrity appearances like Mark Hamill, William Shatner, Ewan McGregor, all four hobbits (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd), Alan Tudyk, Jason Lee, and many others. With sixteen major events across North American metropolises, Fan Expo proclaims itself as the largest fan gathering event producer in the world. Their commitment to San Francisco began last year with a five-year contract with the Moscone Convention Center, and clearly, they want to make it stick by this second one.
Scheduled every year for the weekend of Black Friday, Fan Expo SF is a celebration of fandom bringing young and old from all over the SF Bay Area and beyond. This year, beyond the expanded list of celebrity heavyweights, the vendor floor was expanded to two levels, giving more space to Artist Alley, where I got to meet some old friends – ‘martial’ artists with a keen eye for our treasured legacy.
‘Martial’ Artists
I connected with an old friend, ‘martial’ artist Justin Orr, who I met at the very first comic-con KungFuMagazine.com covered - Silicon Valley Comic Con - back in 2017. Justin’s unique art has a fresh vintage style with many homages to the classics of martial arts movies. This marked Justin’s second year having a booth in FXSF’s Artists Alley. “This is better than last year,” acknowledged Justin, “just how they set this up. And man, the guest list is really like, legit.”
A veteran of Artist Alleys across the country, Justin loves the SF Bay Area because it knows Kung Fu. For people outside of the Kung Fu movie fan base, many of his artistic references can be obscure, too obscure to cover his travel expenses.
“The Bay Area is good because you know, it’s Bruce Lee’s home,” continues Justin. “I mean I'm close to Oakland, so people know what Kung Fu is but when I go anywhere else, it's hit or miss. New York's pretty good. They know their Asian cult cinema and that's what gets a good response. But overall, that's about it.”
“This crowd is dope on its own,” adds Justin referring to FXSF attendees, “that all these people would turn up on Black Friday.”
Check out Justin’s art at Jusscope.com. And tell him Gene sent ya!
It was the first time as a FXSF vendor for another old ‘martial’ artist friend, Lawrence Washington. We first met him at Silicon Valley Comic Con 2019. He creates these unique layered artworks akin to the ancient Chinese art of glass painting and old school cell animation. It produces a 3D effect that doesn’t photograph so well because you can’t move around it in the same way you see it in real life – the dynamics are where the action is.
And as another avid fan of martial arts, many of his subjects are from the martial arts movie genre. Being in the martial arts business, I always ask about how their business is going. “It's been pretty good,” replied Lawrence. “People are responding well. What I sell no one's ever seen it before, so people are responding to it. They like it.”
The last time we saw Lawrence was just prior to the pandemic at at Wizard World. Since then, he’s changed his style somewhat. “I got kind of tired of my old design and I've improved my art skills a little better. So I took a year off and I did a complete rebrand and redesign.” His new artworks are smaller and more box-like. “The whole idea is because I've been noticing that people like to display their action figures in the box. So I kind of model these to go with their collections. And some people have sent me some pictures that collections and these go really well with them so.” And he’s teasing us with more martial oriented art. “So I'm doing some Bruce Lee stuff and Jackie Chan stuff, so if anyone's interested, you know, follow me and you'll see that stuff on there.”
Check out Lawrence’s art at Art by Lawrence Washington. And tell him Gene sent ya too!
But what about those anime katanas we mentioned in the title?
Anime Katanas
I’ve always avoided the topic of anime Katanas. It’s a personal thing. As a former Kendoka and a present Iaidoka, I have a lot of biases against them. Those plastic candy-colored cartoon toy swords just don’t do it for me. However, FXSF schooled me this year.
I should’ve seen it coming. There’s been a surge in Samurai oriented anime, especially on Netflix. Netflix recently released a live-action version of one of the longest running animes of all - ONE PIECE. One of the main characters is Zoro, who wields three katanas at a time. How? You just must watch it. In the live action, Zoro is played by martial arts movie royalty, Mackenyu, the son of the legendary Sonny Chiba.
In addition to ONE PIECE, Netflix also released two new Samurai-based animes: ONIMUSHA and BLUE EYE SAMURAI. ONIMUSHA is based on a Capcom videogame. It’s directed by maverick filmmaker, Takashi Miike, and pits Miyamoto Musashi against a demon horde. It’s dark and visionary, imagining Musashi as Toshiro Mifune played him in the Samurai Trilogy. BLUE EYE SAMURAI is a French-American production featuring an extraordinary cast of voice actors like Kenneth Branagh, Mark Dacascos, Stephanie Hsu, Harry Shum Jr., George Takei, Ming-Na Wen and more. With a keen eye for Japanese culture, this is a classic martial tale of revenge. Both animes are outrageously sanguineous, and BLUE EYE SAMURAI pushes deep into the R-rated section with full frontal nudity and some explicit sex.
However, that’s just a tiny sample of some fresh Samurai animes – the genre is packed with them. There are countless others like BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL, BLEACH, GINTAMA, RUROUNI KENSHIN, and so many more.
On Saturday, there was a Katana demonstration – not lightsaber mind you, there was plenty of that – we’re just talking Katanas. The demonstration, on the Cosplay Red Carpet no less, was given by the Twilight Knights Renaissance Guild out of Cupertino, California. “We are a historical European mixed martial arts group, HEMA,” says Director Benjamin Hsu, “even though it says European.” Benjamin says he propounds a fusion of Kung Fu footwork, Aikido balance, and a little bit of Kenjitsu for the flow of the sword.
“So the Guild officially has celebrated its 25th year this year,” says Benjamin. “Yeah, 25 years.” When asked why the Guild participated in Fan Expo SF, he answers frankly, “It's just fun. Our members really enjoy coming here and meeting some of the stars and some of the cosplayers, yeah.”
And the cosplayers were out in force, especially the anime cosplayers. If there’s one thing San Francisco understands is how to let our freak flags fly. When it comes to cosplay, the anime cosplayers have some of the most extravagant and complex costumes of all. Even if you don’t know what anime they’re from, they are wonderous to behold.
Anime Katana Slingers
There were four booths dedicated to anime weapons, as well as assorted anime arms to be found amongst the other memorabilia booths. So many anime Katanas. If you don’t count lightsabers, anime Katanas amounted to well over half of the swords offered.
For years, I had this personal rule – always crack the sheath before you judge any sword. I’ve seen beautiful blades in lackluster fittings and excellent sword furniture on terrible blades. But after the anime Katanas began to rise, I stopped looking.
I’ve been avoiding anime weapons booths for several fan gatherings. I always peek, but the vendors usually so busy helping buying customers which I am not, and frankly, a lot of the fittings just put me off. However, introducing myself as press, I asked some anime Katana slingers what their best piece was? Tim Zhang of Swords Republic impressed me.
Swords Republic represents a new sword maker from China, an independent. The sword maker is Tim’s uncle Zhang. He says his uncle started learning sword making when he was around 18 years old. Now he’s 67. Tim has just made his first lap around the country through various Comic-cons and anime gatherings. It was experimental, a quest to learn the market. They are so new that their only contact at this writing is through their instagram.
Spread across the table were plenty of lightweight anime Katanas. “I got a bamboo,” said Tim with a refreshing mandarin accent. “Yeah, bamboo. It's very good. A bamboo is different wood - very strong. Yeah, you can compare it to different heavy woods, sure. But it's easy to broken from you. Like in practice. It's broken. Bamboo is different.”
Tim showed me one of his uncle’s pieces – a Katana. The blade was forged with a lovely wood grain pattern-welded blade and tight detailed fittings. Tim made a point to show me that the saya (scabbard) was made of fish skin. I think he meant to mean ray or shark, but he might not have known that term in English and I don’t know it in Mandarin (I looked up ‘shark’ and got shayu, but didn’t dig deep enough to translate ‘ray’). Now Katana blades aren’t made with a wood grain pattern. Traditionally Katanas are forged in such a way that produces that shimmering hamon line. So technically speaking, this replica was inaccurate historically. Nevertheless, it was beautiful craftmanship overall. I would proudly add that to my collection. Tim was asking $2000 for it, which was out of my price range at the time.
Any of my longtime readers can guess my next question. “Will you uncle be making Chinese Dao or Jian?”
“In the future we like more American people to know the Chinese history,” said Tim proudly. “Sure!”
I hope to see some of Uncle Zhang’s Dao and Jian samples should Tim and I cross paths again, perhaps at Fan Expo San Francisco next year. It’ll be on Black Friday weekend once more, November 29-December 1, 2024. Hope to see you there.
