For Shaolin Cowboy, the Matrix & Kung Fu Movies with Geof Darrow Part 1 By Patrick Lugo, click here.
Patrick Lugo, the senior graphic designer for Kung Fu Tai Chi interviewed the legendary comic artist Geof Darrow, the mastermind behind the extraordinary comic book The Shaolin Cowboy. In the first installment of this interview, Geof and Patrick discussed THE MATRIX, Jet Li, and pioneering martial arts themed comic books. Join them again as they discuss Darrow’s latest installment of the Shaolin Cowboy series, Cruel to be Kin.
PLUGO: Looking at The Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin (who’s second issue hits the ‘stands just last week), I noticed you’ve gotten many of my favorite artists to contribute a cover. ButI think there’s one who might surprise and delight readers of KFM.
GD: Tsui Hark.
PLUGO: YES!
GD: I got him to draw a variant cover for the Shaolin Cowboy series. It's in the last the last issue of the series, there's a cover by Tsui Hark on our front and back covers. It'll be out in November, that one.
PLUGO: Oh, that's awesome.
GD: Yeah, I asked him and he said Yeah. I knew he could. He once did a comic and sent it to me. He also does a lot of his costumes. So he told me, he does the costumes and the shows and the actors and says, “who do you want you to play?” He’d also show me his set designs.
This was when he was also living in Paris and my wife calls me and says there’s some guy from the comic shop calling for you. There's some Chinese director in the store that's looking for you. I thought it was pronounced like “sweet” T-S-U-I. So I called the store, and they said he would really like to meet with you. And then we met, and we kept in contact.
That’s also when I went over to Hong Kong. I thought I'd go over there and see like Kung Fu Studios everywhere. I don't think I saw one. I thought, wow, I’ll come over there and then I'll go to the park and see all these people do Tai Chi and, you know, it was like five people.
PLUGO: Can I ask, do you practice martial arts? Have you ever practice martial arts?
GD: I like Tai Chi. I'm not very good at it, but I like it.
I just thought it was at my age when I started, I thought I can probably do this without breaking anything, because when I was younger, I didn't care about breaking anything. But as I got older, if I break something, I can't work.
But my daughter has always been interested. She’s taking Eagle Claw Kung Fu now.
PLUGO: Oh, wow. That's, that's perfect. I’ve had the good fortune of meeting one of the top grand masters of Eagle Claw.
GD: Wow. And she's a woman, right?
PLUGO: Yes, she’s Lily Lau.
GD: And it was very interesting, a little bit of it kind of reminded me of the Kung Fu movies, I was like, “wow, some of this stuff really does happen.”
Another thing is Shaolin nuns. They used to have this touring show of Monks. And they would come and perform martial arts live in Paris. And this is the first time they actually let some of the nuns come with them.
They were performing. And it was beautiful. It's just amazing, you know? And they're doing just amazing things. At the end of it, they had, like three nuns, I think, and they each had a lotus and they just walked out in the crowd and they picked someone to give the lotus to. And one just made a beeline - I was way in the back, and she gave it to my daughter.
– Oh, look at that. That's a really. Wow.
PLUGO: So you're absorbing this stuff and that's kind of coming through in your choreography and your choices, from seeing them do moves.
GD: What I draw is all crazy baloney. I mean, some people come, they go, “you know, do you know? I mean, you're accurate.” That's about as accurate as my knowledge of astrophysics. I mean, I just make it up and, you know, whenever I've seen from watching films and when I was watching those guys on those pulleys, yanking people up into the air. Wow.
Well, you know who must have had an influence? Yuen Woo-Ping - especially his early movies, he had such a sense of fun and he would do such crazy stuff when everyone else was taking it pretty seriously. Yeah, like the MIRACLE FIGHTERS, or especially Taoist drunkard. I think that's his brother that plays the drunkard. Yeah, and that Buddha mobile, right?
PLUGO: Well you know how we all feel about him at the magazine.
GD: Oh, yeah, another a big thing to me when I was a kid was when I saw BILLY JACK. I still remember, the scene when he takes the hat off. There's not that much action in that one, and the politics of it. But I just loved the idea of the guy, the one that you don't suspect, and he sticks up for people.
Didn’t that come out a little bit before Bruce Lee’s ENTER THE DRAGON? Because I'd watched THE GREEN HORNET. And that was another big influence, just watching Bruce Lee move and I didn't know it was called Kung Fu at the time but it was just so beautiful to watch.
PLUGO: I think I spotted that hat at one point in Shaolin Cowboy.
GD: I’ll tell you one other influence. I was really taken with samurai films because they were the first real Asian martial arts films I saw – YOJIMBO, SEVEN SAMURAI. I really liked those. Those were what I watched mostly at the beginning, but ones that were directed by a guy called Kenji Masumi, who did the baby cart ones. Him against a thousand guys.
And Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, he’s the inspiration for my main character basically.
PLUGO: The same sword right!?
GD: Same, and by the end he’d always be fighting a hundred guys!
And you could see it in the Hong Kong films that people were very much influenced by the Japanese films. They took that in, they made them crazier. But you could see that they were also very taken with the with the artistry of those films. They were just turning them out so fast and they were still so well done.
So let me ask, that guy who played Wong Fei Hong, I can't remember the, the actor that who did like 100 films as him. Do they still exist? Do you know? Don't know if anyone's really put them together.
PLUGO: You know, one of our early online articles covered Wong Fei Hung and Kwan Tak Hing, the actor who originally played him. He trained in classical Chinese opera, was actually a master of White Crane kung fu, and apparently was highly skilled with a bullwhip. As to whether they can be found, I’ll have to get back to you on that.
GD: oh wow.
PLUGO: Well this has been a lot of fun. I could hang out and keep talking Kung Fu, Samurai movies and illustration techniques.
GD: Let’s do it again. I loved to buy the mag whenever I found it in the state or out here and I’ve still got a stack of them over there.
