San Diego Comic-Con and the Anthropology of Kung Fu Cinema

By Patrick Lugo

Despite rumors of decreased attendance, especially among international guests, San Diego Comic-Con 2025 was packed! While there were plenty of masks, helms and full-on cosplay (the Galactus Cosplay really was that impressive in person) a common refrain among attendees was that this was the year everyone gave the coronavirus a shrug.

Readers of last year’s coverage of SDCC may recall my interview with author Gene Luen Yang. He’d just released his graphic novel A Lunar New Year Love Story which you’ll recall, not only featured an extended, meticulously researched, Lion Dance sequence it included the input of several kung fu masters KFM is well acquainted with. All that good work paid off on Saturday night when Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham (published by First Second/Macmillan), took home the trophies for Best Graphic Album–New, Best Publication for Teens, and Best Writer for Yang. One of only two titles which took home multiple awards in 2025. So, a huge congratulations to Gene.

The Anthropology of Fight Scenes

A top tier panel for coverage by KFM was the panel The Anthropology of Kung Fu Cinema presented by action designer, stunt man, martial artist and co-founder of Super Alloy Interactive, Eric Jacobus. Eric is an old friend of KungFuMagazine and the author of the new book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman's Unflinching Take on Violence. His was among the small number of panels focused on martial arts at San Diego Comic-Con 2025. That 3:00pm timeslot on a Saturday afternoon in one of the out-of-the-way hotels’ more difficult rooms to find, did not keep that room from filling up with fans of Kung Fu cinema.

The event began informally with Eric inviting the audience to get as close to the screen as possible as he’d be standing in front of it rather than sitting at the table set up on the stage. There was a series of movie clips lined up to play during his presentation and after dropping the lights he began with a classic among Hong Kong cinephiles, the original adventures of Wong Fei Hung featuring Kwan Tak Hing.

“It's very staged,” said Eric about this classic. “It's very operatic. It's on the stage.” He would be going into why that was the case and how things changed. But first he pointed out “there's not much editing. It's very much filmed like a stage performance, kind of like Buster Keaton, kind of like Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and this is in the 60s. Right? Action cinema didn't really change a whole lot between the 1920s when it sort of started in Shanghai, Southern China and Hong Kong.” Fast forwarding to the mid-60s his next example was Come Drink With Me.

“I want to say something real quick about Shaw Brothers” Eric interjected. “So Shaw Brothers was one of the major actors - in-fact, it was the major film studio in Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s, and their films were done in Mandarin, they made hundreds of movies, hundreds. They churned them out, and their stages were very expensive. People lived at the studio lot. And if you understand Chinese opera and Chinese live theater, you can understand Shaw Brothers, and you can understand the movement and the kind of performance that people were doing at the time.” He continues “there's a little bit of clever montage editing here and this genre is Wuxia.” - pronounced “wu•Sah”

”Wuxia is this very simple form of mythical storytelling. Let's go back many, many, many, many, many generations. Wuxia began in written form. Just as the West has The Iliad and the Odyssey, China has Outlaws of the Marsh or outlaws and the Monkey King [Journey to the West], these are the mythologies of China, and they go really far back, thousands of years. In Wuxia, people are flying around, and there's a lot of Taoism and mysticism kind of wrapped up in this, and it's very difficult for us to comprehend the meaning of that.”

”Essentially, Chinese martial arts, and excuse me, Chinese religion is essentially a kind of worship of the dead and a worship of nature. When I say worship, I say that loosely. It's not like people are always bowing down, it's not quite like that. It's a little bit of magical mysticism, a little bit of worship and sacrifice. You have spells, incantations and this very rich system.”

”Theater was where that was acted out in person and it's very difficult to do. Imagine flying around in live theater, they might have had clever ways to do it, they might have had wires on stage. It would have to have been very simple. But Wuxia is this combination of mythical storytelling with theater. They figured that out with a camera, to do montage editing to sell the idea of people flying, of defeating 15 people, realistically, that was what the Wuxia cinema was trying to accomplish.“

Jacobus went on to ask “Do we still have Wuxia cinema today? Yes. Has anybody seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? That was probably when Wuxia cinema really hit the West hard. We all kind of got it at that point. And does anybody remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer? There's a lot of wire women. There's a lot of flying around in that show, right? And that's not an accident. That's because all of these Hong Kong stuntmen and stunt women were coming to the States in the late 90s because Hong Kong was being seeded back to China. Filmmakers and stars didn't quite know what they were going to do, and so they started moving into America, Canada, UK, Australia. Suddenly you get all these amazing action films in the late 90’s in America. We got, Crouching Tiger, we got Rush Hour, we got Michelle Yeoh and The Matrix.”

“So is The Matrix technically a Wuxia? It absolutely is. That's like a weird kind of Silicon Valley Wuxia, if you think about it. Because 1999 is like the year of the cubicle movie. So the Wachowskis combined the cubicle movie with Wuxia, how amazing is that? We got our own Wuxia in America and what do you mean by cubicle movie? Think American Beauty, Fight Club, Clock Watchers in 1997 and Being John Malkovich. These are all movies in 1999 that were in cubicles; it was a weird year. But before we get to The Matrix traditional Chinese action cinema was changed by one man. Bruce Lee.”

Way of the Dragon - Fight Scene

With the iconic fight scene between martial arts legends Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee on the screen, Eric continued “I want to talk about the movement Bruce Lee is using in his fighting techniques. In that earlier clip we saw that people were moving around constantly. There's a lot of jumping a lot of acrobatics, it was very cooperative. That was cooperative action, this is non-cooperative action, which is how a fight really is. If anybody does martial arts, they learn that you don't really want to cooperate with your opponent when you're fighting them. And that's what Bruce Lee was trying to sell in his action design.”

“Bruce Lee was more than just a martial artist. He was an amazing filmmaker, and he understood camera presence. He took what was essentially the Japanese film model, he would set the camera up and let the action play according to where the camera was, and he would choreograph to that. There was this other actor at the time I want to also mention. Has anybody ever heard of Shintaro Katsu?”

“Japanese action cinema is predicated a little bit more on actual combat. Japanese style movement is not very cooperative. The point is to demonstrate proficiency, and the filmmaking lends itself to that right. Bruce borrowed heavily from this, and he took the filmmaking from Hong Kong action cinema, because he used a lot more editing. That, I think, is the beauty of Bruce Lee. I think that that's why his style worked so well, and it was so exportable, and he was so influential”

“Bruce Lee was brought up under a martial arts system called Wing Chun and Wing Chun is a very close system. There's even a term in Wing Chun called playing sticky hands. They call it playing, because it's not really about attacking, it’s semi-cooperative. The tradition of Chinese martial arts is a combination of combat and very cooperative movement. That's what we have to understand about this, that Chinese action, traditionally, is not for fighting. We have to understand that it's actually much deeper than that.”

“Back to that Bruce and Chuck fight, there's a reason that Chuck Norris is in that movie, he was a Vietnam War vet who brought back a martial arts style called Tang Soo Do. It was a Korean martial art, and there were a lot of guys that were bringing back Korean martial arts to America during the Korean War. During the Vietnam War Chuck also was one of them, and a whole bunch of these guys were basically bringing competitive fighting, outside of boxing, to America and that was a big deal.”

“Let’s look at this clip from Enter the Dragon, which really is his True Action Hero form here. Because look at the filmmaking, the camera is not doing much earlier in the film. There's a lot of cutting down in the scene. Every scene is a wonder. The people enter and leave frame. So he was combining that American and Japanese action cinema with a little bit of Chinese flavor.”

“Bruce Lee sort of came from a mentality which was, ’Let's show the world that Chinese martial arts can be adapted,’ and in a sense, he absolutely succeeded. Because when we think of Bruce Lee, we think of this Chinese guy who went international with his Chinese martial arts. But really what he was doing was adopting everything he could to make his martial arts so great, on screen and in real life. That's what Jeet Kune Do is about. But that is not really the essence of traditional martial arts, right? And after Bruce Lee died, there weren't really any real replacements, just copies. They literally made a movie called The Clones of Bruce Lee. Sorry.”

“There was still a movement underway to maintain traditional Chinese action cinema. And there were guys like Lau Kar-leung who made films like Mad Monkey Kung Fu, another Shaw Bros. film. This is not Bruce Lee style fighting at all. Again, this is almost cooperative and it's very beautiful, right? If you can think of Bruce Lee style as a weapon, then this is calligraphy. I would say this is a kind calligraphy of action. It's not even pretending to be something that could actually win wars and kill people. There's a lot of ideas of virtue and righteousness, right? And this, the main character, Shao Ho, without the shirt. He's been trained in what's called Monkey Kung Fu. Look at his head, his head movements. He's moving his head around like that each time. He's embodying the Monkey King, right? And that's actually what Chinese Theater about, this is very difficult for us to understand in the West. Chinese Theater is a possession theater, so when somebody went up on stage to do a performance as Guan Yu, or the Monkey King, they would actually undergo a process to get possessed by that patron god, whatever it might be. So if you're Guan Yu, you weren't allowed to talk until the performance was over. If you're the Monkey King, you better be acting like a monkey or that kind of kills the vibe, you know what I mean? But they really believed it, and I doubt it was even an issue of ‘breaking character.’ If you're possessed by something, then you're going to act as that thing, then after the show was done, you underwent an exorcism, and you went back to, you know, your normal state.”

“Here's another example. It's this great movie called Encounters of the Spooky Kind by Sammo Hung and he's playing the Monkey King. And this other fellow is playing nuja, the infant god/warrior that killed a dragon. These two have been possessed earlier in the scene by their respective sorcerers and now they're fighting it out. They're sort of fighting this proxy war between two sorcerers and there's weird possession languages and whatnot. This is sort of like the bread and butter of post Bruce Lee, Hong Kong action cinema, and there's some really beautiful things that came out at that time.

“But Sammo was at the forefront of a new idea and he was a big Bruce Lee fan. He worked with Bruce Lee on Game of Death and on Enter the Dragon. I think he's in the first fight of that movie and there's no doubt in my mind that Bruce made a huge impression on Sammo. Sammo was raised in an opera school, with Jackie Chan and a few other guys too. They all became Hong Kong action stars, and they were all trained in opera, which is, again, that possession theater that I was talking about. It was Beijing opera based in the south, and their idea of martial arts is again very performative, much less about fighting and combat, much less about competition, much more about maintaining tradition, maintaining this kind of possession theater.”

“Then Bruce Lee comes along, and kind of like distills it down to - what wins in a fight? Sammo, being a fighter, gets an idea, and he has the same idea as Bruce, which is, bring in real fighters. So he made this movie, and this is often called a Jackie Chan movie, but it's not. It's a Sammo Hung movie called Meals on Wheels. That’s Benny “The Jet” Urquidez on the left, a real competitive fighter, undefeated in kickboxing; arguably the inventor of kickboxing. It's one of the greatest fight scenes of all time. Now, look, there's all of this pausing. There's not much cooperation here. This is much more about a real fight, a very aggressive fight compared to what we saw earlier. The pacing, is the pacing of a fight, not of possession theater. These are guys who just want to fight. Jackie's got his character and Urquidez has his; obviously.”

”Sammo knew that by bringing in real fighters you could actually hit them. He was smart. I don't think he did it in too many takes. I could be wrong, but by bringing in a real fighter like Benny the movie lends itself so much more legitimacy. And so Sammo really started opening up that can of worms again, kind of like real competitive action scenes in movies. He brought guys from all over the world and he started training his guys.“

“Jackie Chan, had started training before Sammo, but Jackie Chan didn't really do that kind of fighting, this was actually fairly new for him. He wasn't really learning that stuff until the early 80s, maybe. Now, I won't get into too much of the psychology here, but there's definitely a different Jackie Chan definitely has a different personality than Sammo. Now he went to school. Sorry. This is Police Story. So Jackie has a very different personality than Sammo. Sammo is a fighter. Sammo loves fighting. He loves hitting people. Jackie loves not fighting. Jackie invented this style, which is almost this like anti-martial art. And if you watch the way that he choreographs this fight, this is one year later. By the way, one year, you watch how he choreographs this fight, and you'll see that there isn't really a style, a lot of defense, a lot of evasion, right? And none of it has any Snake Fist, there's no Eagle Claw, there's no, you know, proper jujitsu. There's no counting the bullets, like in John Wick. It's just sort of like a stream of consciousness, whatever works. Do it? It's dirty. Yeah, it's dirty. It's like Charlie Chaplin, it's a Chaplin fight. It's exactly like a Chaplin fight, and it looks incredibly dangerous.”

“It is. I mean, this is his whole persona, right? Getting out of the fight. Well, in this movie, not so much. He's a cop, he's trying to bring these guys down, but he's not really into the fighting part. He just wants to arrest the guy. You can kind of imagine someone like Sammo or Bruce Lee deciding to square up and fight instead. But, Jackie was also very much into doing larger than life stunts. It wasn't just the fighting. And again, that's to emphasize the danger Jackie really wanted to sell vulnerability. That was his big selling point.“

“Jackie Chan came to America quite a few times in the 80s and did various, various films. He did one, The Protector, in 1985. I was born in the 80s. Never heard of that movie. He did Battle Creek Brawl. I was born in the 80s. Never heard of it. Had no idea what that was in America. I don't think we were ready. Cannonball Run was trash, and he played a Japanese guy.”

“We just didn't know any better, right? At the time, maybe it was the Cold War. We were just totally focused on the Japanese style, Japanese and American style. We had Van Damme. We had Chuck Norris and Ninja Turtles. Even though the Ninja Turtles was a Hong Kong movie in America, they're Ninja Turtles. Also American Ninja everything was ninjas.”

“Or it was The Karate Kid. For example, Karate Kid was so popular that there were various Hapkido schools. Hapkido is Korean Aikido, except it has kicks and punches. That's the style that I learned. And there were a bunch of these Hapkido schools in America, because Koreans came over after the Korean War and established Hapkido schools. They were everywhere, and then after the Karate Kid came out, they renamed them to Karate schools. Why not? Whatever gets people in the door, right?”

“Okay, so let's jump to the late 90s. Bear in mind something there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes of Hong Kong throughout the 80s and 90s. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping starts running China and he really wants to open up China. When he does, he starts opening up co-productions. And there's this young lad by the name of Jet Li who gets noticed through these co-productions. Has anybody seen Once Upon a Time in China?“

“Jet Li in a pure Wuxia movie of the highest form. Look at the editing. Tsui Hark was trained in film school in America, he sort of perfected the montage style. There's so many shots because you're sort of selling these physics defying moments with editing and filmmaking. Stuff that's impossible. You're combining wires with montage in a day. Lot of shots and these movies take months to make.”

“So Jet Li was a Beijing Wushu star who was discovered by some recruiters. He was, like 16 or 17, very young. His first movie was called Shaolin Temple, and that was a Hong Kong co-production. And so that's just one example, where Deng Xiaoping was trying to open up China for working with Hong Kong and a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers started working up there, and a lot of mainland action stars started coming to Hong Kong , Jet Li being the big one. And there were a few others too. And one of the other things that was sort of looming on the horizon was that Great Britain’s lease on Hong Kong would end in 1997.”

“They didn't really decide that until close to the end. And so imagine all the Hong Kong filmmakers, and think about film production, how does that affect your financing process? How does that affect capital flow? What currency should you be using? What should you be investing in? Right? If that's on the horizon and you don't quite know what's going to happen. You might just move to Nevada and wait and see what happens. And that's exactly what happened in Hong Kong. Jackie Chan, Sammo, Yeoh, Yuen Woo-ping, Chow Yun Fat all came to America from around 1996 or Toronto or Vancouver. Jackie went and did a Rumble in the Bronx in Vancouver in 96 he did Mr. Nice Guy in Australia in 97. Sammo came to North America and did Martial Law in 2000.”

“And Chow Yun Fat becomes one of the biggest stars in America overnight. That's incredible, right? Because he brought Gun Fu to America, and this was an extremely exciting moment. John Woo was heavily influenced by American gangster cinema, and Chinese gangsters, the ones who actually used guns, were heavily influenced by America. When you combine the violence of a Scorsese film with that Hong Kong kind of montage style action. You get a Gun Fu film. We even had one in the U.S. It was called Equilibrium.”

“Then comes The Matrix, it’s one of these films that comes out and blows everybody's mind, and we didn’t really have context for it at the time. It's like, this forty-fifty-million-dollar Kung Fu movie. This should not exist, and yet it was one of the greatest things that ever happened. For some reason we were ready for this stuff. It's like Americans were so pumped that the Cold War ended, that we could just kind of sit back and watch a movement. We had a primer though a few years leading up to this, like Jackie’s Rumble in the Bronx. The foundation was being built, a lot of Hong Kong stunt performers had been coming.”

”When Keanu Reeves can actually embody this Hong Kong style in America, you know that it has gone international. But I do think that this is sort of a product of things that were happening at the time. I don't think that we all just decided to like The Matrix style action. I think the late 90s were generally good. The tech bubble, I know there were some recessions and whatnot, but in general, people weren't too worried about war, and I think it gave us a sort of ability to sit back and just watch movement again. And that inspired a lot of us too.”

“So what we noticed was the two things were happening. First thing was that after Drunken Master 2, all of those Hong Kong action stars and directors were coming over to the states, and they stopped making stuff there, and they were making stuff here. It seemed as though that Hong Kong style was going away from Hong Kong. The second thing was that it looked like if you could learn this Hong Kong style, you could make it in Hollywood as a stuntman.”

”Then in 2002 The Bourne Identity comes out and sort of throws that entire plan out the window. Say what you want about the fight. but this is a smart action style, and here's why; they can turn Matt Damon into an action star in three weeks with this style of action. It's very cutting, lots of fudging, a lot of fancy editing. Then when you add camera shake, like in the Bourne Ultimatum, it's almost not even a fight, it's more like an emotion. It's like you're being abused.“

“But that didn't stop everybody. There were some saints out there who kept that torch going, and one of them was Tony Jaa. Jaa was mentored by a curmudgeonly old type Muay Thai teacher who had made 80s era Thai action films that were inspired by Hong Kong cinema. Nobody really sees them. But Tony Jaa was his protege, and then 2003 Ong Bak came out.“

”So Tony Jaa kept it up. He's just sort of adding more impact to the Hong Kong style. It's the same sort of filmmaking technique. There's a lot of shooting, but they're not really trying to hide a movement. You get a lot of wide shots where you just see performances happening. These are real fighters. These are people that can actually hit you. Actually hit each other, and he's not he only one. In fact, there was still something happening in Hong Kong; Donnie Yen.”

“He brought in mixed martial arts, and combined that with the Hong Kong style. It's gonna sound terrible, but he's sort of one-upping Bruce, just in terms of the uncooperativeness of the action. It's like, it barely ever stops, but it's still totally uncooperative, And stuff that's really hard to choreograph, unless you're getting hit. It's hard to perform without getting hit. You really have to kind of know how to fight if you're gonna do that. Even if you know how to fight, it's hard to do that.”

”Then there's another team, a Silat martial art team who had never done a movie before, and they're in Indonesia, and teamed up with a filmmaker from Wales, Gareth Evans. They made a movie called The Raid Redemption. Silat is an Indonesian martial art heavily predicated on killing people and cutting their legs apart and making them suffer horribly. But it's very much about watching the performance. Now here, there is much more violence. This is sort of appealing to the video game generation. I think that's why this movie was so popular. It really played like a video game. So these people had never done action movies before, they just sort of put Silat into a fight scene, and Evans filmed in a really interesting way. Got a million bucks shot for 99 days. The same exact process as Hong Kong, filmmaking. Taking forever to shoot things, getting it perfect, which is practically impossible to do in the US nowadays.”

”Finally, I'll mention one more person. Chad Staheski’s John Wick does something extremely smart; three things at once. First off, the American the set design, lots of layers, lots of depth, lots of extras, lots of guns, very American. And when you watch the set design in John Wick, every set is beautiful because Chad understands architecture. He has a whole section of architecture, books in his house. Second thing he's doing is the Hong Kong style, he's using editing to sell gags. He's doing the montage. If you can't do it all in one just cut, do it as another shot. He's doing the Hong Kong thing and he's also showing the stunt performers fall to the ground. So he's letting his guys shine. The Japanese style is kind of like the guys fall off camera, you don't really see them hit the ground. But in this, you get to see the guys actually hit the ground; that adds to the action. The third thing he's doing is the Japanese style, the performer is centered. He's right in the middle the whole time. The camera might kind of bend off to the side, and then come right back. So, he's doing three things at once. He took the best in three worlds just like Bruce, just like Jackie, and that there is how you make great action films. That's where we're at with action. That's it. I think, the peak, that's it.”

And with his presentation ended, the lights came up and he spent the time after in the hall signing copies of his book and answering questions.

About author:

You can also find more of Eric Jacobus on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@EricJacobusOfficial

Patrick Lugo is a freelance author, illustrator & comic creator who consults on comic Crowdfunding campaigns when not running one of his own. His acclaimed graphic novel series A Tiger’s Tale vols. 1&2 is available for purchase online at aTigersTale.com - The campaign for its latest spin-off - UNDEAD KUNGFU GHOST KILLER launches on October 1st at UKGK.site

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