Flame On!

Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee’s Fire Power is a kung fu comic for the 21st century

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JUST AS HE DREW ON CLASSIC ZOMBIE films for The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman has tapped into his favourite martial arts movies for Fire Power, his new Image/Skybound series with former Daredevil artist Chris Samnee.

“I wanted to take everything I love about the genre, find some nooks and crannies that hadn’t been explored yet and add some weird, unexpected elements to it,” Kirkman tells Red Alert. “And Chris is so great with his action choreography that I knew this would be a spectacular comic book.”

Despite the main character resembling a fireball-tossing version of Iron Fist, Kirkman was determined not to emulate the outdated tropes embodied by Danny Rand and the likes of Doctor Strange, and so decided that Owen Johnson, his reluctant hero, should be Chinese – although adopted by American parents at a young age. “There’s a little bit of that ‘Let’s go off to the Far East and find some mystical elements’, but the main difference between us and things like Iron Fist is that our character is actually from the Far East, as I definitely wanted to avoid that ‘white saviour’ snafu,” he explains.