ROBERT KIRKMAN
Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee’s Fire Power is a kung fu comic for the 21st century
Get the inside word on The Walking Dead creator’s new comic book Fire Power.
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the main character resembling a fireball-tossing version of Iron Fist, Kirkman was determined not to emulate the outdated tropes embodied by Danny Rand and the likes of Doctor Strange, and so decided that Owen Johnson, his reluctant hero, should be Chinese – although adopted by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.
“The other thing is that Owen is very much trying to avoid this, so the bulk of the story is him trying to deny his powers and live a normal life with his wife and kids in St. Louis. It’s a big struggle for him to maintain a normal life and not be pulled into this fantastical world. Thankfully, he fails at that and gets pulled into that world fairly quickly.”
Along with the regular series, Kirkman and Samnee have also collaborated on a prequel graphic novel, which sees the young Owen visiting China on a quest to discover the truth about his birth parents. “I could have done that in flashbacks but that would have been distracting, so I thought it would be cool to do a graphic novel that exists on its own as a story,” says Kirkman. “Fire Power: Prelude is the ‘martial arts film’ version of Fire Power, as it’s his origin story. It also plays into the monthly book, as all the characters you meet in the graphic novel come back in the regular series in a very different way.”
Set 15 years after Prelude, the monthly series begins with Owen’s idyllic existence being shattered, as his past returns to haunt him.
“People start coming back into his life, as the Scorched Earth Clan have found him,”
Kirkman says, referring to the treacherous group that his parents belonged to. “They’re trying to draw him back into this conflict, which has world-threatening ramifications. It’s very much a case of him trying to go on a dinner date with his wife but from time to time getting attacked by ninjas. It very quickly becomes clear that in order to have a normal life, he’s going to have to face this threat head on and finally fulfil his destiny once and for all if he is ever to have any hope of things getting back to normal. That’s the journey he goes on, and he’ll be throwing a lot of flame-balls along the way.”
After concluding The Walking Dead with #193 last year, Kirkman recently reunited with artist Charlie Adlard for a special one-shot, Negan Lives!, to benefit comic shops hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s been a year since we’ve done anything with The Walking Dead comic books, so it was nice to get back to that for one issue, have a little Negan adventure and do a little bit more work with Charlie,” he says. “It’s a cool little check-in with Negan after we last saw him in #174. He’s a character we didn’t deal with in the last two years of the comic, so to say that I’ve missed him would be an understatement!”
Despite the dystopian spirit of The Walking Dead often being evoked since the outbreak of Covid-19, he believes that our grim reality cannot be compared to his fiction. “Thankfully we haven’t got anywhere close to the dire kinds of things we did in Dead,” he says. “There’s a lot of people losing their lives across the world, so it’s quite a disastrous event. But at the same time, for most people it’s been about staying at home and not interacting, so it’s hard to compare that with the undead running around trying to eat you…” SJ Fire Power #1 and the Fire Power: Prelude graphic novel are out now from Image Comics.