Infinite Kung Fu

Starred review from September 5, 2011
Begun as a self-published series more than a decade ago, the comics series Infinite Kung Fuhas now been put together in a collected edition with 200 pages of new material, and the results are remarkable. The story centers on Lei Kung, a martial arts expert and former soldier who must infiltrate the five kung fu armies of an evil emperor in order to bring him down. With characters like Moog Joogular, Thursday Thoroughgood, and the Eight Immortals to help guide him along the way, Lei Kung constantly works to perfect his art and learn the secrets that will allow him to defeat a host of nefarious characters. In the story, the world as we know it has regressed to a time when technology is all but gone. Lei Kung must rely on his martial skill against the hordes of reanimated corpses that are slowly destroying the planet. The great strength of this graphic novel is its originality, but equally impressive are McLeod’s extraordinary illustrations and compelling narrative.

January 1, 2012

The Eight Immortals of Chinese legend and their eight students anchor this sumptuous fightfest. Five students have studied "poison kung-fu" and defected to become generals for the evil Emperor. So it falls upon students Lei Kung and Blaxsploitation character look-alike Moog Joogular to dispose of the generals and, finally, the Emperor, the eighth student having been killed by the disobedient five. Despite 16 key characters, all with Chinese-like names, the narrative threads are recognizable because of skillful character design and the overall sturdy story frame. A novel ingredient for this genre adds currency: a zombie explosion driven by the lack of new lives where recently dead souls may find reincarnation. Fortunately for the bad guys, zombies make handy support troops. But fortunately for the good guys, not very good support troops. VERDICT The extensive hand-to-hand combat has not the inventiveness of, say, Dragon Ball, but the story shines via its wonderful Asian art-inspired brush-and-ink work and other inventive details, like a mecha built from a Buddha head and a fight between two one-armed opponents using the bones from their severed arms as weapons. Recommended for older teen fans and up of fight manga and superhero thump-'ems.--M.C.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
Originally self-published in 2000 and collected here for the first timeand including enough previously unseen pages to nearly double its sizeMcLeod's genre-blending opus is not merely a kung fu epic. It's a dystopian, zombie, kung fu epic. Lei Kung is a humble soldier until the eight immortals reveal that his destiny is to defeat their former students so that he may heal a world in which reincarnation has gone horribly wrong, and corpses rise to battle the living. Seldom has a creator's love of a genre been as evident as in McLeod's meticulous homage to the heyday of martial-arts cinema, replete with headstrong students, arduous training, gloating villains, and multiple styles of kung fu displayed in the most gloriously choreographed, multipage, martial-arts battles since Paul Gulacy defined the visual grammar of the form decades ago for Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu. Add heaping helpings of zombie gore, a well-imagined future world, and some gritty, street-style line work that suggests the 1970s, and the result is something irresistibly infectiousfor those with special tastes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)