"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part Two Post Three

The conclusion to the second episode of “Embassy of the Fist” is all about setting up the rematch confrontation between Yamamoto and Cheng Fu. As a result the Chinese martial artist dispatches the American secret servicemen with relative ease, whilst providing me with an opportunity to manipulate my Kung Fu kick pose using my graphics editor once again.

 

The final panel drops the cliff hanger that the rematch will be to the death… as the International Arrest Warrant, thought all this time to be for the criminal gang leader Kam Lo, is actually for his bodyguard Yamamoto.

 

It is Sensei Cheng Fu verses Yamamoto Part Two and the winner will be the only man left alive…

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part Two Post Two

The first panel of this sequence is an attempt to once again break the ‘side-on waist-high’ look of my comic strips and include some driving action. Indeed it’s actually a reimagining of an overhead car chase look I used to draw a few years back but brought somewhat into the 21^st Century by using Paint Shop Pro 8 as opposed to simply drawing them by hand. To try and capture a bit more motion I even rotated the vehicle layers so my graphics editor would slightly distort their edges and make them look a little blurry.

 

The next two frames introduce a rogue American black ops team, who decide that because the British are taking too long to execute the international termination warrant on Kam Lo, they’ll don balaclavas and take matters into their own hands. It’s a bit of silly nonsense to be honest, but most of the World’s Governments have these secret teams lurking throughout the plots of my "Mooretoons" stories. I guess I’m a big conspiracy theorist at heart.

 

Finally, it’s another solo shot of Cheng Fu racing towards the action. Originally I actually had the martial arts British intelligence serviceman running past the lion statue in Trafalgar Square, but changed this as I really wanted to maintain the illusion that he was leaping from rooftop to rooftop in his desperation to reach Yamamoto.

Yamamoto takes on the American Secret Service. But can the Chinese martial arts expert defeat them before Cheng Fu arrives for a rematch..?

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part Two Post One

I included this particular scene in the story in order to try and show that Kam Lo is well aware he is a target of the British Intelligence Service surveillance, and that he has no problem in ordering the deaths of any person whom he considers a threat. He is a cold-blooded murderer. In addition I also wanted to portray Yamamoto’s character as that of a loyal and honourable assassin, but one who still has some semblance of a conscience.

 

The final panel is actually one of my favourites, as I actually spent ages working out its composition. This is a little sad I know, as the frame consists of Cheng Fu simply scaling a drain-pipe but it took me ages to discover a photograph of London at night with which to create such a lovely deep blue background.

 

Kam Lo appears certain to escape back to the safety of the Chinese Embassy. But the Triad Boss has reckoned without the interference of a second foreign covert surveillance team…

Mooretoons - Early Original "Doctor Who" Monsters

Alongside entertaining myself and friends by depicting ‘all-new’ confrontations with the Daleks, Sontarans, Ice Warriors and Zygons, I also created a fair few original monsters for my “Doctor Who” to battle. However in the beginning I was still heavily influenced by the BBC science fiction series and as a result, many of my ‘own’ adventures were based upon what I had watched on either television or VHS video.

 

“The Mutant Rampage”, a seven-page reimagining of the first ever Dalek story, is a good example of this. To begin with its name was actually taken from the working title of the Skaro-based television production - “The Mutants”. Whilst its plot, the tale of two races, one living in a technologically advanced city whilst the other survives on the fruits of the land, is straight out of Terry Nations’ storyline as well. Even the Canabalsans, the large jelly like inhabitants of the planet Danos in the year 3029, are little more than oversized Kaled mutants – the creatures which operate the Dalek travel machines.

 

Following on from this I wrote/drew “The Maddening” a simple two-page tale of the TARDIS being struck by asteroids in the time vortex causing the (first) Doctor to suffer a head injury. Upon recovering the Time Traveller becomes a homicidal maniac and attempts to murder his companions. Once again this is very similar to the two-part television adventure “The Edge of Destruction”, where the Time Lord (and to a larger extent a scissor-stabbing Susan) appears to want to harm his ‘friends’.

 

It therefore wasn’t until “The Treemen of Tremolius”, two-thirds of the way through my first drawing phase, that I finally created a couple of aliens I’d actually call ‘my own’; and even then they were… inspired. The first was a dragon-like creature called the Glasmhmore, a fearsome looking yet ultimately timid monster, who was possibly based upon my love of the Drashigs from the Jon Pertwee television story “Carnival of Monsters”. The second, long before Groot and Marvel Comics’ Guardians of the Galaxy motion picture, was the Treemen (and women) of Tremolius. These walking talking tree-people were almost certainly inspired by the Ent, Treebeard, following multiple viewings of the VHS video release of “The Lord of the Rings”; a 1978 animated fantasy film version of J.R. Tolkien’s famous book trilogy. Neither were terribly successful though and neither would ever make a return appearance in my “Doctor Who” Mooretoons.

 

However I still had plenty of other sources of inspiration for my monsters, such as toys, vegetables and even snooker players..!?!

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part One Post Three

These final panels of Part One were written to set up a second (final) confrontation between Yamamoto and Cheng Fu for later in the story, but also to try and convey a flurry of Kung Fu moves all based upon speed of the hand. So there’s a strike, then block then double strike before a devastating kick.

 

The contents of the final frame were significantly scaled down in size as I wanted to show the movement of the assassin’s kick and the reeling effect it had upon Cheng Fu. In addition it really let me squeeze in the gorgeously colourful ‘London at night’ photograph I was using as the background for the scene. Yamamoto is still quite upright and static in his pose but I rotated all of his opponent’s limbs, torso and head to put across the force of the blow.

 

Victorious Yamamoto returns to his Master’s side. But has Cheng Fu really fallen to his death from the London rooftop..?

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part One Post Two

This posting includes my first attempt to depict a ‘flying karate kick’ and some of the ‘wider’ shots I included in order to hopefully ‘show’ some martial arts action. I actually drew a few bare foot kicks, with limited success as anatomy is not one of my strong points, before I realised that if I simply manipulated the limb using the rotate tool on Paint Shop Pro 8, then I could simply reuse the same foot over and over again and just tweak its angle for different kick attacks.

Unfortunately rotating any layer within my graphics editor does cause it to become a little blurry, and thus badly contrast with the clean pixelated look of the rest of the Mooretoons in the frame. To solve this problem I just slightly reduce the picture within the panel using the resize tool on its smart size resampling setting, and although this then gives the entire frame a slightly distorted look it does blend all the layers back together.

Although the majority of (my) super-heroes wear a standard costume, I wanted Sensei Cheng Fu to stand out a bit more during the action scenes and so decided that although he’d wear the same tunic and face mask in each adventure, I’d re-colour it for every story to ensure he contrasted with his opponent. In “Embassy Of The Fist” he was going to be predominantly surrounded by both dark coloured assailants and backgrounds so I sought out a bright green Chinese cloth weave for him.

In the next posting it is Yamamoto verses Cheng Fu, and it will be a fight to the death…

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part One Post One

This second adventure of my "Men Of Mystery" series was written as a ‘test piece’ to see whether my Mooretoon style could do justice to an action-packed martial arts story. Greatly inspired by the likes of “Marvel” comic book titles “Master Of Kung Fu” and “Iron Fist” as well as the superb Bruce Lee motion picture masterpiece “Enter The Dragon”, I had originally intended to cram each episode with a variety of different Kung Fu stances, kicks and punches. But quickly found drawing all these poses accurately was very time consuming. In the end, rather disappointingly, I settled on just a couple of new moves, and crammed the dialogue, worryingly heavy at the best of times, with as many references to the different forms of martial arts as I could muster.

 

This four-parter also caused me some of the accent issues I encountered with “Burning At Baiame Cave”, as I wanted the Chinese criminals dialogue to differ in font to that of the British secret agents in order to indicate they were speaking in the Beijing dialect. Ideally I’d have liked to use a font that resembles logograms but I simply could not find such a font small and legible enough to fit within my word balloons. I also wanted to show that the deadly assassin Yamamoto, although able to speak English, had a heavy Chinese accent when he did so, so as a result whenever he spoke I applied the Cambria font.

 

Attacked by the very man they had hoped to ambush, the British Intelligence Service must turn to their own martial artist, Cheng Fu, to save them…