This extremely anticipated, once in a blue moon collaboration happened in 2003, especially for people in Hong Kong, the classic Jade Emperor Comic’s cross over with DC was suppose to mean something, to put HK comics back in to the spot light after a decade of “not much going on”. In the end, it bombed.
Both DC and Jade Emperor claiming to have sent their biggest of guns, GRAND daddy’s of their established companies to do the job, both were later found to have hired someone else to step in while they kept the bigger names of Doug Moench as writer & Wong Yuk Long as artist. The evident struggle which this collaboration have suffered is that there was a tone of dialogue, having pieced together short posts, comments of the very very little documentation online reguarding this publication, the common impression is that the folks over at DC were introduced this project of creating a story and have it sent over to Jade Dynasty in HK to work on the art, and evidently the writing was long, draggy and dominated the whole book, readers having claimed that the story having gone nowhere near interesting, rumours of a then assistant Khoo Fuk Lung was wearing a sad face the whole time he was inking this piece.
What I learnt from this is that : there needs to be a coordinator in between 2 super powers, I think it’s obvious by seeing the results that both comic houses barely even communicated with each other or maybe they refused to do so. Batman Hong Kong did become a classic, but only in the sense that it was a rare crossover of 2 seemingly unrelated publishers and the fact that it’s most likely not to happen again.
Story in detail is here:
As we were supposed to work on a piece of editorial design to talk about our findings, I told myself I wanted to find the time to work on a comic strip with Batman and Night Dragon slaughting it out with the above writing to be fit in as dialogue.
Having not drawn characters in a while, it took me a lot of bad drawings and failed posing to end up with the 7 frames I chose to work on, but I have actually never inked a comic in before. In search for a quick, moody method to deliver the best effect I could, I flipped open my Art of Hellboy book by Mike Mignola, some techniques from my days studying animation and tutorial clips by Todd McFarlen.
This is how I started off:
Comparing to using Photoshop like Todd McFarlane did in the video, I used a combination of strokes and the pen tool in creating my shapes, I am not sure how Mike Mignola does his shadow/coloring, but the result of mine done in AI does come close to Mignola or even Frank Miller-ish, the line work is straight and tidy with shadows making up a big portion of the frame.
I’d say it’s a pretty good start, but I didn’t have the time to fine tune for better line work, so ill leave it like this for now. Another thing is that I never thought the speech bubbles would take up so much of my frames, although I did have fun thinking bout shorter dialogue to tell the story of this failed collaboration between HK and the US.
Having wanting to do comics for the longest time and finally figuring out a good way to shadow and color, I look forward to do a comic of my own.
ANDY WAS HERE
ANDY was here 🤓 