Hip Hop and Comics Vol.2: Kagan Mcleod (Infinite Kung Fu)
Artist Kagan Mcleod
Hometown: Toronto, CA
Bio: After doing some time with one of Canada’s dailies Kagan Mcleod decided that his art skills would be put to better use showcasing zombies, blaxploitation, and kung fu rather than charts and graphs. He started a journey three years ago that has culminated in six issues of his epic Infinite Kung Fu. Now a full time artist Mcleod plans to continue his story and hopefully crank out issues at a faster rate.
Notable Works: Infinite Kung Fu
Website: kaganmcleod.com
Do you still work at the newspaper in Toronto?
That’s a little outdated. I work for the National Post in Canada doing graphics but I’m mostly doing freelance now and it’s like I only go in there once a week now.
I been out to Toronto and the hiphop scene out there is pretty nice. Are you feeling any local acts out there?
Yea there is a crew called Monolith, and a group called IRS. I think their album just came out. I know you’ve heard of Kardinal Offishal, IRS are on a couple of his tracks. Kardinal is good too. There’s cool stuff coming from up here.
Comparing to what I was seeing in the independent scene in NYC at the time I went I felt Toronto was a little better. People went to the shows and actually had fun and were open to different types of music.
I’m twenty-five and all the shows I go to I feel really old because everyone is sixteen or seventeen. I just picked up some tickets for Saturday for Lyrics Born, Grouch and Eligh.
I heard you’re a big Aceyalone fan.
Yea! Where did you hear that?
I saw in one interview you said ‘Book of Human Language’ was your favorite album. People don’t just throw that out there like that so I kinda picked up that you’re a big fan. Give us a little background on the work you’ve done and tell us a little about the Infinite Kung Fu series.
I started working on it in 2000 and I just planned on doing a little comic book to see how it goes. I basically just got out of college and I wanted to do something to showcase my art. I wanted to have a kung fu theme because I was getting into that and it got bigger, people liked it and I got a great response from it. So I just kept going and making more. It’s been three years and I’m just finishing up issue six now but I’ve been doing it on the side the whole time just for fun. It’s pretty cool because I get feedback from all over. It’s distributed through Diamond comics and that kinda gets it across the world. People know about it from all over the place. I mailed some out to a bunch of magazines and I ended up getting some press in Wizard and even the Source did a little half page thing. There’s no obvious hiphop in it besides a little graffiti style sound effects but it’s popular with hiphop crowds. I used to do graffiti and that kinda shows through a bit here and there and the whole kung fu thing is popular among hiphop heads.
I’m really digging the style. It’s so different and I guess that’s why I like it and I think the reason it may attract hiphop heads is because the character Moog Joogular is a spin-off of the old George Clinton. It looks exactly like him when he was young.
That’s another thing I could never really find a comic that I was really really digging so I wanted to do something all my way.
Give us an overview of the story.
When I first started I just wanted it to be about the art and the story was just kinda like a backdrop thing because I didn’t consider myself to be a writer but it started to work out and the feedback I got from people was really cool so now I’m working more on the story. It takes place in the future and the only reason I did that was so I could put any cultures together. Something almost destroyed the world so everyone decided to abandon technology and go back to the period when the culture was the best. The east went back to kung fu days and you might get these funky George Clinton Parliament kinds of towns somewhere. I was gonna do more stuff but I figured I’d keep it less complicated and tell those tales. In a way I wanted to tell a story like the old school kung fu movies but at the same time not recreate something that’s already been done. That’s why I added the other flavors in.
You should take the time out and turn this into a video game have you thought about it?
I’ve had people contact me about that stuff but nothing has actually come up. I got all excited the first couple of times people called me up about movie options and things like that but I found out later that there are people whose job is to call everyone who do new comics and see if they can get there hands on the rights to it. I do have some guys that are trying to come up with a movie pitch for it. I really don’t have any part in that I’m just hoping I get some free money someday and put it towards more comics.
What can you tell us about some of the characters and the inspirations behind them?
The main character is Lei-Kung, a name I lifted from a old Shaw brother movie, and in all the Shaw Brothers movies there is a character who is bumbling and inexperienced in the beginning and by the end he is a kung fu master. He’s supposed to be the classic hero. There are the eight immortals, which are actual Chinese mythological characters, and they all have their own students and teach them kung fu. One of the students is Lei-Kung, the hero and another is Moog Joogular, the George Clinton type character. Basically the history of Moog Joogular is that he lost his funk and decided to go off to the mountains and figure out what everything is about. He ended up meeting his kung fu teacher and finding out the funk, the chi, and the force and all that stuff are the same thing and he applied that to learning kung fu. It’s a good mix.
Did you actually pitch this idea to publishers or did you always have it in your mind to self publish the series?
It was more for fun at the beginning. Partly into it, I thought it would be cool to have somebody else taking care of it but there’s something cool about not having to answer to anybody and doing it yourself. I’m gonna keep doing it like that. The only thing that would be better about having someone else do it is having a name publisher like DC Comics or Darkhorse that would increase the circulation. I make some money to print the comic books doing other stuff and take the money I get from the comics and put it towards the next one. I don’t lose money but I don’t make hardly any money either.
It’s a labor of love huh.
Yea. I do illustration work for newspaper its not hard and when its done its done but when I do the comic book I get people from all over the world calling and sending me emails and people drawing my characters and sending them to me so its really cool.
While at the paper have you ever tried to slip some funny stuff into their charts or graphics just to entertain yourself?
I never did anything that would get me in trouble but I’ve managed to get a few characters from the comic into the paper here and there. Sometimes you have to do dummy text that has to be really small but look like text on a book and I might write a few sentences about myself. It’s cool for the money but when I go home I’m not thinking about it. I’m always thinking about the comic.
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