The Eighth Dragon…the origin of Rhythm!!!

Sooooo as some of you may or may not know, I am just flat out FASCINATED with the film Planet B-Boy and the show America’s Best Dance Crew(although this new season 4 really sucks). And as you might have seen on my site I have a BreakDancing Ninjas T-Shirt.
I truly DO believe that rhythm was born through Kung Fu. So this image above is just a few character designs for my new comic concept, The Eighth Dragon.
This comic will be a time piece. Set back in “Old School” China. And these characters will use rhythm and dance as their fighting forms and “battle”. Whether it’s the spoken word, break dancing or just graphitti art.
I hope to make a different spin and twist on what people think as “hip hop”.

Anyway….be on the look out for it.
-jerry
www.epicprops.com
The Eighth Dragon is © of Jerry Ma and Epic Proportions
ps- For any of you that remember YOLK Magazine, The Eighth Dragon was published in that magazine waaayyyy back whenever it was reinvented as a comic strip for about a year and a half.

The Third Tuesday at Loyola Marymount.

So on Tuesday September15, I had the honor and pleasure in joining fellow editors Jeff Yang, Parry Shen and contributing artist Bernard Chang at Loyola Marymount to talk shop about Secret Identities.
Honestly, we felt so at home there and were so welcomed that it helped make it such a great experience.
After speaking about how the book came to be, we took all the students through our “Build a Hero” workshop. They were all so into it, which made it fun for us.
And since Bernard was there(Bernard is the current artist on DC Comics Wonder Woman), we were able to take on a more complicated character.
Basically, the students came up with the idea of two twins, brother and sister, that were born in Korea. The brother was being held captive in a prison in Korea while his sister had defected to…..Canada.
They are part of a brother/sister project where the siblings can swap places with each other. The brother has the abillity to control fire, while the sister controls water.
Unfortunately I can’t recall what we had named these two. And my description of their powers is pretty bad. Parry has the formal descriptions and will eventually post it up on the Secret Identities Blog.

But since Michelle Ko, who was the one that brought us out to Marymount Loyola, had made these fantastic photos of the event, I couldn’t wait for Parry to post the info up and had to do it on my own first.

Anyway, I think these photos that Michelle made really do speak for themselves. And I hope you like my drawing…cuz it kinda looks stinky compared to Bernard’s.
-jerry
www.epicprops.com

Secret Identities at Loyola Marymount University Sept 15.

I’ll be joining Jeff Yang, Parry Shen and Bernard Chang at Loyola Marymount Tues night. We’ll be discussing our book Secret Identities and running our “Build A Hero” workshop.

What makes this workshop cooler than others is that:
a) I almost never get to go to these things due to my day job.
b) Bernard Chang, artist of Wonder Woman will be joining us.

So if you’re in the downtown LA area tomorrow night, please feel free to swing by.
for more info on the event, go here:
SI @ Loyola Marymount

AngryAsianMan.com Limited Edition Tshirt!

So Some of you may or may not know that I was fortunate enough to team up with Phil Yu (aka Angry Asian Man) on a Imaginasian art fundraiser for Kate Agathon from Purdue University. While doing that drawing for the fundraiser of AngryAsian Man, it gave me the idea of using a similar image for a tshirt. More on this later.

But I had the pleasure of meeting Phil back at ECAASU earlier this year at Rutgers University. Phil has been amazing in helping my partners and I with Secret Identities.
And as I’ve gotten to know Phil better, it has been both amazing and awesome to find out exactly HOW influential he is with his site. And I was dying to do a tshirt design with him. So after much bugging and emailing on my part…the shirt is now done! Well….I should probably say underway.
So just to give a little info on this design.
I’ve obviously gone with the “Quick Kick” character. But what was important to me was to do a shirt that not only Phil would want to wear, but to somehow have him involved in the design process as well.
So what I had him do, was sign “angry asian man” and mail me the signature.
And that signature is now going to be screened onto each sleeve of each shirt.
In my mind, this makes the design more “his”….and not just some shirt a guy made about him.
I also wanted the artwork to be clean and simple. More about the line than any messy rendering or detailing.

Anyway, this shirt will be available for purchase….probably in a month or so. It is currently in production. After I receive the shirts from the printers, I’ll have to take pictures of someone wearing them so that I can actually have it up on the site.

The shirt will be available in both Mens and Womens sizes.
Mens: Small, Medium, Large, X-Large
Womens: Small, Medium, Large

-Jerry
www.epicprops.com

Secret Identities T Shirt

So now that my partners(Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow) and I have a bit of downtime before we start work on Volume 2, I thought I’d take this time and design a Secret Identities T shirt.
This design was primarily Parry’s idea.
And before any of you say “who cares”, let me tell you the bullet points we had to use to come up with this design.
This shirt had to convey the following:
- the person viewing this design HAD to know this was for Secret Identities
- to show that this design is for a comic book
- use the color green
- our iconic imgs to work with were: eye glasses and a reporter
- a design in which we personally would like to wear
So now that you know what we had to achieve, I certainly hope you guys all like it. This shirt is only in the concept stage still. So there is room for change here.
But hopefully this shirt will be green lighted real soon so that we can go into production.
Whenever it is finally done, this shirt will be open for purchase at most events we will be at. And maybe even on my own site as well.
But this shirt will only be run off as a limted edition shirt. So there will only be a a limited amount of them for sale.
If and when this shirt sells out…we’ll try to come up with another design.

-jerry

Return to The Sneak

So a little while ago, I had drawn the Build a Hero contest winner, The Sneak.

And I had mentioned that I was NOT a graphitti artist.  And I called out my boy John Franzese to do a little scribble/tag if and when he could.

So he had to go and show me up and do this insanely sweet piece.

THANKS John!  For making me look like a chump.