New martial arts comic book has heroic kids battling ancient warriors and mysterious gargoyles in an epic quest to save the world and earn their blackbelts.
What do you get when you combine a love for comic books, monster movies, and martial arts with a student instructor who spent 5 years helping teach kids ninjutsu classes? If you ask recent film school graduate Joey Corpora, he’ll show you the result- a wacky new comic book called Shaolin Punks.
Since starting work with a temp agency in late 2013, Corpora’s days have been filled with placing orders from his command station in a cubicle at a large cable company. But he has remained adamant that he won’t squander his lunch breaks and waste his evenings watching TV- instead he fills all of his free time with drawing and writing comic books.
Though he hasn’t trained in martial arts in over a year (he currently has a 1st degree brown belt in a ninjutsu style called the Phoenix Ninpo Ryu), his training continues to inspire him in his creative work.
In 2012 he and his friends Kale Sweeney and Shannon Lee Haines created a short kung fu/fantasy film called Sins of the Dragon. The film won the runner-up award for best fight choreography in a short film at the 2013 Action On Film International Film Festival in Monrovia, CA.
When Corpora, a film school graduate, began working his current job, he feared that his creative avenue would be cut off.
“All of my friends were working full time jobs or still in school,” said Corpora. “I had a full time job myself, and that made it too hard to get everyone together to film movies anymore. But I’d always loved drawing, and I still wanted to tell stories, so I started drawing comics on my lunch breaks. It’s great because I still get to share my stories with people but it’s a lot easier to draw funny pictures in my spare time than it is to coordinate meeting up with ten people to shoot a movie for a week.”
Enter Shaolin Punks, Corpora’s first comic book. “It started as a webcomic on my blog,” says Corpora. “But once I finished the story I thought it’d be cool to turn it into a book.”
The story follows two young troublemakers named Nitro and Goose who want to get their blackbelts more than anything. But strange things are happening in the world, and soon the two pint-sized heroes find themselves battling gargoyles, immortal martial arts masters, and a terrible dragon spirit.
Corpora says the characters in Shaolin Punks were inspired by the kids in his martial arts classes. “I helped cover the kids’ classes whenever Sensei was out,” says Corpora. He notes that he was amused by the kids’ obsession with belt colors. “Some of my friends had their blackbelts, and these little 7-year old kids would just take a step back and stare at them with wide eyes like they were kings or something,” says Corpora, laughing.
Shaolin Punks is available as a paperback on Amazon.com. The full series, along with Corpora’s other comics, is also available for free on Corpora’s blog, www.kungfuspacebarbarian.com.
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If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Joey Corpora, please call 610-297-2595 or email [email protected].
-Joey
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