A cliched American martial arts student with a cliched mysterious past treks through the cliched mountains to find the mystical Order of the Flaming Cliche. He begins his cliched training with Master Cliche to learn how to cliche.
How familiar are you with the kung fu genre? Have you read Marvel’s Iron Fist and Doctor Strange comics? Seen Kill Bill, the Doctor Strange movie, Kung Fu Panda, and the movies of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Stephen Chow and Donnie Yen (and those are just the ones off the top of my head)? Then you’ve already read Robert Kirkman’s latest, Fire Power, which is just Kung Fu Cliches: The Comic!
The cast are all stock characters: cliched protagonist student, cliched master, cliched love interest (But we can’t bone, it’s forbidden! Guess what they do?!), cliched rival, cliched bad guy. The story is cliched: the protagonist trains for most of the book, then fights the bad guy. It’s such a boring read - Kirkman brings nothing new to the table and seems content to endlessly riff derisively. At no point is any of it entertaining.
Chris Samnee’s art is tremendous and he manages to draw action so convincingly that you can almost see the drawings move - they’re that good. And it’s a good thing too, not just because the art is the only thing that’ll hold your attention, but because this is a martial arts comic so there’s lots of action. Basically, without Samnee, this comic is completely ignorable.
Not that I would say it’s worth checking out anyway, unless you’re a Chris Samnee fan, because the first volume of Fire Power is one long tedious yawn.
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