Storm Riders, Volume 1

Storm Riders #1

by Wing Shing Ma

STORM RIDERS takes us on a journey through an amazing world in ancient China where, aside from the hegemony of the Royal Government, an individual and separate society exists: The World Fighting Association. Conquer, a powerful Kung Fu master, aspires to gain control of the Association and assembles the mightiest force of fighters known to humanity. Forgetting the evil deeds he's committed in his lifetime; he takes on Wind and Cloud, two very talented and young martial artists, as his disciples. His destiny to be the Ultimate Master draws nigh; however, destiny has a will of her own and at the crux of the impending maelstrom blow Wind and Cloud

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

127 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

Wing-shing Ma (b. 16 January 1961) is a Hong Kong wuxia (Chinese swordplay) manhua (Chinese comic book) artist, writer and publisher. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Fung Wan (Storm Riders) and Chinese Hero series. He also contributed illustrations to the "graphic novel" adaptations of Jin Yong's wuxia novel Heaven Sword & Dragon Sabre and Zhang Yimou's wuxia film Hero (2002)

Reviews

[RdWd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Storm Riders' notoriety in the west stems largely from the 1998 movie directed by Andrew Lau. This was a film adapted from the Chinese manhua (i.e. Chinese manga) tradition; Storm Riders being created by Wing Shing Ma in 1989.

Beautifully illustrated, the first 4 issues collected in Storm Riders Vol.1 checks off many of the wuxia tropes. There's plenty of qinggong acrobatics and flying, swords with fantastic names and powers, mystical entities and prophecies, rivals and adversaries of the jianghu fighting world, and a gruelling duel (taking up the majority of the narrative) between the fathers of Cloud and Wind (central characters in both the manhua & movie). This is very much the prelude to the series and Cloud and Wind's stories.

I loved the idea of the World Fighting Association standing in for the jianghu (i.e. the wuxia martial arts world), and how it exists behind the façade of the imperial court, almost as if its been deliberately excluded from historical record. In some ways it reminded me of Namco's Tekken videogame series that began in 1994 (and of course its sister game-series: Soul Calibur, 1996): from the array of varied martial artists, to the games' concept of the King of the Iron Fist Tournament (on that note, the gaming industry needs a new fighting game: if any game devs are reading this: please, I beseech you: make a Storm Riders videogame ;) )

Put simply: Storm Riders is the gateway series for any western readers wanting a dosage of wuxia in a comic book format. I'm looking forward to reading more from Wing Shing Ma.

[Kurt Rocourt · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a short time there was a steady flow of comics from China. This was the best of the bunch. The story is easy to get into and the characters are clearly defined. Yes, they are generic at first. Its takes up to volume 5 before they start to break off into more believable and nuanced people. You have to start from the beginning so get through this and keep going. Theres also the two live action films and an animated series if you can find them.

[Arthur · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t remember this story as well, pretty slow start

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great art, lots of action. Introduces the main characters in their childhood.

[B.C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up at a book fair for $.50 because the art was pretty good. It had its ups and downs. First off, the art was pretty good. The best, but enough to keep me interested. It is also very Chinese. Kung Fu moves are like special powers and they can develop superhuman abilities through training. All very kung fu, I loved that aspect. The two major downsides was the paneling and the translation. My view of paneling is that if you have to put arrows to tell the reader where their eyes should go next, you failed in designing your page. This may be a cultural thing, but the panels were all over the place. The translation read like a school teacher translated it. The sentence structure was text booky and didn't have a lot of life in it. Felt unnatural. I'm sure it was a good translation in that it matched the original text, but it had very little life to the words.

Overall, it was about as enjoyable as a bad kung fu movie (yes, those can be enjoyable). It is a small piece of the story and I don't think I'll hunt down the rest.