Geof Darrow has had, to say the least, a fascinating and varied career that stretches beyond the realm of comics. His genre-transforming work on The Matrix aside, he’s spent the better part of 15 years working as a writer/artist, primarily working on his opus, Shaolin Cowboy; a multi-volume series about the eponymous monk/cowboy who roams the lands while suffering the consequences of every wrong he’s righted.

Darrow is back with a new volume of Shaolin Cowboy — Cruel to Be Kin — which showcases his relationship with a young Komodo dragon as told by an older version of that same dragon many years later. It’s Mandalorian-esque, coming full circle as Darrow is now seemingly inspired by the more modern incarnations of the characters that inspired his creation in the first place, like Yojimbo and Lone Wolf and Cub.

For those familiar with Shaolin Cowboy, Cruel to Be Kin is more of what you would expect from the series at this point: it’s grimy, it’s violent, and it’s gorgeous. We spoke with Darrow about what inspired him to create this story, as well as his influences and his thoughts on the mysterious Shaolin Cowboy himself.

Popverse: Geof, Shaolin Cowboy is and always has been, at the very least, an esoteric and hard-to-describe series. How would you go about describing this new volume of the story?

Geof Darrow: [laughs] More of what you’ve seen I guess! Oddly enough… I love action films and genre stuff. I’d seen, years ago, this '70s Robert Altman film called Nashville. What always struck me about it is that there wasn’t a real story in it. There were stories, you followed these people, but it was only for a certain amount of time. And I’ve always seen Shaolin Cowboy as the same thing. You’re just kind of following him, and things happen to him.

I didn’t want to do an arc of Infinity War or Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Multiverse time-changes or whatever. He just kinda shows up, as he does in this one, and things happen to him. The only difference in this one is that it picks up where the last one left off, and you get introduced to this Komodo dragon father and son. The father recognised him [Shaolin Cowboy] and starts telling his son about how he met him. It follows him for a while and eventually gets back to the present where things get… not so nice. It’s more of the same.

If you didn’t like the first three then you’re not gonna like this one!

I think this story gets better and better with each issue.

This one is, I think, the best one I’ve ever done. Dave Stewart is working really, really hard. And the flatters too. Nate Piekos, who does the lettering.

I asked Nate, “Can you shrink the balloons?” I think people would rather look at the drawings, nothing against the lettering! He did a great job where it’s still readable, but I want people to see the edge of his tennis shoe for whatever reason. I want you to see the blood on his shoe, so if you put the balloon over his shoe then the reader can’t tell. I like the one before this too. They’re far from perfect but in my limited ability I think I accomplished what I wanted. But I always get that, “But there’s no story!” There is, for me anyway.

It’s not necessarily plot-driven.

It is, or for me it is. I remember one time I was at Thought Bubble and this guy came up to me and said, There’s no narrative in your work!'

And I said, “Well, for me the action is part of the narrative.” And he starts arguing with me. Okay, man. You’ve made your point, that’s fine. And I asked him to move on because I was starting to get annoyed.

He walked away and kept yelling, 'There’s no narrative! There’s no narrative!' I don’t know what drives these people.

One time somebody did it to Frank Miller, I was sitting next to him and we were signing. It was a long line and this guy goes up to Frank and says to him, 'I don’t like your story.' Now, this guy’s waited 40 minutes to tell Frank Miller he doesn’t like his story.

Frank, without missing a beat, goes, “Well, I don’t like the coat you’re wearing.” The guy was just mystified. Who has that kind of time? I’m sure he thought, 'I sure got Miller that time, heh heh!'

There are people who normally live in letters columns and Twitter who just feel the need to do that in public.

I haven’t had anybody go after me online yet. Well, now I say that and it’s going to happen. 'Why don’t you work with a writer?!' Sometimes I get that.

Let us be devil's advocate: 'Why don’t you work with a writer?'

Because I do, I work with myself. I worked with Frank and drove him crazy. I’ve toyed with it. I almost worked with Jodorowsky once. He always tells me, 'It will be one work, Darrow. It will be one book.' And I know him, it’ll end up being 5,000 pages.

Do you ever see yourself working with a writer in the future?

Yeah, I guess. I just don’t know if they’ll give me what I want to do. This way, I can do whatever I want to do. The late Andrew Vachss and I, we were almost going to do Choice of Evil, the novel that he wrote, and I think Denys Cowan ended up drawing it. I knew it would probably take me two years to draw. Frank and I have talked occasionally… we think it’d be funny to do a sequel to Hard Boiled.

I wonder how that would go with today’s audience.

Darrow: I don’t know. Even with this [Shaolin Cowboy] I always worry about talk of cultural appropriation. This might come as a surprise to you, but I’m not Asian by any stretch of the imagination. I really love the Asian culture. I’ve asked people, “Does this bother you?” I say this now and I’ll probably open up some sort of flood.

How do your ideas come to you? Do they cook in your head for a while or do they just appear?

Well I was always thinking about how I left the last one, where he’s [Shaolin Cowboy] just standing in front of a chicken restaurant, about to make the same mistake that always gets him into trouble. And that’s his appetite. What am I gonna do next?/p>

I have all these ideas, I’ll just do this simple thing. I realised I had those Komodo dragons appear in the background in the last book. My idea was always that we’re in this horrible fictional southwestern state that’s based in a real state in the U.S., and that these Komodo dragons used to clean up the streets. You don’t have to pay them anything. If somebody’s died on the street, some homeless guy, they eat him. It’s like the guys who go and pick up roadkill except they’re too cheap to do that.

They have this whole other society of these dragons who live on rooftops and they clean up the waste of the city. They keep down the rats and what they consider the vermin, whether they be human or alien. That was always in my head, when I drew them on the rooftops I thought, “I could have him fight one of these Komodo dragons, that might be funny.”

It was actually an idea I had when I was working on The Matrix, the art director at the time asked, 'Draw me a Komodo dragon doing Kung Fu.' When I had started drawing I’d forgotten that he talked to me about that. I wrote to him and said, “I think I’ve appropriated your idea!” How would I start it and how would I end it? I then came up with that idea that you found out in this flashback that he fought this Komodo dragon.

I was also watching National Geographic. They had a thing on Komodo dragons and how the female has to protect the cluster of eggs from the father because he’ll eat them. He sees them as competition for his food source. So, I thought, “What if he gets to know this one and fights the father, and adopts this thing?” You know, it’s goofy.

I always liked Lone Wolf and Cub, there was a part in one of my favourite movies, a Zotōichi movie if you know who that is, The Blind Swordsman. It was a Japanese series of films. There was one where he has to protect a baby because he accidentally gets the mother killed. So you have this blind guy carrying this baby and everyone’s trying to kill him, because everyone’s trying to kill him. It was a really funny and charming story and it’s one of my favourite films, directed by a guy called Kenji Misumi. They do like three of these films in a year, they’re gems but they’re made in like six or seven weeks but they’re beautifully photographed. Those Japanese directors from the '60s had a great sense of composition, timing, and beautifully choreographed the fights.

And I like spaghetti westerns, so I thought I could actually make him like a cowboy in this one.

I’m not sure if I’ve seen you talk about this before, but where do the talking animals come from? They’re such a consistent fixture across all these volumes…

When I was going to do the first story I thought, “He doesn’t talk much.” I’ve got to have a narrator or somebody to put some dialogue in there because he really doesn’t talk much. He talks a little bit more in this one.

When I was growing up there was a TV series called Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed was a talking horse and it always cracked me up. It was so goofy because the horse only talked to the owner. Everybody else would hear him talking to himself in his garage, he was an architect on top of it where part of his architectural studio was a stable for his horse. They’d do funny things with the horse where they’d put peanut butter on his upper lips so it would move and they would put words into it. In fact, one episode actually had Clint Eastwood in it and it always stuck in my mind because his agent was a guy called Mr. Darrow! And I always thought 'Wow, this is too good!' When the horse was annoyed with the guy, they’d cut to the horse but it would just be an ass. It was so stupid, and he would go, “Ok, Ed, I’m sorry,” and it would cut back to the horse and it would be his head again.

So I had Shaolin Cowboy riding on this mule and have the mule talk, so he’d have all the goofy dialogue. If he talks, I adhere to that Disney rule where you had Mickey Mouse and you had Goofy, and Mickey had this dog called Pluto who can’t talk.

In this world, some animals are enlightened and some aren’t. And with King Crab, I started it because I wanted to do this scene where he shows up and there’s all these guys waiting to kill him. Because I thought it was funny that in the middle of the desert these guys were waiting for him. God knows how long it’s been because they have a portable toilet in there.

I thought that was funny, and it was funny to draw. I just drew all these guys and for some reason I drew a crab down in the bottom of one of the panels, because a crab in the desert makes no sense at all. They’re water creatures, what would it be doing there? As I finished drawing it I thought one of these guys had to be a real kick-ass character who can fight, and I looked through all the guys I had already drawn and I saw the crab and thought, “Oh’s that’s pretty goofy. That’s pretty stupid.”

I came up with this backstory of why the crab would hate him. All-you-can-eat seafood always gets to me because it doesn’t seem too healthy. All-you-can-eat sushi scares the bejesus out of me because sushi needs to be fresh. It seems like a recipe for disaster. What if he had eaten this guy’s family? I think the Wachowskis loved it.

I was in Japan and they were going to make an animated film and shelved it. It was written and I was co-directing. That scene actually got finished, where he goes to the Shaolin temple and trains. In Japan there’s a different way of filmmaking where they do little pieces of stuff, and when the crab’s talking about his origin like he does in the comic, you can see it through his eyes so the animation changed. That part was animated by a gentleman who did a movie called Mind Games. It’s different, but it looked good compared to the rest of the animation which looked more like my drawings. The Weinsteins pulled out the financing before it got finished but that part did get done and it’s pretty funny.

Do you think that film will ever be finished? Will you eventually get the backing to finish it?

It depends on the money. They said if they got the money, they’d finish it. But it’s been ten years. It was right when the whole financial recession hit.

The Weinsteins in particular are pretty cagey guys for more reasons than just financial as I’m sure you’re aware. They really wanted to get into business with the Wachowskis and they went, “We really want to do an animated film of the Shaolin Cowboy.” It was a five million dollar investment, the Japanese put in half and they put in the other half. It was a pretty big budget for an anime at the time. They never even got to meet the Wachowskis, and when the whole financial thing started falling apart for them… they had over-invested, they wanted to do a clothing line and all this crap, and they pulled the plug on it and it turned into this whole legal battle. Because they signed the contract but ended up having to pay some money to the Japanese.

We had some great guys working on it. I think the Japanese were really good about it because they really got screwed. It wasn’t easy. They had this big goofy white guy and somebody actually asked me, “What are you doing here?” I’m supposed to be directing this thing! But nobody told the co-director that I was there to do that. I said to him, “What do you think I’m here for? And he said, “You’re the creator.” And I said, “I hate to tell you this, but we’re both supposed to be directing this.” They never told him that. He was never mad at me but he wasn’t happy with the situation because he had done some great shows. He asked me if this was an action film or a comedy. I told him it was both. He told me I had too much action. That crab mystified them, which always cracked me up because they found it unbelievable. I could never quite say this to them but, come on. Gamera, Ultraman, that stuff’s all pretty goofy.

They draw the line at crabs.

They drew the line at a talking crab! It’s funny.

Whenever you finish a volume of Shaolin Cowboy, there’s always a relatively large gap between volumes. Do you think about other projects?

Well, a lot of the time I have a lot of stuff to do because someone calls up and asks me to work on a movie. The money’s good and I’m not getting younger, and it might be the last time they ever ask me, and usually it’s someone I really like and I’m thrilled they asked me to be a part of the movie.

I think maybe I should create something new, and I have several ideas, but I always come back to him because I’m comfortable with him. I was watching The Mandalorian, which I like a lot. Because it’s just fun. It’s what the movies have missed. It’s aliens and monsters and it’s just a joy. I think of doing a space opera but there’s a gazillion of them and they’re better than anything I would ever do. I can do this goofy cowboy character. Maybe I can put him in space.

I was just going to say that, you could put him in space and nobody would bat an eye.

I’ve had a couple of ideas. I might do some extra pages. When this thing is collected, there’s an idea that Steve Skroce gave me that I might do. Put extra stuff at the end of the collection. I’m always afraid someone will beat me to it.

Shaolin Cowboy has been a part of various eras of comics, living through the Image boom to the corporate ownership era and beyond. What do you think makes the character such an enduring and even endearing fixture of comics?

There’s not enough of it to wear out its welcome. It comes in relatively small doses so maybe if it came out every month people will give up on it. I’ve never really thought about it. I’m not worried since Mike Richardson has been printing them and they’ve been making money… I know they make money because I get royalties but it’s not The Walking Dead. I work on movies and get paid a certain amount of money that allows me to do these things. I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t drawing something.

I’m not sure how many comics you’re reading these days, but I’m wondering what you think this series means in today’s market. I think it’s a relatively untapped genre.

I was contacted by Cartoonist Kayfabe. I didn’t know what it was, they wanted to talk to me and interview me. I thought it would just be, “What’s it like working with Frank Miller?” Then I listened to what they did and they’re fun, and so I did a long interview with them just talking about all sorts of goofy stuff. They have an effect, they tell people to buy stuff and I’m curious to see if that has any effects on my sales and if it reached another audience. I think I have a consistent audience. There’s not a lot of it there, it's not taking up too much of your budget.

You’ve put in a lot of years in the industry, what’s the hardest part of making comics after all this time?

The drawing part of it, honestly. It’s hard figuring out the layouts. I used to do it in spurts, I’ll do ten pages. If I have the layouts the drawing part goes faster because the composition part is hard. Storytelling is hard.

Steve Skroce is really good at it. He probably storyboarded 70% of The Matrix trilogy and I always told him to just print those storyboards because they would just work as comics.

And the writing part, the writing part! When drawing I put the TV on, I listen to music, but with the writing I can’t have any kind of noise. I don’t know how writers do it. I talked to Matt Kindt, I said, “I don’t know how you do it, man.” I feel like I need one of those self-depravation tanks to isolate myself. It’s tiring to me, I don’t feel like I’m… it’s not entertaining. So when I feel like I’m done, I read it and tell my wife, “I don’t remember writing any of this.” I read it and go, “I wrote that?”

Because all I think I ever write is “look out” and “that hurts!” I asked other guys if they remember the stuff they write. There’s one line in this one that stuck with me that I can quote but the rest of it seems like someone else wrote it.

What about the easiest part of making comics?

Probably the inking. My pencils are so tight, it’s only a matter of tenacity because in this case I always pencil an issue, then ink it, and move on. When I get the pencils going and feel comfortable drawing, I end up drawing the whole thing. I think I drew 205 pages. Then I have to go back and ink it. I don’t want to look at the finished image because I’m terrified it doesn’t look good, until I have to send it.

I sent all the originals to Dark Horse in batches of a hundred pages through FedEx, which is a big gamble! Maybe I was hoping it would get lost because I’m so insecure. Maybe it won’t get printed. At one point, it didn’t get lost, but when they put in the ZIP code it corresponds to another one. It was sent to some place like, Cowhide, Tennessee. Because I hadn’t gotten it. I contacted my editor and told them, and they got it back.

Why wouldn’t you just scan it?

I have to go to this place to scan it since they’re really big. There’s so much. The last issue I did scan. I must have been there for an hour. In the States I used to do it, at FedEx or Kinko’s you can just do it yourself. They give you the little keycard but in France they have to do it. So there’s an added thing where they’re looking at these drawings and thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?” I did a drawing for Ed Piskor’s Red Room comic, and it was so disturbing to me. And I come in with a drawing of this guy whose guts are cut with razorblades in their eyes. So I wanted to avoid them. Not like they’re going to track me down. In America a guy would call and say, “This guy’s bringing me these drawings and I think he might be a pedophile murderer!” The cops would burst into my door. Of course they’d see I’m white and go, “That’s fine.”

In terms of Shaolin Cowboy himself, who is ultimately neither a monk nor a cowboy, I’m wondering how you’ve built him up over the years in your head compared to what the audience sees in the comic.

I know all about him. He did go to a monastery but was kicked out. It’s the one line I remember in this issue where the little guy asks him if he’s a priest or a killer and he says something like, “Well, I must admit I’m better at one thing than the other.” He has good intentions but he’s human and has a pretty big ego. He was, as a kid, bullied and not treated well. So when he has the chance to tackle a bully he will do it.

There’s a line from the first issue of Cruel to Be Kin where I think it revealed a lot more about his character than we’ve seen. He said something along the lines of, “I follow the path of the Buddha.” I thought, “Wow, you never really hear him vocalise what he’s about explicitly.”

He’s just not very good at it. He’s a fallen monk. I watched a lot of those movies where the monk isn’t supposed to kill but he butchers people. And those guys get accepted back in. There’s a hypocrisy, even in this character, that he kills a bunch of people and would praise Buddha. Which is something I’d see in those movies all the time. He kills them and says, “Buddha be praised,” and I’m like, “What are ya sayin’ here?” Do you think Buddha helped you kill all these guys?

He lives in a pretty violent world. Do you think he’s trying to find peace within it? Even when he’s not facing thugs in the desert he’s massacring a crab family in a restaurant, though.

I always thought that at that point people don’t really know that those creatures are sentient. Nowadays, the more they find out about animal intelligence… I don’t know if you saw that documentary My Octopus Teacher. I watched that and went, “Wow! Who knows?” I mean, birds can do stuff. They use tools, building these things. I think animals can act way better than humans. So when he ate that crab’s family, I don’t think he realised the extent to which his crime went. I don’t think he would do it again. But, he’s in front of that chicken restaurant.

It’s a cycle that perpetuates itself.

Yeah. He’s probably thinking, “Well, only crabs can think.” But probably all the creatures he’s eaten are sentient. The pig in the last volume was sentient, though in my mind he was eating vegetarian ramen in that place. Whatever it was, I can’t remember what he was eating.

That’s the kind of stuff he gets up to in his downtime.

That is his downtime. He gets from Point A to Z and things just get in his way. He’s not looking to help people actually, he just inadvertently does.

Do you think he’s a good person?

I think he tries to be. He’s killed a lot of people. Some of them deserved it, I guess, but he did wipe out that crab’s family. I would like to think he is.

I remember reading, I think it was the first ever issue of the series, and you had that series of double page spreads showing all the people waiting for him in the desert waiting to exact vengeance upon Shaolin Cowboy. I remember thinking, first of all, I didn’t know you could do that in comics, and second, that’s a lot of people he’s killed.

He’s pissed off a lot of people, but there’s another thing that I like. A lot of times it’s for dumb reasons. Some of them are for people he’s hurt but for others he hasn’t responded to an email. Some people get pissed about really dumb things, myself included. So they carry a grudge against him. If you ask somebody in that group, they’ll say he cut in line at the supermarket.

When I lived in Chicago, some people would get killed over a parking spot. That always stuck with me. So not all those things are gunfights or killing somebody’s brother.

It’s a violent world and I think they’re seeking violence. They found the perfect person because he’ll be able to reciprocate.

He does get down on his knees and say he’s sorry, but he has kind of a big ego. He’s not gonna let anybody kill him. He won’t turn the other cheek if somebody slaps him. He’s not going to kill them, he might break their hand.

You’ve obviously grown as an artist throughout the years. Your work has always been detailed but I think the detail in this new volume is staggering.

Really?

Yeah! I was aware of your work before first reading Shaolin Cowboy so to me there was a progression in detail, more lines in character’s faces now. Has your process changed at all?

I like to think that I’m capable of drawing a little better. I went back and there’s things I would definitely redraw. You just hope it gets better. I’m trying to get better. At understanding composition. Sometimes I wish I was a little more loose. As goofy as it is, it’s very realistic and yet not at all realistic.

I feel like you’ve made it harder on yourself because the stories have become more urban.

That’s always what I wanted to do, the reason I started that first one in the desert was because after Hard Boiled I wanted something I could do fast. I still wasn’t that comfortable, then when I did the second one with all the zombies it was still pretty simple in that respect. I had a gazillion bodies. But then I finally got him into town, I got to draw buildings again. By then I got drawing buildings out of my system.

In this one I got him out of the city into the desert, but then he gets into the city big-time at the end of issue four. God, that was murder. A lot of buildings, cars, and people.

I feel bad turning the pages of your comics sometimes. Like with the first page of this first issue, I felt like I had to live with it for a while before moving on.

With that first page, I didn’t want to ink it because it was all cars and windows… oh god damnit, I just dreaded it. When I got him in the desert those went kind of fast.

When talking about your writing process earlier, you used air quotes. It may have been in the first recap page of the first volume where there’s a comment about the quality of your writing. That was written by the Wachowskis, right?

They were supposed to be recaps. I told them to do whatever they wanted, and they called it the 'ass-ologue.' Which I thought was pretty funny. I’d just do a drawing and give it to them, and ask them to come up with something. So little happened that I thought it would be, “Last issue he killed a guy.”

That’s why when I did the second volume with the zombie fight, I knew there was going to be very little dialogue so I asked them to print the recap really small. I wanted it really dense, put it on one page, no one was meant to read that thing because not one thing happened in the issue before that. Some people got it, some people didn’t.

The recap pages break readers’ brains a little, I think. I think it’s safe to say that not every reader carefully analyses the artwork in a comic so they rely on lettering to help guide them through the page, so when they’re confronted with a big wall of text they don’t know how to handle it and end up reading the whole thing, which is what I did.

I think that was Lilly Wachowski who wrote those. She gave that mule a name, and I was like, “That mule has no name!” But you know, it was hard because it was the Wachowskis and I can’t tell them no. I told them to not give him a name and they just ignored it.

How do you feel about your writing now as opposed to when you first started Shaolin Cowboy?

I think it’s obvious that I care more about the drawings. I won an Eisner for writing and drawing, which really made me happy. For good reason, I’ve never been asked to write. I’ve been asked to write a quote or something, but I think most people are afraid of what I would write. I’ve never been asked, not even Dark Horse asked me to write Conan when they had him. Probably for good reason.

How much of a role does writing actually play in your comics? Do you write a script?

No I don’t, the only script was for the movie. That was an actual script. But with these, it’s Kirby/Lee style except I’m both of them. I treat the Kirby part of me a lot better than Lee treated the Kirby part of their team. I plot it out by drawing it, and I know that in this panel he’s going to say something.

I try not to get too much of that comic book wise-ass thing where every time someone throws a punch they have to say something. “Stick that web up your ass, Spider-Man!” Whatever. I know kids like Deadpool, and I know it’s a comic book.

Do you miss working with writers?

Well, the only thing I miss about it is I never knew what I was going to draw next. It was always a surprise, a gift. I remember when I was working on Hard Boiled, Frank gave me ten pages and another ten pages and I went, “Ooh, I get to draw this!” On Big Guy, not so much because I went off on tangents while drawing and didn’t always follow what he wrote. With Big Guy he just wrote three paragraphs.

Your influences for the series and character range from Yojimbo to Mad Max. Those characters used to be a lot more prevalent but their presence has dwindled over the years. Why do you think that is?

That’s funny because I was thinking about that too. When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, there weren’t many science fiction films. There were B movies but now we have Spider-Man. If I saw these as a kid I think my head would have exploded. The coolest guys were Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen. James Bond was probably the closest thing to a comic book we had.

I thought Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best films of all time because it’s so beautifully shot, so beautifully choreographed. To me there’s a ton of story in it, it just doesn’t stop and tell you. If you listen and you watch, there’s so much creativity in it. And it wasn’t popular. It did okay, I guess, because they’re doing Furiosa.

The Man with No Name seems boring because you can watch Iron Man. I’m sure in the 60s if they had done movies of that quality then the Man with No Name would never have worked.

And yet, the Mandalorian is probably the most popular Star Wars character right now. Well, him and the little green guy.

He’s Yojimbo and Lone Wolf. They put those two together. There’s that scene right out of Lone Wolf and Cub where Luke has the baby choose between the lightsaber and the chainmail. It was right out of the comics and movies, just a straight swipe. And he’s pushing around that little baby cart. So they’re just reinterpreting it. Those original baby cart movies, they’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I saw them when they came out and they really inspired me. My God, they’re so bloody and so crazy and so impossible.

I did some work with Ridley Scott and he had done a film in Japan called Black Rain. He had the guy who played the Lone Wolf in the movie as the main bad guy? So I asked him, “What was it like to work with Tomisaburo Wakayama?” He goes, “Who’s that? Why do you ask?” He had never seen a baby cart movie and I said, “You gotta see those things.” He had no idea who he was when he hired him, he told me he just looked right.

There’s nothing like them. Some of the endings of those things inspire me. He’s got the baby cart and looks up and there’s a thousand guys across the skyline waiting to kill him, and he kills them all. The excess in that stuff… in America we would say, “There’s no way he could survive!”

That makes sense, in The Mandalorian they gave him that armour that makes him invincible.

Yeah! Yeah. But in the baby cart movies, he gets stabbed. I remember he was laying there at the end with a sword sticking out of his back. And the baby comes and he tells him to pull the sword out. He pulls it out and puts him in the cart and he’s pushing him off while dripping blood all over the place, and that’s the end of the movie! And you know he’s not going to die. In the next one he’s fine.

Even with Frank when we did Hard Boiled… I’d seen those John Woo movies where people get shot a gazillion times at the end of the movie and go get a beer. When I was drawing that I was thinking of those, so I put him in a trenchcoat and I had him all beat up and shot and Frank went, “How can he survive that?” So he turned him into a cyborg, because it bothered him that no human could survive this.

Do you ever think of ending Shaolin Cowboy, of the last story you want to tell?

I don’t think it’ll end well. If it happens he’ll find peace. Maybe he’ll end up on some planet by himself and he won’t have to worry about anyone. He’ll probably eat something and start that cycle all over again. And that was all inadvertent, I realised there was a lot of eating-related stuff. Consumerism is a big part of the series.

Knowing him, his ship will knock some asteroid off course which will hit a planet.

And those people will come after him. Now there’s a good idea. You’ll get a writing credit on that, that’s a good one!