When Wind and Cloud unite…you’re in deep $#!t.

Hi, I’m Calvin McMillin, and I like Storm Riders.

Now, of course, my lack of even the most fundamental Chinese reading skills puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to truly immersing myself in the world that Ma Wing-Shing created in his beautifully illustrated comic books, but that hasn’t stopped me from being a fan of the franchise. Still, I’m pretty familiar with the early story arcs since I own almost the entire run of the English language translation of the comic book published by the now defunct company, Comics One (those graphic novel reviews should be coming sometime around 2046). During my trips overseas, I’ve bought several Storm Riders artbooks, desk tchoktkes, and a pretty badass poster of Nameless that I keep threatening to hang up against my girlfriend’s wishes. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my bad habit of collecting those little Storm Riders figurines that come out every so often. And of course, I own both Andrew Lau’s initial Storm Riders film as well as Dante Lam’s animated “sequel” Storm Rider: Clash of Evils. Heck, I even introduced the original film at a student-run film festival back at my alma mater, Oklahoma State University (in hindsight, we should have shown Shaolin Soccer instead, but I digress).

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As promised, in anticipation of the new HK movie, here are some photos from the Storm Warriors exhibit at VivoCity at Harbourfront in Singapore. After making the rather long trip on the MRT (subway to Americans like me) to see the exhibit, I was a little annoyed that the people at the Information Counter had no idea what I was talking about. You would assume that a major Hong Kong star like Ekin Cheng coming to a mall in Singapore would be kind of a big deal, but not only did the young man that I talked to NOT have an earthly clue who or what I was talking about, but he had the nerve to say — when I asked whether his co-worker might know — “She doesn’t know either.”

Ah, so helpful.

Thankfully, I found the exhibit all by myself. It was hidden away in the lobby of the theater. For more information on Ekin Cheng’s visit to Singapore to unveil these props, click here. Sorry about the image quality!

The Display

Cloud’s “Ultimate Superior Sword” (kinda redundant, eh?)

Wind’s Blizzard Saber (Has nothing to do with Dairy Queen)

The Final Countdown

 Since those pics aren’t exactly earth-shattering, I’ve embedded a link to a high quality version of the Storm Warriors Final Theatrical Trailer that was released a little while ago. Enjoy!

 In tribute to James Cameron’s new film, Sanjuro employs Lee Byung-Hun as his Official LoveHKFilm.com Avatar.

Well, I’ve finally made it to Singapore, so it’s time for a blog update. During my stay I’ve already seen the Laughing Gor prequel, TURNING POINT, and I hope to see OVERHEARD eventually as well as the Singaporean film WHERE GOT GHOST? perhaps as early as today. I also finally got the opportunity to watch Pixar’s UP, which is hands-down the best movie of the summer.

With my first Singapore-based update, I’d like to start with a topic that is actually HK-related — Ma Wing Shing’s STORM RIDERS comics. For those of you who live in Hong Kong or some other East Asian country, this post might not be as interesting to you as I hope it is for HK cinema fans in non-Asian countries. Still, I hope you all get a kick out of it!

But first, a preface of sorts. I have — for the longest time — collected toys. I’ve always taken good care of the toys I played with as a kid, and when I became older, I became one of those fanboy geeks who bought cool toys and either a) displayed them on my desk in funny poses or b) kept them sealed in the package in the belief that they might actually be worth something someday. As to the latter hope, I was somewhat successful. On a related note, I recently dug through my closet at my parents’ house, and I have to admit that the sheer amount of unopened Star Wars merchandice I possess is astounding. My hope is that I can secretly pawn this stuff on eBay so my wonderful girlfriend never sees the true extent of my collector mania.

But I digress. The point of this post is to highlight one particulair strain of this deranged mentality – my propensity to collect figures based on Chinese comic books like Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero (aka Zhonghua Ying Hung). Let’s just say that I have a lot of these figures, and on any visit to Hong Kong (sorry Kozo, for constantly playing Virgil to my Dante in my personal descent into HK’s collectible underworld) or Singapore, I will actively search for these things. However, I’m getting a little older and really starting to see the folly of collecting all this stuff (aka: useless clutter). So on this trip abroad, I told myself that I would not go out and seek this stuff, but if it somehow appeared before me while browsing stores, well…

Anyway, when I arrived at my family’s flat in Choa Chu Kang, I was surprised to see this box waiting for me:

I’m not sure you can tell the size from these photos, but it’s a pretty big box. I could tell it was some some kind of official Storm Riders merchandise, and from the size of the package, I was guessing it was a big-ass statue. Luckily, my worries about how I’d bring this back to the US evaporated when I learned that the box simply contained two small figures of Wind and Cloud. Here’s what they look like:

Wind

Cloud

Pretty cool, huh? The only downside is that Wind’s sword and Cloud’s base have pegs with no corresponding holes on the figures themselves, which makes wielding a blade (Wind) or simply standing up correctly (in the case of Cloud) simply impossible. Oh well.

While out shopping later that day, I did pick up this volume of Storm Riders, complete with a crazy holo-foil/chromium(?) cover and a snazzy mousepad:

I bought it at a store called Comics Connection, which has branches in just about every shopping complex in Singapore I’ve visited. I guess small business owners who want to have a comic store of their own have to go the franchise route here (I’m not sure). Each time I’ve visited, however, I’ve noticed that I see less and less Chinese product (aside from the comics themselves) and more and more Japanese manga, toys, and games (most of which is available in the US now). Anyway, despite the burgeoning Japanophilia apparent in these stores, I thought this branch was pretty cool thanks to a familiar figure they had busting out of the wall:

Kinda nifty, but take a closer look at Wind’s hand:

Perhaps Wind is well-aware that this is a vulgar hand gesture.

In other Storm Riders-related news, I’m planning on going to see the Wind and Cloud swords on display at Vivo City, so stayed tuned for that. Apparently, Ekin Cheng actually hand-delivered them about a month ago, but unfortunately, I was still in Oklahoma at the time.

So until next time, I’ll leave you with some avatar shenanigans…

I’ll get you for MURDERER and PARA PARA SAKURA!

AAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!