My first day of school at York/Sheridan’s Design program in 2003 I had the privilege of meeting Kendrick Tu. In our first class, Visual Language, we were asked to pair up with a fellow classmate. We would be working with them for the remainder of the course on various projects. Being the first day, no one really knew each other and all of us, more or less, looked around the room for a friendly face.

Mr. Tu was sitting next to me and we spoke for about 45 seconds before agreeing that we should work together. Eight years later I find myself fortunate to have grown closer to Ken. He’s a hard worker, gifted illustrator, hilarious, and all round fantastic man. When I spoke to him about this writing venture, we made a deal; he would pickup his pen again and start illustrating provided I post his work here and comment on it.

The first piece in this series is inspired by the new Batman console game Batman: Arkham City.

It’s simple shapes speak of anime. Good anime though – not the fluffy kind. While the shading lends itself more to Frida Khalo’s self portraits. A good mixture of style in my opinion. A slight touch of red on the shark’s mouth amplifies the high contrasting black and white. The movement and direction is clear; Batman’s fist towards the sharks nose. Boom!

As mentioned previously, this piece was inspired by a scene in the Batman: Arkham City game. Players are put at odds against a savage shark. Bruce Wayne’s encounters with sharks go back quite a few decades.

Great work, Ken. This piece was featured on Kotaku on Monday and has received some great feedback, including approximately 29,000 hits on Ken’s personal website. For those interested in tools of the trade, Ken completed this piece using Adobe Photoshop, a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, and gallons of green tea.