Welcome to the Chinatown netherworld

Super Wok Explosion is an adult crime animation about ego, loyalty, and the mythology of Chinatown — made by one person, from scratch, over several years.

The show is set in San Delfina, a fictional California city with a Chinatown that runs two layers deep. On the surface: a tight community, restaurants, associations, old men playing mahjong. Underneath: triads, tongs, territory, and a generational power struggle that's been building for decades.

Super Wok Explosion doesn't treat the underworld as backdrop. It treats it as mythology. The show has the bones of a crime drama — betrayal, money, violence — but it operates in a register closer to Greek tragedy or a Hong Kong ghost story. People here are driven by forces they don't fully understand. Some of those forces are supernatural.

The show is written and produced by Tony Cheuk, who has an avid interest in Chinese secret societies and film.

Every episode is built in Blender 3D — modelled, lit, animated, rendered and edited by the same pair of hands. There are no shortcuts. A single episode takes about 8 months to complete. The characters, the environments, the fights, the neon — all of it is constructed frame by frame. This is what independent animation actually looks like.

The website doesn't always distinguish clearly between what's fictional and what's real. Some of the articles in Chinatown Transgressions are documented history. Some are original fiction set in the show's world. The Case File exists in-universe. This is intentional — the show is interested in how myth and reality feed each other, and the site tries to work the same way.

Episodes are released when they are done. Curious about progress? Updates and behind-the-scenes are actively posted on Patreon, Instagram and YouTube!

If you want to follow the production, the socials have behind-the-scenes and work-in-progress. If you want to make it easier to keep going, the support page is there.

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