Finally got my mitts on "Weapon of the Soul", the Epic collection of the earliest Master of Kung Fu comics from Marvel's Bronze Age heyday. The whole world was Kung Fu fighting when comics latched onto the trend and gave us a bevy of martial arts comics. The best of the best was MoKF and that is for one simple reason -- Fu Manchu. I really think of this not as a series of Shang Chi comics, but a graphic novelization of a Fu Manchu novel. After finally reading the Fu Manchu canon, I see now how like the novels the adaptation by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin actually was. The book was picked up soon enough by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy, but in the hands of these talents we have a tremendous treatment of a very venerable property. I'm eager to tear into these pages when time permits with my deeper understanding of the lore of the "Devil Doctor".
Here are the covers in this collection. There's another off-beat story with Midnight included from the back pages of an Iron Man annual or something like that.
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Beauty! This one’s on my list as well. I had most of these issues back in the day. I had forgotten how absolutely explosive these covers were. (They just don’t make em like this anymore…)
ReplyDeleteThat first issue is one of the most beautifully constructed comics of that era. I remember that Englehart and Brunner were planning on doing a separate Fu Manchu series in one of the black and white magazines, but it never happened.
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