The Master Of Kung Fu!

When I first chanced upon Master of Kung Fu in the pages of the awkwardly titled Special Marvel Edition #16, I had not ever read a Fu Manchu novel nor seen a Fu Manchu movie. I had heard the name of the notorious fictional Devil Doctor but that was about all. This was my intro to his evil machinations and in a story in which he was not the focus. At the time my eyes were focused on Shang Chi, the son of Fu Manchu and the titular "Master of Kung Fu".

I loved the first few issues of the book by Steven Englehart and Jim Starlin. They knocked them out of the park, but for whatever reason I didn't follow the book regularly after it changed its title officially to Master of Kung Fu and eventually Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy came aboard to shepherd the rising and advancing of Shang Chi's spirit. Moench was sort of Marvel's go-to guy for offbeat books at the time and Gulacy was a novice who clearly was under the spell of the great Jim Steranko. Like Barry Smith, a devotee of Kirby, we got to watch Gulacy develop in real time on MoKF, getting a little better with each outing. The book was a smash and got a Giant-Size version early in its run, and the stories told there worked very well within the growing MoKF mini-verse.

What I was able to do on this reading of these books was approach them as Englehart had done originally, an extension of the Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novels. Having now read all of those in recent years I am much better versed to understand how Sir Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie and other Rohmer originals fit into this Marvel mix.

That MoKF was part of the larger MU is quickly established with Shang Chi meeting up with Man-Thing early on and co-starring with Spider-Man in one of those amazing Giant-Size books. But nevertheless the book maintained a weird reality all its own. That Fu Manchu shows up irregularly I now realize is part of the natural way one of his tales will unfold, his presence often evident in the shadows and in the presence of surrogates. As another "unofficial" Rohmer tale the early issues of the run work quite well.

By the end of the issues in this  first Epic collection, Master of Kung Fu has finished its first phase and the team of Moench and Gulacy are geared to shift the book into a higher gear with even more elaborate and baroque storytelling techniques. Each will refine themselves and the characters as the world of Shang Chi grows ever more bizarre and fascinating. But the stories here are the bedrock, the base for what is to come.

Here are the covers of the books in this collection.

The collection finishes with a short story starring Midnight, an early Shang Chi foe featured in a solo-story in the back of this Iron Man Annual.

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