Collected together in this graphic novel, the monthly wait to see just how Shang-Chi, Weiko Lu, Clive Reston, and Black Jack Tarr were going to get out of this dire calamity is gone. But something is missing, and I think it’s the cliffhangers and surprise of the monthly comic. Moench and Gulacy are a wonderful team and the intervening years have not diminished their ability to portray in flat panels the fluidity and excitement of a martial arts epic. It’s not that Master of Kung Fu (subtitled “The Hellfire Apocalypse”) isn’t well done. I’ve only read two of the MAX titles–the original creators returning to my favorite books, Howard the Duck and Master of Kung Fu, and I’m starting to think ol’ Thomas Wolfe was right, and you can’t go home again. They also, obviously, believe that since the audience that grew up on these comics are older, that such audience also wants their return to be “mature” as well, and to that end Marvel has a new line of comics called “MAX” to distinguish comics with “mature” themes. Marvel’s recent successes on the movie screen along with the burgeoning market for graphic novels has them looking to the past for their future. Of course, Master of Kung Fu also had the big action sequences as well as secret service intrigue as well, but I suspect it was that idea of the son not exactly wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps that a psychiatrist would have a field day with if I ever found myself on the couch. The other was a comic about family, albeit one in which the father was the ultimate evil and the son had been raised to be the perfect assassin, who then rebelled against his father.
One was Howard the Duck, a satirical comic about politics and society. When I became a certified comics fan in the late 70s, there were two comics outside of the “mainstream” superhero fare that I loved. Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu, Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy, Marvel Comics, 2004 (c2003), ISBN 9780785111245, 144pp.
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