Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #2

November is already upon us. Halloween has come and gone. Walking home from work last night I passed several young couples in costume: the women in full regalia with face paint and wigs; the men, half-assed, a cape here, a rodeo-rider belt buckle there.

After finishing up Aronofsky's Noah -- which I recommend, despite its short comings (no people of color cast), for its compelling and innovative advocacy of vegetarianism -- I went to bed and was hardly disturbed by the drunken revelry emanating from the homeward-bound debauched on the street below.

Up at the usual rat-race time of four o'clock to do two loads of laundry, everything was going smoothly until 5 AM when I upturned a large glass of Odwalla juice that was next to my mattress on the floor. The accident soaked the rug and several stacks of books by the bedside, necessitating stripping my mattress, pulling it up off the floor, and giving a bucket-of-hot-water wipe down to the books, hardwood and portions of the rug hit by the juice.

That done, I traveled down to the basement laundry room to fetch my clothes out of the dryer. On the way back up the stairs I ran into the building super, Dave. Dave is my age. Middle-aged. We were both dressed in cargo shorts, t-shirt and flip flops. Both of us prefer to move about in the early morning before the rest of the building is awake. Dave was changing a light bulb. He asked how my Halloween was. I said quiet. He agreed. I asked what he thought about Oakland coming to town. He said, "They're zero-and-seven. It shouldn't be a problem."

I replied, "Yes, but they're playing better. And Derek Carr lit us up. Hopefully, that Panthers win got us back on track."

"That was a big win. It was messy but impressive."

"Good seeing you, Dave."

With that we said goodbye and I returned to my apartment to fold my clothes.

Last Saturday after I got home from a going door to door for a Democrat in a race against an incumbent Republican that is noteworthy because the outcome will factor in who controls the state senate (the campaign has also received attention because it is one that the PAC of billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer has donated to), I was so wiped out from a lingering flu that I went to bed. When I woke up I read the first two issues of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, a four-issue series put out this year by Marvel.

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu was originally a black-and-white comic book magazine published from 1974 to 1977 by non-Comics Code Authority Marvel-imprint Curtis Magazines.

As a grade-school kid, I didn't read Marvel's Curtis stuff. It seemed too adult and slightly seamy and pornographic to me. Now and then I would glance at Dracula Lives!, Tales of the Zombie and Crazy Magazine at the 7/11 in my neighborhood. I think I owned an issue of Tales of the Zombie that I purchased at a garage sale. But I much preferred the color of the standard comic book to the black-and-white magazine illustrations.

The Curtis Magazines period is an interesting one in Marvel history and U.S. culture in general coinciding as it does with the demise of the Hippies and the gathering storm of a business-dominated Rightist counterrevolution. Really the only Curtis Magazines title to make it past the early 1980s is Savage Sword of Conan, probably owing to the popularity of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

An abiding interest of mine is how in the 1970s there was a "massification of bohemia" in America as the Hippie counterculture along with Black Power cracked the white privilege Cracker militaristic paradigm and then how this massification of bohemia was rolled back by the plutocratic elite. Signposts of this struggle are Hippies vs. Punks, which I have been sporadically exploring on this page, as well as the proliferation of monsters, mystics and masters of kung fu in comic books. By the beginning of the 1980s as Reaganism and Thatcherism -- neoliberlism -- lock in for the long haul, all these freakish comic-book characters have had their titles cancelled.

I loved Master of Kung Fu as a kid, particularly the issues by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy. (Check out this blog devoted to Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu.) Moench, who also worked on Werewolf By Night, Morbius and Ka-Zar, together with Steve Gerber and his Man-Thing comic, made Marvel a potent vehicle of counterculture ideology.

So it was a profound sense of disappointment I felt after finishing the first two issues of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. Written by Mike Benson with art by Tan Eng Huat, the comic book is utterly lifeless. It is like reading a newspaper comic strip splashed up with some cereal-box-bright colors.

You can judge for yourself. Below is the cover plus seven pages of a Chopsocky street brawl pitting Shang-Chi and Daughters of the Dragon against Razor Fist and his minions.