Master of Kung Fu #2: Battleworld

Yesterday I woke up at before 2 AM and couldn't fall back asleep. So I got up and did a couple loads of laundry and cropped the scans I had made last week of Master of Kung Fu #2, a delightful Shang-Chi yarn that is part of Marvel's Secret Wars reboot. Master of Kung Fu is written by Haden Blackman (who did a great job on Elektra) with superb art supplied by Dalibor Talajic, another talented Croatian penciller.

The main reason there has been a drop-off in comic posts on this page is that scanning requires a fair amount of labor. When I was posting weekly on comic books I had trained myself to scan on Friday night and then edit the scans and upload them to the blog first thing the following morning. But things have been topsy-turvy lately. The hundred-plus year-old apartment building I live in is experiencing upgrades this summer: painting of the entire exterior has just been completed, and now I'm due to get new kitchen plumbing and a sink.

Both the painting and the plumbing work to be done have also required work on the tenant's part. The exterior painting required masking all the windows from the inside to prevent water and debris from blowing into the apartment from outside pressuring washing; -- the plumbing, relocation of the contents -- clothes and comic books -- of my main closet so that the plumbers can gain access to the new tie-in point.

On top of the apartment upgrades, another distraction is that I seemed to have come down with a case of tennis elbow. It hasn't progressed to the point of disability, but it is painful and bothersome. I think it is primarily caused by the way I lean on my right arm while holding the mouse as I navigate the wonderful World Wide Web. Subsequently, on the weekends, I am trying to spend as much time away from the laptop as possible.

Last Saturday I watched a DVD of Marlowe (1969), the MGM version of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949) which happens to be Bruce Lee's major Hollywood feature film debut.

Last month on the 4th of July after spending a delightful 45 minutes running square laps around the artificial soccer turf of Miller Playfield I jogged over to Lake View Cemetery to pay respect to Bruce and Brandon Lee. I do this periodically.

I got there before 9 AM and no one seemed to be around. But as I was just about to walk down the path that leads to the grave site of the father and son martial-arts legends I noticed a barefoot guy about my age dressed in grey sweats and a white v-neck t-shirt drinking coffee out of a ceramic mug.

So I said hello and we proceeded to shoot the shit for about 20 minutes. A good guy, a fireman stationed in the tony Madison Park neighborhood (Howard Schultz's home base), he grew up on Capitol Hill; his grandmother is buried in Lake View Cemetery. On that July 4th morning he was there to visit her, as well as kill time until his daughter, who is a homeowner on a street that runs parallel to the graveyard's northern boundary, woke up.

My acquaintance remembers as a kid being in the cemetery when Bruce Lee was buried in 1973. I got the sense the event confused him. He speculated about the suspicious nature of Brandon Lee's death. Then we got talking about retirement, life, Seattle and politics. Next thing I knew it was time to go. I had a lot of reading to do. So I thanked him for the chat and excused myself. In the interim another well-wisher had arrived at the Lee graves. I jogged home without actually visiting the graves.

Of course, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, was Marvel's attempt to cash in on Bruce Lee at the zenith of his popularity, as well as the popularity of the David Carradine television series Kung Fu. For some reason, whenever I think of the Bruce Lee early '70s of my childhood I always hear Al Green songs from his Willie Mitchell-produced Hi Records of the same period, songs like "Love and Happiness":

Below you will find ten scans from Master of Kung #2:

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.