I have never heard of this character at all.
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^ He's mostly associated with the X-Men titles, although he's not one of them & has guest-starred in an Avengers title or two, amongst others iirc. (Kinda like how Deadpool started out. And yeah, Shang-Chi's had his own title, too.)
Could be interesting!
Carry on!
--C.
If I remember right, Shang Chi has popped up in various places. He even taught Spider-man a bit not that many years ago. We'll see how this goes.
Here's some random speculation...what if they sub in the Mandarin for Fu Manchu
Edit: Man I just CAN NOT write a sentence tonight
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I'm down for some better martial arts action film. If only because Danny Rand clearly can't do Kung Fu.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Maybe I've told you how I started collecting Marvel comics.
In 1974, I was 12, and I'd been reading Harvey comics (Caspar, Richie Rich, etc.) and then Archie comics for years, but I'd considered superhero comics to be a bit too adult for my tastes.
That Halowe'en, my brother and sister and I were trick-or-treating through our subdivision, and I found out that the man who lived two streets down from us, in the house on the corner with the big driveway, had the job of filling the comic book vending machines at the supermarkets. And so, that year, I got Sr. Strange #6 (Englehart and Colon, the beginning of a four-part story about Dormammu and Umar) and my brother John got Master of Kung-fu #25 (Moench and Gulacy). And John was not all that interested, so I stole it from him in due course.
Last year, I saw the Marvel "Epic Collection" reprint telephone book of Master of Kung-fu, and picked up the copy. It included all the stories that featured that character, Shang Chi, son of the "devil-doctor" Fu Manchu, that Marvel published between late 1972 and 1975.
Well, let's just say that, in hind-sight, John was very lucky.
Overall, the writing for the series was painful to read, clunky even by the standards of the time. As might go without saying, by 21st-Century standards, every issue was impossibly racist. The arrangement Marvel had with the Sax Rohmer estate let them publish books featuring Fu Manchu, but not actually impact the character, so the plots were all: Shang Chi or his father attack each other, and both of them survive the encounter. Rinse, repeat. The comic used the conceit that all the narration was Shang Chi's thoughts, but they were pedestrian rather than philosophical. "The shaft curves below me, becoming a chute. Light intrudes upon the shadows and I burst out thru another grating, rolling as I have learned to absorb the impact of my fall."
The art was blocky. Most of the artists working on the series -- Gil Kane, Al Milgrom, John Buscema -- didn't have any feel for what kung-fu was supposed to look like, and the page layouts were graceless and busy. The ink work was slipshod. Nobody knew how to draw Asian feautures. This was definitely a B-side book and was getting B-side talent.
But Issue #25 stands out. The story is a stand-alone one-shot: the insidious Fu Manchu doesn't appear at all; the villain has used his helicopter to escape the jungles of South America, leaving Shang Chi and his allies to wait for their own transportation. While they do so, Shang Chi hears the cry of a human child in the jungle, and slips away to rescue it from a jaguar and then from a tribe of superstitious Jivaro natives. The narrative voice is suddenly somber and contemplative, appropriate the the character and the story. The choices of what to show us, and what not to show us, are artistic and confident. (For example, one of Shang Chi's father's assassins has a role to play. They fight near the end of the story, and Moench just zooms out from the assassin drawing a blade to the precipice where the fight takes place, with the assassin falling to his death a panel later.)
And the art is amazing. Paul Gulacy had been on a few other issues, but the artists putting the finishing touches over his work had been ham-fisted and blocky. Here, in the jungle, the art opens up. There are a couple of fight scenes: martial arts against claws and fangs, or against waves of hunters and warriors, that are just amazing. The panel lay-outs, the positions of bodies filling space: they give us the impression of Shang Chi always being a man at peace within himself, exerting his will, his spirit, on those around him.
And that's the second Marvel comic I read.
The one Marvel comic I read that had Shang Chi in it, had him training Spider-man.
Meh...I am not a big fan of martial arts movies...
Mm. We'll see how this goes. Shang-Chi isnt a particularly interesting marvel character- as noted above, he was VERY interesting in non marvel works. There is a great hurrah about him being an Asian character, but much like with Luke Cage(and to a much lesser extent Cyborg), let's not forget the character's ugly origins with respect to race.
The writer/director that Marvel selected is an Asian American, so one thinks that Marvel is sort of aware of issues (and probably more so than with most films...China is a huge moneymaker for Marvel films so I think they are going to distance this as far as possible from the Yellow Peril origins.
Thejeff,
That's fully what I expect and maybe a little mention of going to mystical martial arts tournaments.
They have ample, recent, Chinese-sourced materials to draw upon for this character. One example that comes to mind is Ip Man. Yes, the founder of Wing Chun. Tutor of Bruce Lee as arguably the best-known of his numerous students. Throw in a dash of Taoist folklore and general badassery and they're cooking with some serious gas.