Mind/Body Problems
Though the actual return of Fu Manchu and the partial resolution of Shang-Chi’s struggle with father figures would only become the main story from issues 83 through 89, Smith’s reappearance signals a new phase in Shang-Chi’s negotiation of independence and authority. Curiously, that new phase is made possible by an extended storyline that revisits the hits of the Gulacy years: the return of Shockwave (72), Mordillo’s island (73-75), a delirious Shang-Chi (78-79), an old friend of Smith’s who may or may not be a mole (the brainwashed Dr. Petrie/ Lyman Leeks and his body double), a close Fu Manchu associate who seems to have betrayed him (Ducharme/Karamenah), and a multi-part confrontation with Shang-Chi’s father that includes a fight with monstrous pseudo-brothers and mind-controlled assassins, an issue narrated by Fu Manchu, and Shang-Chi’s second apparent murder of the man who sired him.
Were Moench and Gulacy simply retreading familiar ground? And if a similar, albeit drastically truncated, set of repetitions characterizes Moench’s subsequent collaboration with Day, is this the sign of dwindling imagination, or perhaps a concession to the dismal, iterative nature of corporate superhero stories? After all, Stan Lee was quoted in the 1970s as urging his writers to craft stories that created the “illusion of change” rather than actual change. Fu Manchu was the closest thing to an archenemy Shang-Chi ever had; if comic book readers knew that Dr. Doom was never really dead, fans of Master of Kung Fu should not have been surprised to see Shang-Chi’s father cheat the grave repeatedly.
There is good reason for cynicism here, but industry standards are not a satisfactory explanation for the development of MOKF from 1978 (when issue 71 was published) to 1983 (when Moench left both Shang-Chi and Marvel). Moench and his collaborators harness the cyclical nature of mainstream superhero comics in order to complicate the metaphor behind their hero’s name. What they show over the course of five years is that the “rising and advancing of a spirit” does not take a straightforward, linear path. Shang-Chi’s sense of himself and his place in the world develops through a compromise between the linear (as suggested by the ongoing sequence of issues of MOKF) and the cyclical (“Fu Manchu’s back! Again!”). Shang Chi moves forward by looping back, revisiting familiar moments with new eyes and under new circumstances. He rises and advances along a spiral path.
Thus when Shockwave returns, his battle with Shang-Chi is not just a replay; it is a rewrite of a familiar script. Their first fight was entirely silent, with Shang-Chi receiving most of the blows. This time (issue 72), Shang-Chi is uncharacteristically talkative. Shockwave informs him that he is going to die: “What do you say to that?” Shang-Chi replies “I say: I am not ready to die, Shockwave. / Are you?” He even repeats his answer while beating Shockwave with a piece of wood. Later, when they are both on Mordillo’s island, Shang-Chi is once again active where he had been reactive.
No longer shocked by Mordillo’s absurdist creations, he keeps his wits about him, even tricking Shockwave into making a confession that he secretly records on the mechanical voicebox ripped out of one of Mordillo’s robot monsters (Leiko: “Shang, I think you’re catching on to the ways of the West!”) As Shang-chi puts in the penultimate line of issue 75: “And so a monster shall go to the court of kings, and speak of slaying his brothers.” That recording is the lynchpin of the next several issues; at the same time that Shang-Chi grapples with challenges to his fundamental self, his allies and adversaries are continually fighting for possession of Shockwave’s stolen voice. At key points in the storyline, Shang-Chi’s narrative takes on a confessional tone, a nice counterpoint to the fight over Shockwave’s confession.
The next four issues are an extended examination of Shang-Chi’s consciousness as he begins to break down, mentally and physically, including moments that recall his first fight with Shockwave and his drugged confusion in “The Phoenix Gambit.” He meets an old Chinese man on the docks in search of fatherly wisdom (“Tonight I wish…I had a father) (76), and laments that “the sound of my name—/—signals nothing but violence”: “Why must my spirit always be so torn? So shattered?” The old man’s betrayal of Shang-Chi to mercenaries in exchange for cash leave him bereft. Back at Leiko’s, he stares straight into the distance with tears in his eyes, recalling the last good night he and Leiko had together (issue 71, the “routines’ issue), begging Leiko to explain why their peace is always broken by violence.
In both his conversations (with the old man and with Leiko), Shang-Chi’s dilemma is represented visibly and allegorically through images of a broken yin/yang symbol; first, when speaking with the old man, his words are illustrated by two panels of Shang-Chi before a yin/yang gong. In the initial panel, it is whole, while in the second, he srikes the gong and breaks it. When he is on the couch with Leiko, the page flashes back to the yin/yang puzzle she was assembling in issue 71 and its sudden disassembly when their cat, shocked but the noise of Smith at the door, wrecks it with his paw. Even before going into battle, Shang-Chi is emotionally drained.
After a car crash renders Leiko unconscious (and saddles her with a concussion) (77), Shang-Chis is single-minded in his pursuit of Zaran, the antagonist who hurt his lover. He has already been awake for two days, yet rather than allow himself to sleep, he resolves to meditate until nightfall, requiring “silence, darkness, a clear mind, and a fresh body.” The events that subsequently unfold, however, show that Shang-Chi has only pushed himself further into an altered, and even impaired state of mind. Spying on two figures as they meet across the lake, he is unable to identify one of them as his own sister. By the beginning of the following issue, he is barely able to remain awake, with swollen glands indicating the onset of illness.
He and Leiko discover their friends bound and gagged around a dining room table in a castle, captives of Zaran. But when he enters the room, Shang-Chi suffers a near-complete mental collapse reflected in his ongoing narration. Now his captions become a hodgepodge of references to recent plot elements as well as phrases that have played a significant role in his previous narration: the reader has no trouble following, but Shang-Chi has lost the thread of the plot:
“No—can’t be—must be sleep—dreaming—can’t be Zaran—just fought him—in lodge on lake—where the fish opened the Dijon and the stage—its eye watching with the voice of a monster…
“—Mordillo's robot-monster peeking words of Smith’s nephew sneed his veins like lightning carrying fire of electricity to plug in tape recorder to the stag’s eye can talk to prime minster…
“...make him strike down his country’s agency of defense which is worse than my father…
“…up in the snow like phantom sand melting and hissing…
“…with Leiko as in a dream of cold cold sleep…”
The middle four panels of the pages are nothing but increasingly tight close-ups of Shang-Chi’s panicked face, while the lettering emphasizes his inability to prioritize one reference over another (only the word “sleep” is given in bold for emphasis, twice). When Zaran throws a knife at him, he can barely comprehend what is happening, deflecting it only at the last second. Zaran beats him, but Shang-Chi thinks he is merely encountering the embodiment of Sleep, welcoming him rather than resisting. Snapping out of it at the last minute, he stands up, accusing Zaran of trying to trick him. Of the course of another four panels in the middle of the page (this time showing Shang-Chi rising and gearing up for action, rather than staring in a stupor), his narration describes his physical sate in minute detail:”
“I rise, my eyes burning, my veins afire, fueled by streaming adrenalin…
“my tongue tasting the bite of sheared copper…
“,,,my nostrils flared to the brimstone which expands my chest…
“..my fever, my body high and ready to burst.”
The final panel of the page shows Shang-Chi leaping into the air, his foot aimed directly at the reader while his scream expands beyond the panel’s top edge. He is resolute, but he is also completely dissociated:
“It bursts and somehow I leave my body,.,..to watch this strange creature, this maddened beast blazing from the very heart of the martial arts state of awareness.
“I know he cannot be stopped.
“I think….he is me.”
His body spends the next page brutally beating Zaran, while his mind struggles to understand the ramifications of his current state:
“And yet, he is not me, cannot be me…for I have changed. I have been polluted by the sickness of the West, deprived of my father’s discipline and guidance, my teachers.
“I have become lazy and weak—unlike this mad beast who now savages Zaran.
“I have allowed my master of Kung Fu to remain state, perhaps even slipping into decline.
“There has been too little rising and advancing of late…but now it changes.
“The mad thing which is me bristles with intensity—maniacal, almost bestial.
“My body seems to glow.
“A read haze burns from my skin. Energy bleeds from my pores…
“…and I am wild. But wait—I will also be cunning.
“I will stop now—because my enemy has fallen.”
If we recall Shang-Chi’s ongoing concern with the question of routine, then this moment is, indeed, transcendent, for his body has risen above the routine manner in which his martial arts skills have been deployed. But it is an advance that has left his mind behind. Once again he confuses Zaran with the embodiment of sleep, and when Zaran throws an explosive knife at the ceiling, Shang-Chi stares upwards, transfixed, about to be crushed by falling debris. It is fitting that, just two bags after lamenting the loss of his father’s guidance, he is saved from death by Nayand Smith, who, though still bound and gagged, hurls his body into Shang-Chi’s to knock him out of the way. He may not yet be comfortable with the side he has picked in the fight between his two fathers, but one of those fathers has demonstrated total commitment to him.