Fighting and Talking
Starlin only stayed with the book for three issues, while Englehart lasted for five, but the team quickly sketched out the broad contours of the character and his supporting cast before Moench’s arrival. Shang-Chi was the son of Fu Manchu and an American (i.e., white) mother, raised in his father’s fortress to believe that Fu Manchu was a force for good. Sent to England to assassinate Fu Manchu’s enemy, Shang-Chi kills Dr. Petrie, the closest ally of Nayland Smith (the hero of Rohmer’s original novels). Smith confronts Shang-Chi and quickly disabuses him of his faith in his father’s goodness, converting him to his side (but not yet turning him into an ally). Englehart and Starlin also introduce Black Jack Tarr, a younger MI-6 agent who goes out into the field now that Smith is too old.
The most important feature introduced by Englehart, and the one that Moench would run with, is the narration: the entire comic is narrated in the first-person by Shang-Chi himself, in captions much like Jack’s in Werewolf by Night. But where Jack’s captions served to bridge the gap between Jack’s own consciousness and the Werewolf’s animalistic unconscious, Shang-Chi’s testify to his individual growth throughout the series. It is fitting that Shang-Chi’s victim in his first appearance is Petrie; Petrie was the Dr. Watson-like narrator of Rohmer’s first three Fu Manchu novels. With his voice silenced, the narrative reins were firmly in Shang-Chi’s hands. [1]
For the duration of his comic, first-person narration was one of Shang-Chi’s defining features. Even when appearing in someone else’s book as a guest star, he brought his captions with him. On the three occasions when Moench briefly returned to the character (1988-1989, 1991 and 2002-2003), he continued with the same narrative form, as did Ben Raab during Shang-Chi’s short solo arc of Journey into Mystery (1997-1998). Since the 1990s, however, most of Shang-Chi’s appearances have been in team books (Heroes for Hire, various Avengers titles, and the Agents of Atlas), where there has been either no room or no interest in continuing his interior monologue. In addition, his physical appearance changed: he has cast off his iconic gi, gotten a haircut, and is depicted with a skin tone commonly found among humans native to Earth. Greatly improved visually, he is now a cypher as a character. For a time, he even gained the ability to make multiple copies of himself, which one could take as an unintentional comment on his derivative status.
Since his early days, Shang-Chi has repeatedly encountered Spider-Man, a sales gimmick that proves revealing. After all, Spider-Man is the archetypal Marvel hero as chatterbox: part of his appeal is his non-stop quipping, designed to annoy his antagonists (and sometimes even his allies) but delight his readers. When he starred in his own book, Shang-Chi rarely spoke while fighting; if he had anything to say, it would be delivered as a brief but stirring speech before or after the battle. Yet the reader hears him all the time; indeed, were it not for his interior monologue, Shang-Chi would have run the risk of adding yet another racist stereotype to a book that was loaded with them. He would have been inscrutable.
In fact, when moved to the comics page, the martial arts genre virtually demands direct representation of the hero’s interiority; wuxia heroes, whose fighting maximally resembles actual physical exertion, do not have the comic book hero’s unrealistic capacity to speak at great length while fighting. The greater the verisimilitude, the less talkative the hero (at least during the fight scenes). If Shang-Chi were to be consistent with his onscreen models, his creators could choose between sharing his thoughts or rendering him more object (to be looked at) than subject (to express a point of view).
Moench inherited Shang-Chi’s first-person running commentary, just as he did the similar narrative captions in Werewolf by Night. Superficially similar, the narrative strategies of these two series diverged in one crucial aspect: Jack Russell always tells his story in the past tense, which, in addition to being the most common form of first-person narration, makes sense, in that Jack isn’t entirely present for the Werewolf’s exploits. With a few exceptions (including several pages in his very first appearance), Shang-Chi describes his thoughts and actions in the present tense. The result is a fascinating combination of emotional intensity and detachment. We are usually privy to Shang-Chi’s emotional state, but his manner of “speaking” separates Shang-Chi the narrator from Shang-Chi the character. As readers, we are watching Shang-Chi, while Shang-Chi is watching himself.
The first-person narrative captions allow Shang-Chi to function on two parallel tracks (the physical and the interior), and at the series’ best moments, when writer and artist were working in near-perfect sync, so, two, did the two tracks complement each other completely. Over the course of Moench’s ten-year run, he had extended collaborations with three different artists: Paul Gulacy, Mike Zeck, and Gene Day, as well as a brief interregnum between Gulacy and Zeck primarily (and infelicitously) filled by Jim Craig. Moench appeared to tailor his scripts to suit the artist with whom he worked, such that the verbal/visual balance would vary over the course of these three periods: more laconic when working with Gulacy’s highly cinematic layouts; more wordy with Zeck, but rarely overwhelming the penciler’s action-oriented large panels; more flowery in conjunction with Day’s exquisitely ornate, small-paneled tight layouts. Whether by coincidence or design, the succession of artists accompanied an ongoing journey deeper into Shang-Chi’s own psyche.
Note
[1] Later Moench would bring Petrie back, disclosing that the man Shang-Chi killed was a double planted by Fu Manchu. Subsequently, Petrie was revealed to be a sleeper agent brainwashed by Fu Manchu. After shooting Smith but failing to kill him, Petrie is eventually deprogrammed, though he never resumes an active role in the Smith’s organization.