Mind Over Matter
When the story resumes in issue 80, Shang-Chi’s problems remain, but now he is in a better position to face them calmly, and to share his anxieties with his comrades in arms. Moreover, though he is still not comfortable with the ethical compromises of spycraft, he appears more adept at reconciling opposites when the stakes are lower. Having slept for 16 hours, he is, of course, meditating, but now it is to the sounds of rock music playing at full blast. When Black Jack berates him for his “screechin’ music,” Shang-Chi responds with an inspirational quote…from Mick Jagger. Later, when the team discusses it plan of action, Shang-Chi raises his ongoing concerns about their “games of deceit and death,” confessing “My own name..the meaning of it, the rising and advancing of a spirit…has come to seem strange to me…foreign…alien.” Zeck and Moench devote an entire panel to the silence of Shang-Chi’s friends, who have no idea how to respond
While the seven-issue battle against Fu Manchu only begins in Issue 83 (narrated once again by the “Devil Doctor” himself), the previous seven issues do more than simply set up the plot. They establish the stakes for Shang-Chi as he prepares to face his father for the last time (once again). As a test of Shang-Chi’s sense of his own identity, the father-son conflict is already overdetermined, but now it comes on the heels of Shang-Chi’s extensive rumination about his own personal agency. For years now (in real time, if not comic book time), Shang-Chi has been uncertain that siding with his father’s sworn enemy actually represents a positive moral choice, rather than simply a reflexive move as far from his father as possible. Now Fu Manchu’s latest plan is built on his capacity to turn ordinary people into obedient, brainwashed robots. In other words, into unreflective creatures of total routine.
Issue 84 connects Shang-Chi’s personal dilemma with his father’s modus operandi. On the very first page, Shang-Chi thinks:
“Recent days have seen me too…mechanical.
“Resolved to do what I must without thought or conscience or sensitivity,. I have moved like a machine ever ready to perform but incapable of judging my own performance,.
“It is, I think, a device of psychic defense. Often, actions must be taken for their own sake. But here in South America—where we search for Fu Manchu, my father—amidst so much life, my awareness returns. Spirit merges with body, old lovers again united.”
The reunion is short-lived. Attached by cultists clad in leopard-skin singlets (don’t ask), Shang Chi fights back (“Again I move like a machine”). He wins, but there is not joy in it: “The mechanism has functioned perfectly, but I loathe it.”) He is soon reminded of his own passivity before going on the mission, when he allowed Leeks to threaten a captive without even voicing an objection. The flashback sets up Shang-Chi’s next moral conundrum: he and Black Jack discover dozens fo men and women standing passively in cages, staring straight ahead. Underneath their wigs are clean-shaven heads with electrodes protruding from their skulls, rendering them Fu Manchu’s mindless slaves. Black Jack calls them “zombies,” and Shang-Chi thinks:
“Yes…they too are much like machines, men who still I’ve but whose souls have been slain. And if I have indeed been like them, then it is time for my soul to—“
His musings are interrupted by one of Fu Manchu’s non-brainwashed henchmen; Black Jack tells Shang-Chi to kill the man before he attracts attention:
“Tarr is right, but I cannot do it….cannot at like the machine which kills without thought or conscience. My spirit binds my body and fiercely cries: no!”
Black Jack shoots him anyway, and the issue ends with them surrounded by enemies. Shang-Chi concludes:
“Then…my one act of conscience was a move of defeat in a game such as this.
“I should have killed the man, or at least silenced him.
“Sometimes it is better to act as a machine, without thought or conscience.
“For dragons die…but machines do not bleed.”
Indeed, just two issues later, after an emotional confrontation with a hologram of Fu Manchu he mistook for his actual father, Shang-Chi agrees to simulate mechanical mindlessness, boarding an airplane full of his father’s brainwashed victims:
“We must play more dead than alive, for I am indeed my father’s creation… in many ways. Dragon, machine, monster…
“And now, too, a man whose soul has been slain and replaced by my father’s hand reaching down from the heavens..or so it must seem…but actual a man who will do what he must, having learned well…
“And having learned from my father, I will do what I must to stop him.
“I will do what he would do. Theme has come for the son to slay his father. No love will be lost.
“And so the dragon takes flight.
“His vengeance shall be terrible.”
Shang-Chi begins to sort out his complicated feelings about acting “mechanical” by deliberately mixing metaphors. As his father’s on, he was created and controlled by Fu Manchu; the brainwashed slaves are also controlled by Fu Manchu, reborn (that is, “fathered’) by the man’s evil genius. Shang-Chi’s decision to pretend to be brainwashed is accompanied by his repeated declarations that he is, indeed, his father’s son. Thus the path of his murderous rebellion against his father opens to him only when he accepts kinship with him, accepting that Fu Manchu is “within" him, just as Fu Manchu is “within” his zombified followers. Shang-Chi’s mistake was to see the choice between Fu Manchu and Smith as not just binary, but entirely external to himself.
The (semi-)final battle with Fu Manchu is more than simple generational conflict or Oedipal rivalry; it is, instead, a clash of ontologies. As Shang-Chi gets closer and closer to a physical confrontation with his father, he is obliged to fight against still more variations on the brainwashed slave. In the penultimate issue, he is nearly defeated by Maru, a muscular giant whose devotion to Fu Manchu is unquestioned. Yet despite Maru’s loyalty, Fu Manchu has seen fit to equip him with the brainwashing electrodes. Before the fight with Shang-Chi, Fu Manchu asks Maru if the electrodes are causing him discomfort, but Maru simply responds, “No, Celestial One, I feel nothing but a heightened sense of clarity and awareness.” Fu Manchu literally has Maru on remote control, pressing a button o rob Maru of his will and render him impervious to pain as soon as Shang-Chi appears. With horror, Shang-Chi realizes that Maru “cannot even lose consciousness!” Shang-Chi has no choice but to kill him.
In the story’s final chapter, Shang-Chi is initially dazed by Fu Manchu’s mimosa gas, but will not let his faulty perception stand in his way. So his father sends a new round of monstrous servants into battle against him. These freaks are, essentially, pre-brainwashed, existing only to carry out Fu Manchu’s command. But Shang-Chi realizes that they are more than simply mindless monsters:
“My father created them in his laboratory….
“They are the children of mutations, crafts, transplants—grotesque monsters that once were men.
“The children of Fu Manchu.
“And, as the children of Fu Manchu, they are my brothers.
“Fu Manchu has worked his will on their bodies, making of their flesh what has long since made of my spirit…
“A mockery.”
It would be simple to see the first two extended Fu Manchu sagas (drawn by Gulacy and Zeck, respectively) only in terms of family conflict. After all, each time Shang-Chi has to confront surrogate brothers who would not (or could not) even consider rebelling. But the persistence of the mind control motif emphasizes the true nature of the father-son conflict: Fu Manchu is a father who can only see his sons as the vessels of his own will. How, then, could Shang-Chi’s spirit ever “rise and advance” when his father has always sought to extinguish it?
When Shang-Chi breaks into Fu Manchu’s craft as it flies away, he shouts “You cannot escape me! I am mad! I am a fury! And I am of your making!” The story has reached its climax, but Shang-Chi, whose entire narrative and existential raison d’être is to engage in reflection, pauses. We see him standing before the broken window in a classic martial arts pose, but the caption shows that his mind is elsewhere:
“I am here, facing him, again, at last, and yet I am not here. Time freezes and a thousand thoughts shoot through my mind, all memories of the past days and weeks….All memories of the recent gifts granted by Fu Manchu…”
For nearly two entire pages, panel after panel shows moments not just from the past six issues, but even from the first half of the current one. This is no simple recap for the reader. Indeed, it is not for the reader at all. It is for Shang-Chi, who must reflect on the horrors of his recent past in order to make sense of the moment in which he finds himself:
“All these images, all these memories, all these foul and fatal gifts…bring my blood to a boil.”
Shang-Chi repeats the vow he made earlier, to destroy and denounce his father, But this time, he punches him in the face: “It explodes, from my heart outward.”
The physical assault (“You have desecrated me person. You have blasphemed against me!) is far more intimate than his last attempt at patricide (in issue 50, he shot Fu Manchu with a gun). And for once, Shang-Chi is completely present and integrated in mind and body, word and deed. He smashes the ship’s controls, leaps out the window into the harbor, and leaves Fu Manchu to die in the ensuing explosion.