In/Action
Gulacy left the book upon completion of his multi-part Fu Manchu story; Zek stayed on one more year after drawing its sequel. HIs penultimate contribution to Master of Kung Fu was two-thirds of the extra-long 100th anniversary issue, in which longtime inker Gene Day made his debut as the series’ new penciler (Zeck pencils issue 101 before leaving for good). In terms of plot, that year saw Shang-Chi in something a holding pattern, engaging in minor adventures such as Asian American gang wars and fanatical cults with secret geopolitical agendas. Shang-Chi has not quite become complacent; issue 97 is an inner-monologue heavy story in which he worries that he has lost his “art” of living. Yet that same story shows a lighter, playful side of the character that was usually eclipsed by his endless brooding. He and Leiko actually banter, and it somehow works.
This lightness would not last. Once he was partnered with Gene Day, Moench’s scripts once again grew heavier and more introspective. Their collaboration would prove short-lived, a term that, sadly could be applied to Day himself: the artist died of a heart attack in September 1982, at the age of 31. His last issue of MOKF, 120, appeared posthumously with a 1983 cover date. As it happened, it was Moench’s penultimate contribution as well: 121 was a fill-in, with 122 (penciled by William Johnson) featuring Moench’s final script. It was not particularly conclusive; Moench left the book abruptly after creative differences with Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter made the job untenable. Alan Zelentz wrote the last three issues, in which Shang-Chi, suddenly struck by guilt over killing his father, abandons his life in London to live as a fisherman in a Chinese village named “Yang Yin.”
Setting aside the corporate drama, the timing of Moench’s departure was close to perfect. By issue 118, he had wrapped up virtually all the plot threads and character arcs that he had been developing for nearly a decade. Had he left then, it would have looked like it was all part of his plan. But that would have been highly unusual. Though his last issue was cover dated 1983, Moench’s trajectory was pure 1970s. Corporate comics had yet to reach the point where a series would be canceled once the creators most closely identified with it had said all they wanted to say.
By the same token, the Moench/Day collaboration, though technically post-1970s, must be considered at least briefly in any assessment of Moench’s run on Master of Kung Fu. Day brought a completely new aesthetic to the tile, abandoning the kinetic dynamism of Gulacy and Zeck in favor of a much more crowded, static, but exquisitely detailed comics page that demanded slow appreciation. From the very first page he penciled, the splash page of Issue 100, Day’s art stood out for its mastery of mood and symbolism rather than action. The page features the story’s title at the top, etched in the ornate stone border that frame’s page’s single image. All along the border are overturned date vessels, either lying on their side (in the top border), or deliberately spilled by the stone cherubs that hold them (on the side borders). Water drips multiple points along the frame, landing on a golden Egyptian sarcophagus and the figure of Fu Manchu. Zeck and Gulacy specialized in action that flowed from panel to panel; Day’s panels feature few action-to-action transitions, forming a comics page that looks as if it came from an alternate universe in which Jack Kirby never existed. Yet that same splash page demonstrates Day’s attention to amore literal flow, modeling the falling water in fashion that is both beautiful and consistent with how liquid behaves in the real world.
If Gulacy’s cinematic layouts exemplified the aesthetic of comics as moving pictures captured on paper, Day’s pages are carefully-assembled compilations of frozen images. His pages were occasionally framed by large drawings of the title character, holding the panels together like bookends; Day was the rare artist at the time for whom the comics page was as attractive for its extradiegetic content (the materials that was not, technically, part of the experience of the characters he drew). The symbolic, oversized human figures surrounding the pages, along with the clever games he played with the issues’ titles (issue 103 contains a two-pages spread whose panels are all contained with the letters of its title, “A City Asea”) show the influence of comics legend Will Eisner, though his figure drawing is more in the faux-realist tradition than Eisner’s caricatures. Day’s pages are chock full of statues and figurines, which best embody Day’s aesthetic: beautiful bodies frozen in a particular moment.
As a result, Day’s work on MOKF is a truly unlikely success: a martial arts comic define by a pervasive sense of stillness. Why does it work?
For the same reasons that Master of Kung Fu merits attention in a book about subjectivity: devoted readers come for the martial arts action, but stay for Shang-Chi’s internal monologue. Day’s gorgeous pages, cramped as they are by frequent small panels, leave plenty of room for the captions that convey Shang-Chi’s thoughts. The fact that Moench once again revisits old characters and plots only emphasizes how much has changed: the latest confrontation with Shen Kuei ends in a much friendlier truce, and Leiko’s infidelity (which was part of her espionage mission) doesn’t even rise to becoming a plot point. Leiko and Shang-Chi have frequent disagreements, but Leiko refuses to let them rise to the level of crisis, telling Shang-Chi that she can be mad and still love him. And when Shang-Chi has what at the time truly appears to be his final fight with Fu Manchu, his father is reduced from an all-powerful, scheming mastermind to a repulsive old man desperate to drink the blood of his children in order to ensure his immortality. This time, Shang-Chi defeats not just his father, but his father complex. After Fu Manchu dies, Shang-Chi visits Smith on his sick bed. He and Smith had already achieved a rapprochement, but now the Fu Manchu arc ends with Shang-Chi saying, “Say nothing, Smith. Your the father I never had. / I love you."