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Today, we look at a comic book featuring Batman and Superman meeting up with a villain based on, of all people, Shang-Chi.
In Meta-Messages, I explore the context behind (using reader danjack’s term) “meta-messages.” A meta-message is where a comic book creator comments on/references the work of another comic book/comic book creator (or sometimes even themselves) in their comic. Each time around, I’ll give you the context behind one such “meta-message.”
Reader Eddie D. wrote in with this one. As I’ve written about a number of times before, Shang-Chi made his debut in 1973’s Marvel Special Edition #15 (by Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom), where we first see Shang-Chi after he’s shown off his skills on some formidable opponents and we slowly discover that it was all a test and Shang-Chi is the son of the legendary criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu. However, we also learn that Shang-Chi has been in isolation for all of his life and his father had convinced him that he is actually a legendary DO-GOODER and that Shang-Chi must his his newfound fighting prowess to eliminate one of his father’s most evil enemies…
So Shang-Chi ventures out of his father’s fortress for the first time and easily breaks into the home of the old man who has been such a thorn in his father’s side but here’s the problem. As part of making Shang-Chi the perfect weapon also meant educating him and when you educate a guy in philosophy and stuff like that, what are you going to get but a man who questions the very mission that you have sent him on, as he has already learned that killing is not the answer and that revenge is not something that you should seek out…
However, his devotion to his father was just too much and so Shang-Chi, in his very first mission in the real world, murders an innocent hero (who was also from Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels)….
and in the process finds himself under the gun sights of Sir Denis Nayland Smith, the OTHER character who was adapted into the Marvel Comics from the Sax Rohmer novels, where Smith is the main rival of the villainous Fu Manchu. Here, after Shang-Chi easily disarms him, he explains to Shang-Chi just what kind of a man Fu Manchu is and luckily for the rest of the world, he is convincing enough that he turns Shang-Chi against Fu Manchu….
Shang-Chi then teams up with Smith and the British MI-6 to take on his father and to try to bring down his evil criminal empire, and that takes up the next decade or so of Shang-Chi’s adventures, with writer Doug Moench taking over the writing duties on the series soon after Shang-Chi debuted. Moench lasted on the book until he left Marvel in 1983, with Master of Kung Fu #122 (the book took over the numbering from Marvel Special Edition).
BOB HANEY’S TAKE ON COMICS
Bob Haney has a special reputation in comics for the continuity of his comics, especially his Brave and the Bold comics, but also other books, like his World’s Finest Comics work. As I’ve written a number of times, the old newsstand format lent itself to the popularization of team-up comic books, as most (not all, of course, but most) comic book purchases back in the day were impulse purchases. In other words, you grabbed a comic book when you were at the newsstand or the drugstore and you grabbed whatever comic book looked the coolest to you. And if you liked Batman and, say, Green Lantern, if you saw a comic book starring Batman AND Green Lantern, then you just got two heroes for the price of one. As we got to the direct market model, comic book customers were coming to the comic book store mostly for comic books that they wanted before they got there. And then, comic book readers wanted comic books that “mattered.” One-off stories between Batman and another superhero weren’t really going to affect the continuity of either character, so team-up books were slowly phased out. However, while they were still popular, the whole idea of continuity was basically negligible, which is right where Bob Haney lived. He didn’t need to know what the deal was in your own comic book, once you go into the pages of Brave and the Bold, you were a Bob Haney character. People would often joke that Haney’s Earth was a whole other world in the Multiverse (Earth-B?), because characters acted totally unlike themselves while appearing in Brave and the Bold and his other works.
HANEY POKES SOME FUN AT SHANG-CHI
Haney has also previously poked fun at Marvel Comics in his work, like this bit in Brave and the Bold #74 (art by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito) having Batman mock the attitude that Marvel had in the mid-1960s about how other companies were copying Marvel…
Here, though, I have no idea what his point he was making in this 1975 issue of World’s Finest Comics #232 (art by Dick Dillin and John Calnan), where Batman and Superman keep having dreams about a mysterious monk attacking them…
They go to the a dream institute in their waking world and they meet the real version of the man, who was a pacifist named Chang-Shi working with the Inner Peace Foundation…
Both Batman and Superman began seeing people who had recently died and Superman ultimately discovered the magical reason behind it all…
Chang-Shi is basically trying to bring all of the people back whose dreams were still out there (basically, dream energy, whatever that is, exists even after you die, so you can bring those people back still). Batman, of course, explains that this is a bad idea and he fought against Chang-Shi…
Shi is defeated when he is killed by his own Snow Leopard (which is part of the magic)…
What a weird story. Since there’s no real connection to Shang-Chi, I assume the “meta-message” here didn’t go any further than Haney simply using the name, but perhaps someone else can figure out if he is making some other commentary here.
Thanks for the suggestion, Eddie! If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Meta-Messages, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com
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