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Today, we look at the first time that Shang-Chi was used to train another Marvel superhero at martial arts.
In “When We First Met”, we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
One of the interesting aspects of Shang-Chi’s comic book history that really plays a major role, I believe, in why he is such a relatively unknown superhero is the fact that the writer who wrote his series, Master of Kung Fu, for almost its entire run, Doug Moench, kept the book pretty much in its own universe. You could argue that the best way to tell the type of stories that Moench was trying to tell really only WORK in its own distinct universe, like how there is a reasonable argument to be made that, say, James Bond does not really fit that well into a world where, say, Thor and Iron Man could fly into outer space and destroy Goldfinger’s satellite any time they felt like it. Moench was very much doing a sort of martial arts/James Bond riff with Master of Kung Fu and it worked really well (especially with the high level of artists that he was working with like Paul Gulacy, Mike Zeck and Gene Day), but the end result was that Shang-Chi was really off in his own little corner of the Marvel Universe (the licensing issues that made it difficult to reprint the comics with Shang-Chi in them didn’t help, as well) and thus, when Shang-Chi’s series ended, he pretty much just disappeared.
I’ve written a few times about how Shang-Chi went into comic book limbo in 1983 and then was gone for five years before Moench returned for a four-month Marvel Comics Presents run and then a one-shot graphic novel in 1990 and then after a brief guest arc in Captain America in 1992. Shang-Chi went missing again from 1992-1997 before he got a number of high profile stories before 2000 came and he had a number of big series in the 2000s.
As a result, though, his interactions with the rest of the Marvel Universe was always a bit sparse. Even when his series was going on, there were few Marvel Universe characters that would guest in his book and he would only guest star in the team-up books, that typically only have room for an action adventure. Not a whole lot of character work going on in most team-up books, ya know? And how would he even train, say, the Thing, in martial arts in Marvel Two-In-One?
What’s interesting, though, is that during Shang-Chi’s second of his two big visits to comic book limbo, Shang-Chi DID make an appearance in the 1994 Daredevil Annual (by Gregory Wright, Kris Renkewitz and Charles Barnett III) where he is, for the first time, shown training an established Marvel character, only this time it is Nick Fury…
I assume we don’t count Nick Fury as a “Superhero,” do we? If we do, then that’s the answer, all the way back in 1994. I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for, though.
I think that the 2011 Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man comic book (by Dan Slott, Humberto Ramos, Carlos Cuevas, Victor Olazaba and Edgar Delgado) is really where people started to think about Shang-Chi as a guy who trains other superheroes in martial arts, as that was a key part of that issue and that turned out to be a major part of Spider-Island (where everyone else received Spider-Man’s powers and thus Spidey needed to have his martial arts skills to give him an edge over all of the people who now had his powers)….
However, amusingly enough, a few months before that issue, Ed Brubaker, Mike Deodato and Rain Baredo had Shang-Chi training Steve Rogers in Secret Avengers #9…
So is Steve Rogers the answer?
Nope.
A year before that Secret Avengers issue, Fred Van Lente, Francis Portela and Ulises Arreola had Wolverine be forced to turn to Shang-Chi in Wolverine: First Class #9 to try to train him to help give him an advantage after Sabretooth had kidnapped Kitty Pryde to force Wolverine to come rescue her….
I’m unclear if the timing necessarily works, continuity-wise, but it’s definitely close enough for a comic book set in the past (everyone can’t be Untold Tales of Spider-Man, ya know?). Wolverine is frustrated at how Shang-Chi keeps trying to get him to “lose the nonsense,” testing him with stuff like asking him what an apple is or talking about the diamond sword that could be used to cut through his problems…
All of that stuff eventually pisses Wolverine off enough that he just quits working with Shang-Chi (there is a great bit where Wolverine quickly returns to make sure that storming off wasn’t specifically the answer that Shang-Chi was looking for. It was not)…
However, amazingly enough (well, unless you’re familiar with martial arts popular culture), where Wolverine is confronted by Sabretooth, he soon realizes that his biggest disadvantage with Sabretooth is that the villain knows how to push his buttons. It is not so much that Wolverine goes into berserker rages, but it is that Sabretooth knows how to send him into specific rages and so Wolverine realizes that the only way to beat Sabretooth is to, well, you know, cut out all of the nonsense from his past and allow himself to get zen enough where he can take advantage of Sabretooth’s missteps instead, and allowing Wolverine to rescue Kitty and defeat Sabretooth…
Wolverine was good enough to revisit Shang-Chi and to thank him for the lesson.
Okay, folks, if anyone has a suggestion for/question about a notable comic book first, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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