Today, see how Shang-Chi spent over a year in limbo slowly dying of poison before Marvel resolved his storyline.
This is “Never Gonna Be the Same Again,” a feature where I look at how bold, seemingly “permanent” changes were ultimately reversed. This is not a criticism, mind you, as obviously things are always going to eventually return to “normal.” That’s just how superhero comic books work. It’s just fun to see how some of these rather major changes are reversed. This is differentiated from “Abandoned Love,” which is when a new writer comes in and drops the plot of the previous writer. Here, we’re talking about the writer who came up with the idea being the same one who resolved the change. This is also differentiated from “Death is Not the End,” which is about how “dead” characters came back to life, since this is about stuff other than death.
In 1988, Marvel decided to follow suit with DC and try out something that had not been attempted in quite a while in the comic book industry (before 1988, that is), which was a straight comic book anthology. The format used to be WIDELY popular, but that was back when comic books were sold on the newsstand market where fans were more willing to do impulse buying, so having a LOT of features was typically seen as being very appealing to the kid with a few dimes to spend on comic books. As the direct market became the primary way that people bought comic books, anthologies (and team-up books) fell by the wayside as people were more interested in seeing books that “counted” that “mattered” to the continuity of the main heroes. Team-up books and anthologies are not very good for that sort of thing.
Marvel and DC, though, both decided to release weekly anthologies in the British comic book format of a lot of short serialized stories. DC canceled Green Lantern Corps and gave their book, Action Comics Weekly, to Green Lantern as the lead characters whose adventures would “matter” while Marvel turned to one of their biggest characters period, Wolverine, for a new lead story by Chris Claremont and John Buscema (who would then soon do a Wolverine solo ongoing series).
One of the innovations that the editor of the series, Terry Kavanagh, had, was that this series could be used to reunite the acclaimed creators of slightly less known series, so for the first eight issues of Marvel Comics Presents, Doug Moench returned to Shang-Chi to write a Shang-Chi story (the cover for #1 was by Walter Simonson)…
Shang-Chi had retired at the end of his series, having defeated his father’s criminal empire, but now he was lured back by the love of his life, Leiko…
When Leiko is then kidnapped by a bad guy, Shang-Chi is ALL the way back and when they mail Leiko’s hand? Shang-Chi was in a REALLY bad place.
In the final part of the story, he and his allies storm into the villain’s lair after the villain claimed that he had killed Leiko. The villain warned Shang-Chi about a deadly poison…
Shang couldn’t be stopped, he didn’t care about dying, he just wanted to KILL this dude, and so he was then exposed to the fatal chemicals…
As he was beating the villain to death, he was shocked to learn that Leiko, though badly hurt, was not dead.
Shang celebrates the victory (well, except for he missing hand and his fatal poisoning) and they look forward to an uncertain future…
Now, the odds are very good that Moench was going to then continue the Shang-Chi story right away, but SOMEthing happened, and instead, NO Shang-Chi story appeared in the next year or so! So over a year of NO Shang-Chi comics after the guy was just fatally poisoned with a chemical that will kill him any time from a couple of a weeks to a year? How can we live with him just being MISSING?
I guess things got re-shuffled in who was going to appear in Marvel Comics Presents, because in early 1990, what were clearly intended to be parts of a serial story were released as a one-shot, Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black, by Moench and artist brothers Daniel and Dan Day, the brothers of legendary Master of Kung Fu artist, Gene Day.
Their artwork was reminsicent of their brother. Just check out this sequence where Shang-Chi reveals that his father has an elixir that could cure Shang-Chi….
Fist, we confirm that he is, in fact, dying…
Shang-Chi has to defeat a follower of his father to become the “true” heir to his father and he succeeded in doing so, drinking from the elixir and getting kind of weird while doing so…
He then decided to destroy the rest of the elixir for fear that it would seduce him too much.
He was now cured, though.
What a weird time in his life.
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