It would be hilarious if it needed more post-production special effects than the rest...

Last week Destin Daniel Cretton was picked to direct Marvel's (upcoming, eventually) Shang-Chi movie--wait, are they going with that as the title, and not Master of Kung Fu? Huh. Well, encouragingly enough, it sounds like they plan on leaning hard into the martial arts side of things--something the Iron Fist show didn't push hard enough, y'ask me. While I'm not a huge fan of the character, I still have some issues here and there, or keep grabbing them from the quarter bins. Like this one! From 1980, Master of Kung Fu #93, "Midnight Wind" Written by Doug Moench, pencils by Mike Zeck, inks by Gene Day.

In Chinatown, Shang and Leiko are enjoying a visit to a used bookstore; so the issue opens with the parable they had read. They don't have much time to dwell on it, as they are soon reunited with their old friend, Black Jack Tarr! Who needs help rescuing a girl from a cult, the Dawning Light. Shang had been around enough by that point to guess Tarr wasn't doing this out of the kindness of his heart: the girl had stolen "tradecraft," papers from the Ministry of Defense. Something was up with the Dawning Light...The magenta robes aren't particularly threatening, although I'd write that off as an artifact of comic book coloring and printing. (White robes would show images from the other side of the page, right? And black robes would be a mess.)

The girl, Mandy Greville, is rescued in fairly short order, but is profoundly ungrateful: it's not yet clear if she was brainwashed, or a "true believer." Even though Tarr had known her since she was a child, she still promises to kill him...Until looking this up in the GCD, I didn't realize this was a three-part story. I'm guessing Mandy doesn't succeed, though.

I always associate this book with a lot of captions; I wonder if that could carry into a film version? Like, Shang's narration never stops, fight scene or no...