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Monday, May 17, 2021

SONS OF THE TIGER PART 1

As presented in DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Nos. 1, 3, and 4.

"THE SONS OF THE TIGER!" | "THE TRAIL OF THE NINJA!"
"NIGHT OF THE DEATH-DREAM!"
Author: Gerry Conway | Editor & Advisor: Roy Thomas
Artists: Dick Giordano & Frank McLaughlin (pts. 1 & 2) | Don Perlin & Dan Adkins (pt. 3)

The Plot: (DEADLY HANDS #1) One night in San Francisco's Chinatown, on his way home from a martial arts tournament, a young man named Lin Sun is attacked by a group of ninjas. He fights them off, but upon entering the dojo where he trains, finds his Master Kee dying thanks to the ninjas. Kee tells Lin to take the three jade tiger amulets that he keeps in the dojo, and to go seek out the school's two other best students, Abe Brown and Bob Diamond -- then Kee dies in Lin's arms. Lin takes the amulets and locates Abe first, helping him to fight off a group of drug dealers. The two move along to the penthouse apartment of Bob, a movie star, and save him from a ninja attack as well.

Bob and Abe each take one amulet and the trio sets out for the only ninjutsu school in San Francisco, where they fight its master, Sui Tu Kama. Using the mystical amulets to triple their individual fighting skills, the "Sons of the Tiger" defeat Kama and his ninja followers, and discover a hidden opium den in the dojo as well. Abe believes Master Kee has been avenged, but Lin states that Kama had a master, and vows to find him.

(DEADLY HANDS #3) Following a lead, Lin Sun arrives at Janto Imports on the San Francisco waterfront. He is attacked by ninjas and holds his own, but is eventually defeated. Meanwhile, Abe and Bob, who abandoned Lin to continue his mission alone after they felt they had sufficiently avenged Master Kee, have a change of heart and go after their friend. They find Lin about to be killed by an old man named Lo Chin and his minions. Abe and Bob rescue Lin and the group fights together once more, defeating Lo Chin's men and destroying his stolen sonic cannon -- but in the aftermath of the fight, Lo Chin has vanished.

(DEADLY HANDS #4) Following yet another lead, the Sons arrive at the airport, where they try to stop Lo Chin from boarding a plane. But the craft takes off with Lin having chased Lo Chin aboard. Bob and Abe hitch a ride as it rises into the air, leading to a battle aboard the plane. Eventually it crashes, apparently with Lo Chin aboard, but the Sons bail out to watch the wreckage burn.

Continuity Notes: Lin Sun, Abe Brown, and Bob Diamond all make their debuts here, along with the tiger amulets. Though none will go on to much stardom beyond these DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU stories, they have all popped up very sparingly in the years since, most often in Iron Fist stories.

When he first appears, Sui Tu Kama mentions a group called the "Seven Silent Ones", who will be "displeased" by his ninjas' failure to eliminate Lin, Abe, and Bob. Later, Lo Chin also mentions the Seven Silent Ones, claiming that he will soon rule the world beside them. Lo Chin also informs the Sons that his masters have a plan to take control of America's youth with drugs: namely, heroin.

Lin Sun is at Janto Imports to start chapter two, and we get a flashback showing that he got the name of the place from one of Sui Tu Kama's ninjas before he passed out. That's fine. But in part three, the Sons are jsut randomly at the airport. At the end of the previous chapter, Lo Chin escaped without a trace, then at the start of this one, the Sons have determined that he's coming to the airport, and have even found the exact plane he will be using to depart -- with no explanation for how they figured this out.

These first three chapters of the "Sons of the Tiger" serial were, as noted above, published in DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU issues 1, 3. and 4. DHoKF was a bi-monthly publication, so the first two installments appeared four months apart!

My Thoughts: So far we're off to a fine start. Weird plot hole aside, this is a fun, gritty martial arts exploitation story done in the Mighty Marvel Manner. Free of the Comics Code, Conway is able to go a bit further in some spots than one would normally expect from a comic of this vintage; there is some mild cursing from our protagonists, and Lin Sun is shown to kill at least five men throughout these three chapters.

The artwork in the first two installments is wonderful. Dick Giordano, who had inked several of Neal Adams' DC stories by this point, turns in a very photorealistic effort worthy of Adams. I love his moody depiction of San Francisco by night, and all of his Tiger-Sons move like martial artists. The art takes a step down in the third chapter, though. Don Perlin is fine for superhero stuff, but his depictions of martial arts moves look weird, stiff, and lifeless.

The story is what really engrosses me here, though. I'm a sucker for long, drawn-out serials like this, where our heroes' goalposts keep getting moved. Every time the Sons meet a character who seems to be the "big bad", it's revealed that he has someone else pulling his strings. I don't know where Conway was originally planning to take his saga, but unfortunately we'll never find out, as he only ever wrote these three chapters. But before we move along with the Sons' serial proper, next week we'll examine 1974's DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU SPECIAL, which featured a three-part story, each chapter spotlighting a different protagonist -- Iron Fist in part one, the Sons of the Tiger in Part two, and Shang-Chi in part three.

6 comments:

  1. Dick Giordano doing work for Marvel always feels like you've slipped into some kind of alternate universe or something, given how much I associate him with DC. Which is also kind of weird, given how much work across comics, but there it is. It's like John Romita working for DC-though that was so early in his career that it's easy to overlook it, especially since it was mostly romance comics.

    I am also pretty sure that Gerry Conway worked on everything Marvel did in the '70s, in one way or another. And it DID seem Don Perlin also showed up at one time or another just about everywhere.

    I'm very fond of '70s Marvel, as you likely figured out ages ago. I loved how Marvel was running with trends like kung fu and karate movies and Conan the Barbarian and Godzilla and Star Wars, and still reprinting war comics and cowboy comics. Marvel largely abandoned that after the 70s, but it was good fun back then.

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    1. I know what you mean. It's almost a double-take moment when you see Giordano's name in something published by Marvel. What gets me even more is when you'll see him inking a Marvel book after his decade-plus as a DC executive! He left his DC editorial position in the early 90s and apparently became a freelance inker again, and you'd randomly see him pop up on a Spider-Man issue or a Thor issue or whatever later in the 90s.

      I get the same feeling when I think about the fact that John Romita Jr. was exclusive to DC for something like the past eight or ten years. I know it happened, but it feels like a hallucination. There are some guys who are just so ingrained with one company that it doesn't feel "real" to see them working elsewhere.

      Yeah, Conway really seemed like Stan Lee's heir apparent in the 70s. First guy to do AMAZING SPIDER-MAN after Lee left, first editor-in-chief after Roy Thomas stepped down, and he really did dabble in everything. I believe I read that he had some absurd contract that guaranteed him something like a dozen titles a month to write.

      Yeah, Marvel was a licensing machine in the 70s and early 80s. They continued to do licensed books through the 80s, but it never felt the same as in the 70s -- probably because in the 70s and early 80s, the licenses -- Fu Manchu, Godzilla, Micronauts, Rom -- where usually integrated into the Marvel Universe, while later on they weren't. (Which was probably the right choice in the long run for reprint rights, but it also makes the licensed stuff feel less "real" somehow.)

      Anyway, I'm big on 70s Marvel too. Even though I didn't live through it (I was born in late '78), it's one of my favorite decades for the company. Despite all the accolades the Jim Shooter era receives, and despite the fact that I started reading Marvel stuff sporadically in the 80s, I rank the 70s and 90s both higher -- the latter because that's when I really got into Marvel as a regular, ongoing reader, and the former because the company felt so diverse at that time.

      I've never been sure where I rank the 60s in this list. I love the 60s in theory, and of course there would be no Marvel as we know it if that decade didn't happen, but outside of all the Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man, which I love dearly (well, mainly the Romita section; Ditko I can take or leave if we take for granted that Spider-Man wouldn't exist without him), I've read precious little 60s Marvel.

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    2. John Romita Jr. being DC exclusive feels like it violates the laws of physics and I really never liked it at all.

      I think the main reason why I loved 70s Marvel was until Jim Shooter took over there was an era where no one was really paying attention to what was going on, and as a result guys like Steve Gerber and Don McGregor got away with murder. The Comics Code was kind of just a broad suggestion for Marvel for a while. Shooter deserves credit for getting the books to ship on time without deadline issues; people reading collections now don't see sometimes how storylines were messed up by a fill in or reprint (usually the latter.) But he kind of stamped out a lot of wild creativity when he took over too.

      Most of my 60s Marvel was the classics, of course. My favorite 60s book was Thor, rather than the FF or Spider-Man, though I loved the former too. 60s Thor is why Walt Simonson's run on Thor is my favorite ever, because that's what he was trying to bring back.

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    3. Shooter seemed to have two minds when it came to his creators. If the creator was a proven star, he let them do whatever they wanted; see Claremont on X-MEN and NEW MUTANTS, Simonson on THOR, Byrne on FF for the first few years of his run, and so forth.

      But for creators who either weren't superstars or had earned his ire somehow (Byrne in the latter part of his FF run), Shooter micromanaged the heck out of them.

      I also think that, again, unless you were looking at major star penciler, Marvel's artwork deteriorated considerably under Shooter. By the end of his tenure, Most Marvel books, at least those not written by Claremont, adhered to this dull, lifeless and unexciting "house style".

      Lee/Kirby Thor is at or near the top of my Silver Age reading list, because I've heard so many accolades for it over the year. Everyone seems to love it.

      I actually do want to read most of the "main" Silver Age Marvel titles... I've bought a lot of the digital Epic Collections with that goal in mind. The problem is, anytime I think about reading, say, classic AVENGERS or THOR, this other voice in my head says, "Or you could just re-read Lee/Romita Spider-Man for the umpteenth time!" And that's the voice that typically wins.

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  2. How you know the amulets are magic: Lin Sun reads aloud the ostensibly Chinese inscription on the box — what becomes the mantra spoken by the Sons to unlock their power — and his instant translation has a rhyme and meter in English.

    Agreed on Giordano at Marvel.

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    1. I actually somehow failed to notice that, but you're right. Maybe Lin is just a poet at heart and came up with an English equivalent of the Chinese chant on the fly...!

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