Good afternoon all,
This blustery winter afternoon is a perfect time for me to discuss the one hundred and thirteenth issue of Marvel's The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. The cover showed Shang in the middle of four black panthers, with a fifth, larger-than-life panther superimposed in the background. The story was called "Learn & Burn." The issue had a cover date of June 1981.
The tale began on a Toronto street at night, where MI-6 associate Talon was about to meet his contact Simon at a local pub. Clive Reston, Shang, and Leiko Wu followed him into the tavern. Simon darted out the back of the establishment after seeing Wu and Shang-Chi, thinking that members of the Communist Chinese mob were after him.
Talon was eventually able to calm his comrade down, with Reston's assistance. Shang and Leiko brought up the rear. Simon was telling his contact about a superweapon when he was shot from above with a poison dart in the neck. The assassins were too far away for Reston to shoot, but the quartet soon tracked them down and engaged in combat. Their foes were defeated, but they swallowed cyanide capsules after the battle (just like the villains from last issue).
Simon muttered something about a white heat document being a forty or fifty-year sham and mere code for diamonds before passing away. Back at his London townhome, Sir Dennis Nayland Smith received the information via telephone and worked with Dark Angel and Black Jack Tarr to try to make some sense of it. The trio was still hard at work several hours later when a bullet pierced one of the windows in their room.
Tarr ran outside to find the shooter and finally subdued the Chinese Communist spy. Smith was now concerned that he and the Red Reaver (named last issue) were the only ones still alive from the program that began decades earlier. After six hours, Angel was finally able to break the code. She figured out that the weapon was a maser, a more destructive form of a laser. It required blue diamonds that could only be found in Africa as its power source.
Shang-Chi, Reston, and Leiko were soon on their way to Africa to reconnoiter with a man named Gaboa. The group ventured deep into the countryside in a trio of Jeeps before making camp for the evening. Gaboa was a long-time associate of Smith's and was glad to assist. The next morning, they came across an encampment in front of the mountains where the blue diamonds were.
Wu and Shang could see a man in a blue uniform, whom Smith had called the Red Reaver, instructing his excavation crews. Shang-Chi then decided to distract the black panthers who had been guarding the camp. He and Leiko were able to enter the mine minutes before a detonation revealed a massive cluster of blue diamonds directly above them.
Shang warned that the explosion may have caused a fault that would trigger an earthquake mere moments before the ground beneath began to rumble. Shang-Chi ran free from the resulting cave-in. It appeared that the diamonds were lost to all, and that the Red Reaver and his minions had perished. Afterward, a helicopter carrying Talon and Shang-Chi's half-sister, Fah Lo Suee, arrived. The mission was successful, but the subsequent loss of life did not appear to make it a victory in Shang's eyes.
I wasn't pleased with Alan Kuppenberg's inking of Rick Maygar's pencil artwork in this issue. They made the drawings seem more crude and less refined than the usual brilliant efforts that I'd grown accustomed to in this series. We didn't learn a lot about the Red Reaver, or the decades-old dossier that was brought up at the end of the previous issue. It seemed like a rushed two-part story, one that was good but not great, in my humble opinion.
Well, that's all from me for today. Tomorrow, I'll write about the one hundred and fourteenth issue of Master of Kung Fu. Shang embarks on a solo mission, meets a new potential love interest, and something resurfaces from his past. Until then, have a great week and don't forget to be kind to one another.
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