Deadly Hands of Kung Fu Omnibus, Vol. 1

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1

by Bill Mantlo, Jim Starlin, Gerry Conway

By 1974, kung fu fever struck the United States. Hot on the heels of the breakout hit Master of Kung Fu, Marvel launched the amazing, oversized The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine. Headlined by Shang-Chi, Iron Fist and the Sons of the Tiger, artists including Rudy Nebres, George Pérez, Jim Starlin, Paul Gulacy and more gave, Deadly Hands their all. With stunning painted covers by the likes of Neal Adams, no man could stand against Deadly Hands. Each issue featured not just the comic-art adventures of Marvel's greatest kung fu heroes, but also extensive interviews, martial arts guides, photo features, and movie, TV and book reviews. If there was anything you wanted to know about martial arts, Deadly Hands had a kung-fu grip on it.

COLLECTING: DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU (1974) 1-18; SPECIAL (1974) 1

Genres: Comics, Marvel, Graphic Novels, Martial Arts, Fiction, Adventure, Action

1120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

William Timothy Mantlo is an American comic book writer, primarily at Marvel Comics.
(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

With Deadly Hands of Kung Fu Marvel staked their claim on a corner of the '70s martial arts craze. Packed as it is with articles and movie reviews, it will surprise nobody that I'm mainly in it for the comic strips.

Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu himself, is the lead strip and he's backed up by the Sons of the Tiger, Iron Fist and the occasional one-off strip featuring less well-known characters (less well known than the Sons of the Tiger? Well, actually... yes).

As with most anthology titles, the quality of the content in this omnibus is pretty variable. I'm sad to say the storytelling is definitely the weakest element in the mix; some of the writing here is woeful. The artwork is a different story, however. This book is notable for featuring George Perez's first professional work and some of the painted covers, by folks like Neal Adams, are very nice but the real standout in the art department is Rudy Nebres, whose work is absolutely beautiful. Whatever happened to him?

With all its highs and lows I can't really give this anything other than a straight down the middle 3 stars.

[Little Timmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marvel Comics took a chance in the 1070s with several magazine series. These Magazines didn't have to conform to the Comics Code Authority for their content. This allowed Marvel to showcase writers and artists in creating more adult oriented stories for the readers. Deadly Hands was a great collection of stories about some of the Marvel characters. A very different read than the normal comics of that time. Very recommended

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man, this was a tough read.

Your mileage may vary, but I have a very hard time with Marvel comics from the 70s. Overwritten, overwrought, relentlessly wordy, bizarre and trippy, often nonsensical.......I was born in 1970, so I seek these books out almost as a scholarly pursuit: I know I'm not going to like them, but I feel compelled to read them based on their legendary status.

The book started strong, and I was enjoying the mix of comics, movie reviews, and articles about the martial arts. Until I realized that, and the editorial staff admits this themselves, Marvel didn't have the budget to fill a thick magazine with comic art, so the articles had to be MASSIVELY padded to fill the page count. (A 14 page review of a James Bond movie...? A three-issue long review of ENTER THE DRAGON...? They are more like novelizations than reviews....) Some of the articles were very good, but between the endless pages of text, and the overwritten comics themselves, I was just overloaded with words. Sacrilege, I've been told, but Marvel didn't become truly readable until Jim Shooter took over in the 80s.

And the writing....The omnibus is filled with the usual Marvel suspects from the 70s, purple prose purveyors like Doug Moench, Steve Englehart, Don McGregor, Bill Mantlo.....why use one word when one hundred will do just as well?

I wanted to love this, embrace it as a hidden gem that I missed in my childhood, but my main takeaway is "I'm glad THAT'S over with.

On to Volume 2.....sigh.

[Paul Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved these growing up and had to get it!

[Brent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started off good but by the end I was just trying to get through it.

[Devero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tanta roba in questo omnibus, purtroppo non sempre di qualità.
La rivista originale aveva pochi fumetti rispetto al numero di pagine di articoli sul cinema, le serie TV (all'epoca si chiamavano telefilm) e la parte saggistica sulle arti marziali vera e propria. Diciamo che questa parte di articoli, spesso panegirici su attori o show che piacevano ai redattori, sono invecchiati molto male. Hanno interesse solo per chi sta facendo ricerca su un fenomeno, quello del boom delle arti marziali, durato un lustro o poco più e probabilmente ucciso dalla scarsissima qualità media delle produzioni. Voglio dire, a parte Bruce Lee che era il non plus ultra, per il resto c'è poco di sufficiente e molto di scarsissima qualità. Un poco come gli spaghetti western se togli la trilogia del dollaro di S. Leone, resta poca roba sufficiente e tanta spazzatura.
Le storie: dal punto di vista delle trame, molta ripetitività, molta noia e poche cose buone.
I personaggi: Shang-Chi senza dubbio è convincente, anche se sospetto, molto meno che sulla serie a lui dedicata. I Figli Della Tigre come personaggi non convincono affatto, sono piatti e abbastanza stereotipati, le loro trame sono senza senso e nel complesso non mi stupisco che siano usciti di scena in fretta senza nemmeno mai tornare come comprimari nella Marvel. Al massimo un cameo o due nei successivi 40 anni, roba che nemmeno gli Shogun Warriors, accidenti.
Iron-Fist nelle sue poche apparizioni di questo primo omnibus non brilla particolarmente.
Le altre storie senza questi tre concept come protagonisti sono un paio di storielle senza ne arte ne parte.
Quindi perché nonostante tutti questi lati negativi merita 3 stelle questo omnibus?
I disegni.
da Rudy Nebres a Alan Weiss, al giovanissimo George Perez, a un sacco di altri grandi disegnatori tra cui MacLaughlin, il mio amato Pat Broderick, Gulacy.
Per tacere di alcune copertine spettacolari di Neal Adams, tra cui quelle dedicate a Bruce Lee sono dei capolavori di dinamica, realismo ed efficacia nel trasmettere adrenalina.
Ecco, i disegni in generale sono di alto livello, in qualche caso altissimo livello.
3 stelle.

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must say that I enjoyed the historical writing of Martial arts in the 1970's included in these magazines. Movies and television show like Bruce Lee and John Carradine and others that were popular at the time and have gone into oblivion.

The stories of Shang Chi and the Sons of the Tiger again or their time and were truly inspired. Bill Mantlo and Doug Moench wrote great detailed stories and the art was stunning.

Part of me like the Sons of the Tiger stories a bit more only because I read very little of their tales in the color comics at that time. They were guest stars in multiple issues, but to read their stories were wonderful.

[Timo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were just bad, so bad, but then again, I'm looking them in 2021, not in 70s, so they might have been good then. But the art is interesting as there seem to be first works of people like George Perez and other that came to be superstars.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is good and bad here, so lets start with the good. For starters, we have a beautiful reprint of something that has been out of print since the original magazine. So pure exploitation kung fu comics from the 70's, they don't get enough credit for it, but this is when Marvel was at their peak. Now the art is also extremely good. It really highlights how poor the coloring process was at the time, because a level of detail was lost back then whenever color was added. Since it's in black and white, those details are still there. Finally, it's a magazine instead of a comic book, so the same rules enforced by the comic's code are absent. So we have a little bit more adult situations and language. The writers never got too blue, they didn't want to alienate their readers after all.

Now for the bad. The Sons of the Dragon. There is a good reason they never had a color comic and that's because no one wrote any good stories about them and they weren't very interesting. Also, the other side of the black and white issue is that there was so much detail on many of the panels that it was hard to understand all of the action. It all comes out looking like busy detail and might have been solved with a little zip a tone, or the way Warren made it work by using washes to create grey tones. The articles are not written too we'll and that isn't because they couldn't write, they just were trying to fill space. So a movie review that could have taken three paragraphs was done in three pages, most of which recapped the entire story. The martial arts instructions are fun to see when you look at the illustrations, but not so interesting to read. Finally the format is all off. While it's nice that I can neatly put this on the shelf next to my other omnibus editions, the size is just wrong. Marvel has scaled the book with blank space at the top and bottom to squash the magazine format into comic book dimensions. If only Marvel had reshaped the dimensions to fit with the magazine format, maybe some of those tiny panels would benefit from a little growth.