Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu #1 – Review

By: Mike Benson (Writer), Tan Eng Huat (Penciller), Craig Yeung (Inker), Jesus Aburtov (Color Artist), VC’s Joe Sabino (Letterer), Dave Johnson (Cover Artist)

The Story:
When someone kills your partner, you gotta do something about it. Even if you’re a pacifist.

The Review:
You won’t have to skip to the end to understand my grade for this issue. It stands for Disappointed.

I am in the habit of never looking at preview pages for a book I’m looking forward to, and I was looking forward to Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu. Unfortunately, this comic makes me second guess that practice, as I could have found out ahead of time the significant flaws of this comic, which show up even within the first four pages. In these pages, Leiko Wu, a skilled martial arts hero with nearly a hundred comic appearances (based on the Marvel Chronology Project) has a four-page fight sequence until she is literally ripped in half by the villain Razorfist. That’s a problem for another paragraph, because I first must address the ineffective artwork on display.

The characters are often out of proportion and inconsistent with their environment, and sometimes even with the other characters they are meaning to interact with. The first three panels on the first page show problems of basic perspective, and the third panel with the dramatic villains suddenly takes place in an entirely different space than the second, with figures that are not to scale nor placed properly. In a martial arts comic, where fighting stances/forms and choreography are key elements, these are significant problems indeed.

And these problems continue throughout the book. Shang-Chi, our title’s hero, does get into a fight in, of all the exotic locations, a nondescript alleyway, but again the fight is quite simple, at best, with maybe one cool move that somehow connects two people several feet away with both of his feet. Okay, I’ll give him two if we count the catching of a knife midair.

I’m not sure if the credit belongs with the writer or the penciller. Huat’s work here feels unpolished, because of the problems I’ve mentioned before as well as some fairly basic choices for panel layouts and expressions, in conjunction with some spotty anatomy. I can justify a lot of this if it’s a deliberate artistic choice of style (and/or a lack of experience) but the worst offense is in simply not being able to capture the title hero in any conceivable likeness. Bluntly, the main character cannot even appear to be Chinese, in facial features or in hair color (which switches to brown halfway through.) The pencils are not helped by the inks, which lend a scratchy quality brings more confusion than clarity, no sense of line weight, or depth of field. Nor is the colors particularly helpful either. Every surface is given texture and multiple shadows, adding to a lot of visual confusion.