If you got up this morning and you thought, “I would like to see Bruce Lee bodies with random heads on them,” the covers of UMTU 15 & 16 by David Mack are for you! Back in UMTU 11, I mentioned various western people doing faux-Manga around this time, and on that note, here’s Rick Mays! Jason MArtin inks his work, but there’s a framing device in this story by Andy Lee, which start us off:
“A Chinese fairy tale. Certainly not something we made up.”
Jarring transition, but those are consecutive pages. That lady walks through Chinatown until she sees the auntie she’s come to visit, but then immediately has her bag stolen by some goons who run off. Then one of them gets a broom in the face.
Mays, at least, has pages that look vaguely manga-y. Clugston-Major just essentially drew Sailor Moon heads on American looking comics, but this has more manga-y energy. A credits page gives you Shang-Chi’s background which, as usual in UMTU, is more or less just the original recipe version. Heir to a vast criminal empire, trained to be the ultimate weapon, turned his back on all that, gets into adventures. Another page of the “fairy tale” has the prince tell the spider he doesn’t know what he’ll do in this new land, but he’ll earn his own way. And then we finally see some familiar faces.
The open, cartoony feel of Mays’ take on manga is pretty appealing, all cultural weirdness aside. People sure tend to open their mouths superwide when they talk. The kids see Shang-Chi being accosted by those dorks from earlier, now with some presumably Yakuza guy who owns them here to get some payback. Peter says he has to go as they drag a silent Shang into an alley to whup on him. MJ sees them beating on him and Peter scales a wall looking for somewhere to change.
MJ, having seen all this, says Peter will whine about it for a month. Probably! Meanwhile, the lady Shang-Chi saved earlier asks her auntie who he was, and isn’t getting much in the way of answers.auntie says he’s the only one in the neighborhood who will stand up to the bullies, and one day they’ll kill him for it, but she doesn’t know his name. To which the younger one replies it’s Shang-Chi, and she found him just like that.
Songs like bad news for Shang-Chi. If only he’d spoken a word this issue, someone might worry about him. This was a weird one. Not UMTU’s finest hour to me. But come back for more of it next time.