FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: My 2006 MASTER OF KING FU pitch that kinda-sorta reappeared in EMPOWERED!

So, back in 2006 I worked up a pitch for Marvel's Master of Kung Fu that went nowhere, like 99% of my many, many defunct proposals. However, a key element of that pitch kinda-sorta cameoed years later in Empowered vol.5, as we'll see; I even considered reworking the concept as a Ninjette project, as we'll also see.

Anyhoo, here's the Master of Kung Fu pitch:

MASTER OF KUNG FU: “GHOST-DISEASE FIST”  

A miniseries proposal by Adam Warren

             What interests me, here, isn’t so much the fact that Shang-Chi is a Master Of Kung Fu as such (though that does interest me quite a bit!), but the fact that he’s a Master of Kung Fu in the Marvel Universe, a milieu of superhumans and superscience far wilder than any wu xia (Chinese martial arts fantasy) could ever be...  

             The miniseries opens with Shang-Chi temporarily operating as, in effect, a martial arts consultant to certain high-profile superheroes... a role about which, we’ll soon learn, he’s highly ambivalent. Issue #1 crosscuts between three different scenes: 1) Shang-Chi at a Stark Industries facility, consulting on the hand-to-hand-combat programming for the Iron Man armor, critiquing technique while sparring with the suit! Supposedly, Tony Stark is phoning in (on speaker) from another city, but Shang-Chi easily figures out from esoteric cues in Iron Man’s posture and movement that Tony is actually inside the armor, not his supposed “bodyguard.” Scene 2) finds a well-dressed Shang-Chi (he’s sexy, yo!), flirting with a beautiful Businesswoman at an airport bar while waiting for a flight to another superhero consultation. As our hero interprets the seduction in his thoughts using combat terms of openings, feints, finishing moves and so on (everything is kung fu to him, it seems), the couples’ conversation bridges the issue’s other two scenes.  

            Scene 3) brings the wild-ass action, depicting an incident during Shang-Chi’s recent travels, in which our hero is attacked by a wasted-looking wretch who nonetheless displays highly advanced kung fu skills. This turns out to not be a case of a mere martial art being used by an evil man; conversely,  this is a case of  a mere man being used by an evil martial art! Gui Ji Chuan (“Ghost-Disease Fist”) is a legendarily brutal kung fu style that parasitizes and possesses those reckless fools who dare study its deadly forms, eventually writing its own self-aware personality over that of the doomed martial artist... before, that is, the dark art’s rampant qigong (internal power) abuse inevitably destroys the host’s body. Yep, Gui Ji Chuan is effectively a martial arts “meme,” a culturally transmitted “intellectual virus” in kung fu form... but the style’s notorious reputation and the years of training required to learn it have always kept its “infection” from ever spreading very far.  

           (2024 note: I asked my artist friend Jo Chen to work up a Chinese-language translation of "Ghost-Disease Fist," as seen below:)

           Issue #2’s rapid-fire opening sequence depicts Shang-Chi boarding a plane (after a possible assignation with the beautiful Businesswoman?), flying to another city, and winding up at a party, hobnobbing with a superhero team of some sort (the Avengers, perhaps, or whoever else is available at the time). Inexplicably, Shang-Chi goes berserk and assaults the superheroes with a breathtaking display of multiple kung-fu styles (such as, say, using a tai chi throw to redirect an attacking Avenger super-oaf out through a high-rise window)... while giving voice to repressed resentments regarding superheroes. “Beefy, clumsy, artless Caucasian longnoses who rely on superhuman strength and speed to compensate for the fact that they have all the fighting skills of developmentally disabled third-graders...”  What is the role of the martial arts’ arduous disciplines when a dose of radiation or a mutant gene or a set of powered armor can magically grant anyone incredible fighting skills? Or, for that matter, when a gigantic alien in a purple headdress might show up in orbit and consume the planet at any moment?

            Shang-Chi’s rampage becomes explicable as he casually states that he’s well aware that he’s been “trapped inside a digital simulation for hours, now.” Yep, so intimate is our hero’s sense of his body and its surroundings that he can easily recognize when someone’s stuck him inside a false, computer-generated reality. In fact, he’s still seated aboard the airplane from the beginning of the issue, where a team of nefarious Hydra techs is targeting his brain with electromagnetic “remote sim induction,” in an attempt to record and “upload” Shang-Chi’s kung fu! Groups such as Hydra, AIM, the shadowy Mecha Underground and others are developing super-science techniques for the billion-dollar prize of, well, “instant kung fu”: as in, software or biotech means of downloading high-level martial-arts skills to new subjects nearly instantaneously. Shang-Chi’s famously multi-discipline skill set is, of course, an ideal basis for such technologies... but he uses wild interpretations of qigong (internal power usage) to warp and destroy the simulation and escape Hydra’s trap. The inevitability of technology-spawned “instant kung fu,” however, continues to haunt him...

           While our hero may have escaped the initial attempt to “steal his kung fu,” in issue #3, Hydra tries again... as do competing “snatch and grab” teams from Advanced Idea Mechanics and the Mecha Underground! These other would-be creators of “instant kung fu,” having become aware of Hydra’s targeting of our hero, now make their own attempts to capture Shang-Chi for themselves... and high-tech, high-intensity action ensues, needless to say! One example: In a callback to the infamous, eponymous weapon from the 1974 HK classic Master of the Flying Guillotine, the Mecha deploy a cryogenic “head-snatching” device to decapitate and cryopreserve Shang-Chi’s valuable skull. So our beleaguered hero must carry out his latest bit of superhero consultation while evading and beating back a series of increasingly bizarre attacks by ultra-tech enemies...     

          The final arc of the miniseries runs through issues #4-6, as disparate plot threads from the first three issues weave together for a disastrous result. Hydra, after failing to steal Shang-Chi’s skills for its “instant kung fu” project, instead found another worthwhile subject from whom they could extract martial arts knowledge: the dying Gui Ji Chuan stylist that Shang Chi faced in issue #1. The good news, for Hydra: They created a DNA-based biological agent that, once injected into a subject, rewires their brain with a formidable set of “instant kung fu” skills! The bad news, for Hydra and everyone else in the world: they’ve accidentally transformed the dark art of Gui Ji Chuan from a rare, not-easily-acquired “meme” into an easily transmittable, lethal infection that begins spreading rapidly by blood contact! Yes, kids: a plague of high-speed kung-fu zombies! 28 Days Later meets Fist of Legend writ large! And unlike Shang-Chi, the self-aware group-mind spawned by Gui Ji Chuan’s infected legions is perfectly content to use Marvel-Uni technology to perpetuate itself...

            The kung fu/ science fiction/ horror kicks into high gear as Shang Chi and Hydra (including the beautiful Businesswomen from #1, a covert Hydra operative) first try to stem Gui Ji Chuan’s spread at a secret Hydra facility... then wind up fighting for survival as the sentient kung fu plague spreads to the city beyond. It’s bad enough that the infected victims are armed with high-level fighting skills and extreme bloodthirstiness... but worse, Gui Ji Chuan overdrives the victims’ bodies with qigong abuse, making them capable of (moderately) superhuman feats. Worse still than that, it’s entirely possible that a number of superheroes could become infected with the martial arts meme!  So, as the final issues erupt in crazed, high-energy kung fu zombie superhero superscience mayhem, it’s up to an overpowered and wildly outnumbered Shang Chi to beat back the onslaught of Gui Ji Chuan... Is he up to the task? Approve this proposal and we’ll all find out!

             In closing, a bit of an overview on the handling of Shang-Chi... I’d depict him as a martial arts savant, a prodigy skilled in a wide assortment of separate kung fu disciplines, from circle-walking pa kua to Northern eagle claw and Southern praying mantis. He’s not superhuman as such, but merely an incredibly talented and disciplined normal human. (From #1:“I’m not a master of kung fu, of course; we’re all merely students.”) However, we do get just a hint of the supernatural from some of his qigong internal-power techniques; nothing flashy like fireballs or flying allowed, but some effects of Shang-Chi’s arts are a bit unearthly. Remember, this isn’t taking place in our mundane world, where qigong’s modest alleged effects are a tad hard to believe, but the ol’ Marvel Uni, where damn near anything is possible! Example: our world has hack magician David Copperfield; the Marvel world has Doctor mothereffin’ Strange, baby! You feelin’ me?

            Also, Shang-Chi’s a man of some pretty serious contradictions... Not only does he embrace the mystical qigong concepts of pressure points and meridians and qi flow, but he’s also a smart, savvy, scientifically educated fellow well able to cope with the demands of Iron Man’s programming and Hydra’s biotechnological wackiness. He seems superficially charming and socially adept, but turns out to be repressing an urge for combat almost as extreme as that of Gui Ji Chuan...  

            In terms of the action, I’d want to work in all sorts of fighting, from “realistic” approaches to gonzo, WAY-over-the-top HK-cinema bizarreness. For example, I’d love to use forms from my personal favorite, the multi-discipline grappling, locking and trapping art of chin na. (“Kung fu: It’s more than just punching and kicking, folks!”) Also, I’d also want to work in the full panoply of kung fu weaponry, which is more fun than a barrel of (drunken) monkeys: choy-li-fut’s nine-dragon trident, wushu’s classical, double-edged sword, hung gar’s tiger fork, wing chun’s butterfly knives, even hung fut’s famous “iron cloth” form (as wielded by Jet Li in the end of Once Upon A Time In China 2, you might recall)... All of this and more, yo. 

      Back to 2024: After the pitch failed, I considered working the idea of the "evil king fu style" into Empowered, and in fact Gui Ji Chuan is briefly mentioned in Empowered vol.5 during this flashback scene recounting the earliest days of the doomed romance between Sistah Spooky and Mindf**k:

Yeahp, those are "kung fu zombies" in the background. In the story's next page, an off-panel Capitan Rivet briefly namechecks the ported-over martial art:

Later on, I considered reworking the original Master of Kung Fu pitch into another Empowered Guest Artist miniseries with Ninjette taking the place of Shang-Chi as the martial artist under siege in a crazed superhero universe. Could've worked, I suppose, but I never found an artist who could take on the formidable drawing challenges that the concept would've posed.

UPDATE: Holy crap, I only now realized that, two or three years ago, I started reworking that pitch into an original concept (very) tentatively titled The Warlord's Daughter in the World of Capes, that would've featured a new, "Ninjette-y" character trapped in an Empowered-like superhero universe; this revised version had an obnoxiously plot-twisty Big Reveal that I definitely could not have used with Ninjette (or with Shang-Chi, either). As with so many other pitches of mine, I apparently abandoned the concept because, once again, I didn't know any artists who could handle the potential project's martial-arts-intensive workload. (Then again, nowadays I don't know many artists, period, due to a lack of congoing and an almost complete disengagement from the online world of American comics.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?