Master of Kung Fu #40
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMaster of Kung Fu #40 opens the celebrated 'Dream Slayers' multi-part arc — the creative peak of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy's run, widely regarded as one of the finest sustained story sequences in Bronze Age Marvel. The issue introduces James Larner and the Oriental Expediters, the front organization that will drive the conspiracy plot through issue #50, dramatically expanding Shang-Chi's supporting cast and the series' espionage infrastructure. Gulacy's nine-panel grid layouts in this very issue have since been cited by comics scholars and bloggers as anticipating the formal page architecture Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons would later make famous in Watchmen, making it a quiet landmark in the history of comics page design. The issue also reinforces the series' defining moral texture: Shang-Chi, disillusioned with his handlers, must be coaxed back into service — a character beat that kept the book philosophically richer than its martial-arts-craze contemporaries.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
By May 1976, writer Doug Moench and artist Paul Gulacy had been building toward an extended serialized climax across their run together, which had begun with issue #22. Gulacy, who had been inspired by the cinematic spy-thriller aesthetic of Jim Steranko and who inked his own pencils on this issue, modeled characters after film stars — James Larner, debuting here, was drawn to resemble Marlon Brando. The issue was edited by Marv Wolfman at a moment when Marvel's Bronze Age titles were pushing toward longer, more novelistic arcs; the Oriental Expediters thread introduced here would thread continuously through six more issues before resolving, an ambitious commitment for a monthly genre book of the era.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published May 1976 (cover date); story titled 'The Murder Agency' — written by Doug Moench, penciled and inked by Paul Gulacy, colored by Petra Goldberg, lettered by Annette Kawecki, edited by Marv Wolfman.
- Cover art by Gil Kane and Dan Adkins; a possible additional John Romita Sr. inking credit on the cover has been noted by researchers but not definitively confirmed.
- First appearance of James Larner (Earth-616): a disgraced former MI-6 agent, bitter toward Leiko Wu, who is conscripted back into service by Shang-Chi and Black Jack Tarr and drawn by Gulacy to resemble Marlon Brando.
- First appearance of the Oriental Expediters, Ltd. — a London-based front organization for the villain Shockwave, whose assassins attack Larner's flat in this issue, providing the team their only lead for the arc ahead.
- Shen Kuei (the Cat) and Juliette appear in flashback only; their actual first appearances were in Master of Kung Fu #38 (March 1976), also by Moench and Gulacy.
- The issue opens the multi-part 'Dream Slayers' story arc running through approximately issue #50, culminating in the apparent death of Fu Manchu — considered Moench and Gulacy's creative magnum opus on the title.
- Gulacy's nine-panel grid page layouts in this issue have been identified by comics scholars as a formal forerunner to techniques central to Watchmen (1986–87).
- Reprinted in Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu Omnibus Vol. 2 (Marvel, 2016) and Master of Kung Fu Epic Collection Vol. 2: Fight Without Pity (Marvel, 2019), per the Grand Comics Database.
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Reprinted in Eclipso #75 (1981), Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu Omnibus #2 (2016), Master of Kung Fu Epic Collection #2 (2019), Μάστερ Κούνγκ Φου [Master of Kung Fu] #26, Shang-Chi Maestro del Kung Fu #30
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