Shang-Chi #3

History

The issue was written by Eisner Award-winning author Gene Luen Yang — whose own Chinese-American identity informed his approach to the material — with interior art split between Dike Ruan (handling present-day sequences) and Philip Tan (handling flashback sequences), a deliberate visual strategy Yang described publicly as matching Ruan's emotional clarity to contemporary scenes and Tan's style to period material. Edited by Darren Shan under Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski, the issue carried a cover date of January 2021 but was released on November 25, 2020 — part of a miniseries originally scheduled for June 2020 but delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 miniseries was later adapted into a scrolling vertical format as Shang-Chi: Brothers & Sisters Infinity Comic (2021) for the Marvel Unlimited app, extending the reach of this issue's key story beats to a new digital readership.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Released November 25, 2020; cover-dated January 2021; part 3 of the 'Brothers and Sisters' arc in the Shang-Chi (2020) five-issue miniseries.
• Written by Gene Luen Yang; interior art by Dike Ruan (present-day scenes) and Philip Tan (flashback sequences); colors by Sebastian Cheng; letters by Travis Lanham; edited by Darren Shan.
• First appearance of Master Ling, the trainer of the House of the Deadly Dagger, as well as the first appearance of Commander Sabre (a historical Boxer Rebellion-era Deadly Warrior who dies in flashback) and the Warriors of the Deadly Dagger.
• First appearance of the historical Deadly Warriors unit, presented in Boxer Rebellion flashback as the Five Weapons Society's fighting force circa 1900.
• Brother Sabre's birth name Takeshi and Sister Dagger's birth name Esme are revealed to Shang-Chi for the first time in this issue — Esme shares her name only after Shang-Chi shields both siblings from a Jiangshi explosion, earning her trust.
• The issue delivers the first in-continuity origin of Zheng Zu as a fratricide — it is revealed here that Zu was responsible for the death of his own brother Zheng Yi in order to seize sole leadership of the Five Weapons Society.
• Leiko Wu reappears in this issue, assisting Shang-Chi in tracking Sister Hammer's attack on the Chinese Art collection at the Louvre in Paris.
• The entire 2020 miniseries (including this issue) was later reformatted as Shang-Chi: Brothers & Sisters Infinity Comic for Marvel Unlimited, and all five issues are collected in the trade paperback Shang-Chi by Gene Luen Yang Vol. 1: Brothers and Sisters.

Cast · 8 characters

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