X-MEN #62: Games of Deceit and Death Part 1 of 3

Our hero finds unexpected allies in a team of mutants!

Originally Published March 1997

We begin on the southern coast of Scotland, home of MI-6 agent Clive Reston. Reston is being visited by his old friend, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, who as you no doubt know has been out of the game for some time, enjoying a placid life and not looking to get drawn back into the games of deceit and death.

No sooner can he think this, however, than he is accosted by a cadre of Si-Fan Ninja, who were once pledged to the service of his father, who is now dead.

The Master of Kung Fu, of course, can hold his own, but the Ninjas have one thing Shang-Chi doesn't -- namely, guns. Shang wonders exactly who is directing these ninjas nowadays.

"Chinese" isn't a language, Bob.

No answers are forthcoming, but just when it looks like Shang-Chi is outnumbered and outgunned, he has unexpected help from a bizarre animalistic creature with long claws coming out of his hands.

Shang-Chi is suitably impressed by the stranger, whose presence causes the ninjas to retreat, but he also exudes an arrogance that the Master of Kung-Fu finds unappealing, so he repays his rescuer with a kick to the face to teach him some humility.

The stranger is unfazed -- as if he were somehow impervious to bodily harm -- and identifies himself as "Wolverine," revealing he has moves of his own.

They scuffle, with this "Wolverine" actually managing to get the better of it, until a few of the attacker's comrades -- a woman named Storm and a young man with floppy hair called Cannonball -- arrive to settle things.

As it turns out, these are the X-Men, so-called "mutants" who are persecuted due to a genetic quirk that gives them powers that set them apart from the rest of the population. They are on what some might call a noble quest, we are told, to protect that selfsame world that hates and fears them, and they too seem to have some business with Reston.

Everyone goes inside, but Shang-Chi is unnerved when he senses some other figures hiding -- it turns out to be more X-Men -- Cyclops and Phoenix -- being cloaked in some kind of telepathic shield!

That stuff may work on people with regular senses, but not Kung Fu senses!

Finally, Clive arrives and requests that Shang-Chi stop trying to beat up the X-Men already. It turns out they have a common interest. It seems one of the X-Men's enemies -- a group called the "Hellfire Club" -- is interested in the creation of Shang-Chi's father... the Elixir Vitae!

Before you can say "The Elixir Vitae" (again) the X-Men and Shang-Chi are on a plane to Hong Kong. En Route, Reston gives a little primer on how after Shang-Chi's Father died, the Chinese underworld splintered to fill the power vacuum. However, all of the new crime lords are being disappeared, as it appears someone is searching for...

Here's a fun game, take a drink every time someone says "The Elixir Vitae!"

It seems these mutants are being threatened by something called the Legacy Virus, and there are some who would try to use the Elixir Vitae (drink) to cure it -- and that's bad, because of all the bad mojo surrounding the Elixir Vitae (drink) I suppose. Anyway, the #1 suspect is the leader of the Criminal Group for Rich Weirdos, aka the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle, Sebastian Shaw. 

Speaking of whom, a mysterious figure appears to give us a lecture on the recent history of Hong Kong as of 1997.

In the car in Downtown Hong Kong, Shang-Chi sulks, remembering how ruthless his father, The Father of Shang-Chi, was. But there are other ruthless men, and that's bad. In response, Cyclops gives some completely unrelated advice about unity.

Their chat is interrupted when the car explodes, but the occupants are protected by a telekinetic force field.

Their assailants? These guys!

To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

This is a good comic to introduce the X-Men to longtime fans of Shang-Chi who may not be familiar with the characters. Unfortunately, this is actually the 62nd issue of the X-Men's second ongoing series, and Shang Chi has made only a handful of appearances in the 14 years since the end of his series. We've run into this problem before, where the people writing the comics remember all these old comics going way, way back, but the people reading it are probably not, on the whole, quite as conversant. As acclaimed as Master of Kung Fu was for its time (or more recently, in Douglas Wolk's book All the Marvels, where he singles it out in one of the best chapters), and as popular as he's gotten in recent years (*maybe he'll even get a second movie!) I think it really behooved Marvel in 1997 to focus on things more geared toward the recent past and present. IE -- Why are we giving a spotlight to a character nobody buying the book is going to care about?

I'm not saying "The X-Men team up with Shang-Chi to track down the Elixir Vitae (drink) which may be the cure to the Legacy Virus" is not a viable story, but it really does feel like the book is trying to foist Shang-Chi on us as a test balloon for a possible revival, and for some reason it appears to cover unnecessary bases by using Shang-Chi as a viewpoint character just meeting the X-Men for the first time. It's very dislocating to have your protagonists feel like newcomers in their own book, wedging in catchphrases and personal data about their powers and backgrounds to try to get potential new readers up to speed quickly. 

This particular story is not well-executed, and looking at the credits that may be down to scripter Ben Raab, a hired gun if ever there was one (though I'm sure he's a darn nice guy) working with the characters for more or less the first time, and over-worked plotter Scott Lobdell providing a somewhat half-baked premise that promises some action but has yet to deliver. I can't even really judge the highly-touted new artist Carlos Pacheco's work all that fairly because the stilted feeling I get from reading the comic makes it hard to gauge what he really brings to the table.

Looking at the stellar work -- pun intended since it takes place in outer space -- being done in Uncanny by Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira in the same months as this story was coming out, it really throws into relief that this was not a quality product.