In the immortal words of Jamaica-born Northern Soul songster Carl Douglas “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting”. But that was back in 1974. Three years earlier in 1971 no-one had heard of Kung Fu outside of martial arts aficionados. Karate, yes. Judo, yes. Jiu-Jitsu, maybe. Kung Fu, no.
By 1972, Bruce Lee had broken through the Asian leading-man movie star barrier with the UK “X” rated films The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, but it wasn’t until a very wet Friday¹ on Sept 21 1973 that Kung Fu went family-mainstream in the UK, with Kwai Chang Caine scarring his forearms with dragon motifs and falling into some snow on a weekly basis.
I’d already become somewhat familiar with martial arts on TV through Bruce Lee’s appearances on UK ITV in the drama series Longstreet since Jan 1973, but somehow I missed seeing that first pilot Kung Fu shown on ITV. But following Nigel Brown’s rave review in school the following morning (we went to school on Saturday mornings in those days), I made sure that I did not miss watching the first regular episode 'King of the Mountain' that evening.
We SuperStuff brethren (Nigel Brown , Geoff Cousins and myself) were soon caught up in the cultural zeitgeist, collecting trading cards (colloquially “Kungies”), TV tie-in paperbacks, and generally getting anything Kung-Fu related that we could lay our hands on.
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| © Warner Paperback Library. Book #1 of 4. TV Tie-In |
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| © WB Television. Topps trading card |
It all peaked so quickly.
By 1975, things were slowing down with the cancellation of the Kung Fu TV series, and by the end of the decade, Kung Fu was a fad of the past, assigned to the dustbin of popular culture and recent memory along with David Soul, Kojak and the Bay City Rollers. Despite various TV movies that tried to revive the original show, and a syndicated sequel series that ran on a satellite channel for four years in the 90s, it never regained the popular cachet it briefly enjoyed.
Perhaps it was due to Roy Thomas’ reluctance to produce a Kung-Fu magazine at all that made Marvel pass on the rights for a TV show-related comic strip. Roy details in the editorial of Planet of the Apes B&W magazine #1 how he almost let the rights to the Apes stories slip beyond Marvel’s grasp. He had little interest in licensing film and TV material. In fact, it was not until Star Wars that Marvel took licensed characters seriously, although Gold Key had done it (not with any great success) for years producing short-run comics which presumably had to adhere to the TV shows story line, resulting in really limited episodic storytelling.
Nonetheless, it was in that 1973-1974 period that Marvel jumped on the Kung Fu bandwagon, with the ingenious idea of a new Kung Fu hero with a backstory linked to an existing property that had already been around for 50 years, that had already entered the popular vernacular, yet had never risen about its pulp origins or B-movie status - oriental villain Dr Fu Manchu and his stalwart British nemesis, Police Commissioner of Burma, Denis Nayland Smith. Thomas’ decision for Marvel to create its own Kung-Fu hero Shang-Chi, linked to established literary properties, would give the lead character a longevity that would be denied to its TV counterpart. (The origins of Shang-Chi have been recounted elsewhere - even in our own SuperStuff #1 fanzine from 1974 - but for a good look at Marvel's approach, head over to Rip Jagger's Dojo blog. )
And so it was UK weekly teen magazine Look-In (published by ITV themselves) that secured the rights for a comic strip based on the TV series. They made the decision very late in the day (six months after the show premiered on British TV) with Martin Asbury tapped to illustrate two pages per week.
Look-In’s purpose in life was to promote interest in TV series being shown on ITV, and the timing of the appearance of the strip was presumably to shore up the teen viewership at a point when audiences had started to plateau.
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| © Look-In and WB. Martin Asbury draws the first strip, issue #9 Vol 1975 |
The first strip appeared in the 30th March 1974 edition of Look-In, and continued for sixty-nine weeks, making 138 pages in total. The great Mike Noble replaced Asbury for one story line commencing 22nd Feb 1975.
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| © Look-In and WB. A sample of Mike Noble's work 22nd Feb 1975 |
By an interesting co-incidence Marvel’s Shang-Chi made his appearance on the UK scene in Avengers Weekly #1 in the March 30th 1974 edition, exactly the same day as Kwai Chang Caine’s premiere in Look-In. Both of these comics were relatively late to the party, as ITV was already showing season two of the TV series at this point.
The TV series came to an end with Caine finding his half-brother Danny in the third season finale, which aired in the UK on June 15th 1975. Look-In ceased publication of the Kung-Fu strip rather abruptly that same week with issue #25 of the 1975 volume. Take a look at the final panels below and you may conclude that there was probably another part of the story yet to be published, or perhaps transition to the next Kung Fu story arc.
The following week the Six Million-Dollar Man strip debuted.
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| ©Look-In & WB. Final panels in strip end abruptly |
There were still a handful of third season TV episodes remaining unshown in the UK, which were burned off late at night, out of sequence, in October 1975, with a final solitary episode in Jan 1976.
I’m not aware if the Look-In Kung-Fu stories have been collected in any publication since.
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You've rendered Asbury's name as Astbury in a couple of places, B. The main problem with the TV show was that it was a bit slow-paced, with the fighting being rendered in slow motion. They did this with The Six Million Dollar Man's running scenes as well, and I think they overdid it in the main. Some people now think that an Asian actor should have played the lead role, but they're usually not aware that Kwai Chang Caine was meant to be half American (so mixed race).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the catch on Asbury's name...have now corrected. (That's what comes of drafting blogs on the iPhone and missing the auto-corrects or replacement of names from a contact list).
DeleteI remember thinking that the slow-motion fighting was pretty cool in 1973, but as you say, it got really over-used in the SMDM series the following year. Plus subsequently seeing the speed of Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury only highlighted the lack of action in the TV series. But it was a show I really liked for the story and Carradine'e performance. Carradine always had a slight Asian cast to his features, so I had no problem with him playing half Caucasian/half Asian at the time. Carradine was a far better actor than Bruce Lee, and the show was built around Caine's non-violence philosophy. It's worth a look at the Benny Hill and Two Ronnies Kung-Fu parody sketches from the same era (or even 1o years later) to really get a view of the casual racism and asian stereotyping in Britain in those days.
Hmm.....only saw your comment by accident. I did not get an email notification.
It's still spelt Astbury in your labels, B. I don't really buy into the racism thing back then (most of the time), I just view these performances as comedic caricatures, much like Scotsmen always wearing kilts and the like, or Americans wearing Stetsons and speaking with a Texan-style drawl. You'll notice that in Benny Hill, it wasn't usually the Chinaman who ended up looking stupid, it was Henry McGhee.
DeleteThanks for the label catch, Kid. Hopefully all corrected this time!
DeleteThese painted British comics are so wonderful. I loved Kung Fu as a kid, collected the paperbacks, but seems I missed out on the end of the series! College was calling out to me to just get out of my home town! Now I have to watch that show again! Loved David's dad John before this, which is why I got into the show at age 16.
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by and for the comments, Lord Mikolaj. If you're not able to find the show on streaming, the three DVD box sets are worth getting. The interviews with Carradine provide a lot of insight into the show.
DeleteThose painted comics were quite a feature of the 1960s. Mike Noble is a favourite UK artist of mine from that era, as was Don Lawrence (who had a very similar style) on the Trigan Empire. I'm not so much a fan of Martin Asbury's angular style, although it is undeniably memorable.
I rarely bought "Look-In" as it really didn’t appeal to me (I’m not a big fan of most adaptions of TV/Films to comics) but I did pick up the occasional issue when it featured a cover that I Iiked featuring a star of that time or a TV show I was following. One such cover was the one shown here and I was immediately taken by Mike Asbury’s art. I also liked the odd issues I picked up where he drew "The Six Million Dollar Man".
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the Kung Fu TV series for the first few weeks but it did seem a bit pedestrian and eventually (for me at least) ran out of steam – compared to shows like the “Water Margin”, Kung-Fu was in hindsight, a tad bland.
It still amazes me that Marvel took so long to jump onto the Kung Fu craze, but to be fair their early Kung Fu books were impressive. It should be noted that Charlton were pretty quick to see the potential of the Kung Fu craze and were producing their own Kung Fu comic “Yang” from 1973 although it was pretty much lifted from the Kung Fu TV show.
I'd totally forgotten about Yang from Charlton. I think I may have picked up a couple of the early issues, but cannot remember anything about them.
DeleteI stuck with the Kung Fu series right to the end ; season 3 had a number of flashback episodes and tried to move the focus of the stories more to the philosophical and ethical issues encountered by Caine. But the audience came for the fighting, not the waxing lyrical. There has been a reboot TV series recently, but I think the only connection to the original is simply the title.