Sometimes you buy crap, and find chunks of gold embedded in it.
I shouldn't be too harsh...after all, it was just a TV show-based comic aimed at the younger set. And just look at that cover...the prospect of Mr. T facing a sumo is just so delightful I gladly dropped a quarter on this one.
But what was really going on inside?? I was so unprepared for this...
Let's not get bogged down in the main story. For reasons too complicated/silly to explain, Hannibal is forced to battle a "master" of the nunchaku:
Gee, that guy looks a little familiar...sorta like Shang-Chi, the Master Of Kung Fu. With the eyepatch, kind of a mirror universe, evil Shang-Chi. Ah, it's just a coincidence, though, right?
Then we get to the main event: B.A. fighting a sumo. And a glorious fight it is, too. Yet, maybe it's because I'm such a nutsy MOKF fan, but I couldn't help but notice a resemblance between the layouts of Mr. T's fight with a sumo...
...and Jim Starlin's layouts of the very first appearance of Shang-Chi, in Special Marvel Edition #15, where Shang fights--a sumo:
And B.A.'s coup de grace...
...is amazingly similar to the one Shang used:
Well, well, well.
The corker comes at the end, when the reclusive millionaire reveals why he secretly kidnapped himself (I warned you not to ask about the plot!):
"Games of deceit and death," of course, was Shang's pet phrase for describing the MI-6 shenanigans he always ended up involved in. Which pretty much seals that this was a deliberate bit of hat-tipping.
And when you look at the date of this issue--April 1984--you realize it came out just a few months after the final issue of MOKF.
So, it seems pretty clear (to me, at least) that Jim Salicrup, Jim Mooney and Joe Giella ("based on a suggestion by Bill Salicrup") decided to do an MOKF homage. In a kiddie comic based on a goofy-ass TV show. And I found it in the quarter bin.
That's why I love comics, dammit.
Interestingly enough, Salicrup did not write the 3rd (and final) issue of Marvel's A-Team. I hope he wasn't put on the bench for his little tribute...or perhaps it was a fiendish plot of Fu Manchu...
I shouldn't be too harsh...after all, it was just a TV show-based comic aimed at the younger set. And just look at that cover...the prospect of Mr. T facing a sumo is just so delightful I gladly dropped a quarter on this one.But what was really going on inside?? I was so unprepared for this...
Let's not get bogged down in the main story. For reasons too complicated/silly to explain, Hannibal is forced to battle a "master" of the nunchaku:
Gee, that guy looks a little familiar...sorta like Shang-Chi, the Master Of Kung Fu. With the eyepatch, kind of a mirror universe, evil Shang-Chi. Ah, it's just a coincidence, though, right?Then we get to the main event: B.A. fighting a sumo. And a glorious fight it is, too. Yet, maybe it's because I'm such a nutsy MOKF fan, but I couldn't help but notice a resemblance between the layouts of Mr. T's fight with a sumo...
...and Jim Starlin's layouts of the very first appearance of Shang-Chi, in Special Marvel Edition #15, where Shang fights--a sumo:
And B.A.'s coup de grace...
...is amazingly similar to the one Shang used:
Well, well, well.The corker comes at the end, when the reclusive millionaire reveals why he secretly kidnapped himself (I warned you not to ask about the plot!):
"Games of deceit and death," of course, was Shang's pet phrase for describing the MI-6 shenanigans he always ended up involved in. Which pretty much seals that this was a deliberate bit of hat-tipping.And when you look at the date of this issue--April 1984--you realize it came out just a few months after the final issue of MOKF.
So, it seems pretty clear (to me, at least) that Jim Salicrup, Jim Mooney and Joe Giella ("based on a suggestion by Bill Salicrup") decided to do an MOKF homage. In a kiddie comic based on a goofy-ass TV show. And I found it in the quarter bin.
That's why I love comics, dammit.
Interestingly enough, Salicrup did not write the 3rd (and final) issue of Marvel's A-Team. I hope he wasn't put on the bench for his little tribute...or perhaps it was a fiendish plot of Fu Manchu...
4 comments:
I have a collection of all the comics put out by Marvel Books (which also made collections for The Transformers, it was their book division). I've been seeing the individual issues on blogs more than once this week.
So, new theme, eh?
Ah, Blogger just a whole buncha new templates, and I'm just palyin' around...
Funny stuff, especially the Master of Kung Fu pages. Would it be too hard for someone to find out what Chinese really looks like before filling a page with meaningless scratch marks?
Goodness know I've messed with Wordpress's offerings, but they also have a preview area that lets you test *some* of the features of a theme.
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