Dig the Streets of Life! Dig the Chinamen!

To pay dubious honor to the centenary of Fu Manchu, PopSmarts considers one of the best-loved but seldom-seen comicbooks of the Marvel Age, Master of Kung Fu — and the ways in which it both depended upon and interrogated racial stereotypes.

Set aside some time for this one. At 3,500 words, and with a boatload of images, it’s exactly the sort of in-depth pop-culture delve that my sainted editor Jeff Giles was asking for when he greenlit this column, the poor dope. He asked for it, and now he’s getting it, good and hard.

And for no particular reason but that I love you, here’s a bonus panel of Shang-Chi straight-up karate-chopping a goddamned alligator:

(from Master of Kung Fu #23, art by Al Milgrom and Klaus Janson)

Defining the Definitive

In which I pursue the fool’s errand of trying to extrapolate a meaningful aesthetic theory from superhero comics — specifically, early-1980s Marvel.

I contend that if there was ever a time and place in commercial comics storytelling where you could smell the cordite from the medium’s shotgun marriage of art and commerce, it was the Paul Smith X-Men.

See me lay out my argument — and maybe start another one — in this installment of PopSmarts.