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Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.

Bruce Lee's ENTER THE DRAGON had shattered every pre-existing record for foreign film grosses in this country. Jim Kelly; Sonny Chiba; Tom Laughlin; Angela Mao; and a horde of even less talented, more monosyllabic aspirants to the box office throne were hastily scissor-

kicking their respective ways through one shoddy, slapdash cinematic exercise after... and raking in small fortunes, while so doing.

Small children could be observed playing with nunchuks in their front yards, while their parents beamed admiringly to one side. Junior high school kids swapped information on the local dojos, and which sensei was the best one to study under. And damn near everybody was quoting the dopey-aphorism-of-the-week, courtesy of David Carradine's staggeringly popular KUNG FU television series. (e.g. "When the wildebeest farts, O Grasshopper... the monkeys all run away. SCREAMING." Stuff like that, there.)

Given (then-) Marvel honcho Stan Lee's well-documented ability to detect the scent of a dollar bill through six-inch-thick battleship plating... it was only a matter of time before Marvel Comics, Inc. attempted to divert some of the cash flow attendant to this cultural phenomenon towards the company's own corporate coffers.

Hard on the heels of the successfully launched four-color MASTER OF KUNG FU monthly comic came the black-and-white DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU magazine, featuring (throughout the greater portion of its enviable run) two essential '70's strips Master of Kung Fu and (a personal favorite; mock me though you will) the "B"-movie flavored The Sons of the Tiger.

Of the two of these, Master of Kung Fu was the more pedestrian in ambition, and (accordingly) more of a "hit-or-miss" affair, month in and month out. Written (chiefly) by regular MOKF comic series scribe Doug Moench, and drawn (apparently) by whichever Marvel Bullpen artist pulled the short straw that month, the b&w Master of Kung Fu was seldom anything less than a reasonably diverting use of interior magazine pages which might otherwise have been apportioned to various "You, Too, Can Learn the Secrets of the NINJA!"-type advertisers... but seldom anything more than that, either.

The real reason I eagerly coughed up seventy-five cents (and -- later on -- a full buck, American) for DEADLY HANDS on a monthly basis, however, was one of the most oft-maligned (and unfairly so, I might add) series' of the 1970's the Gerry Conway-created (and Bill Mantlo-

perfected) The Sons of the Tiger.

It was everything a genuinely cheesy, low budget, "high concept" martial arts movie should be, really.

Three wildly disparate martial arts students -- philosophical Lin Sun; street-hardened Abe Brown; and smug, shallow film star Bob Diamond -- are improbably thrown together when their aged sensei is brutally slain by a clandestine ninja cult. (I make it an easy half-dozen clichés in the foregoing sentence, alone. How many did you get...?)

In moments of particularly dire peril, the trio could call upon the magickal combat prowess granted them by an arcane artifact formerly in the possession of said sensei a glowing "tiger's head" amulet (with a pair of similarly luminescent "tiger's paw" gimcracks). All they needed do, in this instance, was to clasp hands and chant the requisite oath/spell:

"When Three Are Called, and Stand As One;

As One They'll Fight, Their Will Be Done;

For Each Is Born Anew... THE TIGER'S SON!"

... and they'd each be granted, in turn, the speed; strength; and stamina of three martial arts masters.

The series was a visual knock-out from Day One onward, with pencils provided (initially) by master craftsman Dick Giordano, and -- later on -- a young and pyrotechnic George Perez. That the actual writing, re the Sons, was seldom of a comparable caliber was (admittedly) something of a drawback for the series, on the whole

... but only something of one, in the final analysis.

The Sons of the Tiger was the 70's Marvel Comics equivalent of one of the early Sam Raimi films DARKMAN, maybe... or else ARMY OF DARKNESS. A calculated emphasis on movement over motive; with ambitiously-staged action sequences so heart-stopping and immediate and visceral... they practically qualified as being intravenous.

There's nothing inherently "evil" or "wrong" in being a known prostitute...

... only in being known as a dishonest one.

The Sons of the Tiger series was a great many things, during its black-and-white "glory days." Not all of these ("derivative"; "addle-pated"; "superficial") were good things, of a certainty...

... but give it this much, if nothing else:

It didn't have a dishonest bone in its storytelling "body."

I couldn't (and -- more to the point -- shouldn't) let the subject of the non-supernatural, non-science fiction Marvel magazines of the day pass without at least mentioning what may very well have been the best of the bunch:

Written by the ubiquitous Doug ("He Never Sleeps. Never.") Moench, and penciled as if it were a true labor of love on the part of John Buscema, Marvel's DOC SAVAGE magazine was -- quite simply -- one of the company's undisputed "class acts" of the period.

Granted the comparative luxury of fifty-plus pages per issue in which to strut his highly idiocyncratic storytelling "stuff," writer Moench produced some of the finest and most imaginative fictions of his comics career... remaining, all the while, stone true to both the letter and the spirit of "Kenneth Robeson's" (the company name which appeared on the Doc Savage paperbacks as the putative "author" of same; in reality, chiefly the work of Lester Dent and Norman Daniels) long-established canon.

Lt. Colonel Andrew Blodgett ("Monk") Mayfair. Theodore Marley ("Ham") Brooks. John ("Renny") Renwick. Thomas J. ("Long Tom") Roberts. William Harper ("Johnny") Littlejohn. Doc's devil-may-care cousin, Patricia ("Pat") Savage. The skyscraper headquarters, eighty-six floors straight up. The Autogyro.

It was all there.

... and it was glorious.

So we've covered both the "vampires" and the "kung fu fighters," then...

... but what about the aliens referenced in this entry's title?

Page Three of our loving (re-)examination of the Marvel Comics black-and-white magazines of the '70's... comin' right up.

The MARVEL Black-and-White Magazines of the 1970's PAGE ONE

The MARVEL Black-and-White Magazines of the 1970's PAGE THREE

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