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The Phoenix Gambit: End-game
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After the shock reveal of Doom's involvement at the end of the previous issue of Master Of Kung Fu, this one starts with a double dose of him looming threateningly over the other characters, both on the cover and the splash page.
Shang Chi is on the way to Latveria with his friends to try and find out what's going on, but on the way he falls asleep and has a Mystical Dream about his father Fu Manchu and... dinosaurs?
Actually it turns out to be a dragon, which kills Shang Chi, causing him to wake up in a sweat. He sweats a LOT during these two issues, does Shang Chi - is it part of his superpowers?
They land in Latveria, where a confused (and still sweaty) Shang Chi tries to remember how he got into the plane in the first place. Before he can work it out, however, he and his friend Reston are attacked by a samuri robot who kills Reston... who also turns out to have been a robot.
Shang Chi then fights his way into the castle, beating up lots more robots, until he faces someone called Shadow Stalker who has a double headed mace in his hair (for some reason). They fight, Shang Chi wins, and then a wall opens to reveal The Prime Mover and an absolutely delighted Doctor Doom.
It turns out that Shadow Stalker was NOT a robot, which means that Shang Chi has killed somebody! This is surely the most dick move of all dick moves ever undertaken by Doctor Doom, and Shang Chi asks the question we all want answering - "Why?"
It's interesting to see an artist like Mike Zeck at such an early stage of his career here - he would go on to have such a distinctive style, but here is relying on several swipes to get by. Last time it was from Jim Steranko, this time it's from John Buscema in Thor #183:
(or maybe this is a swipe of swipe of the swipe by Dick Ayers in Incredible Hulk #143!)
Doom seems to think this means he has won, and so all that's left to do is set all the spare robots on Shang Chi. During the course of beating them up, one of the robots - a man in a lady's swimming costume who has swords instead of hands - cuts through the body of the original Shadow Stalker, who turns out to have been a robot all along.
This leads to a final big fight between Doom and Shang Chi at the end of which - well, you'll never guess what happens!
The Prime Mover starts to explode from all the madness (I know how he feels) and falls on the floor, where he turns out not to be the Prime Mover either, but actually Shang Chi's friend Reston in a robot costume, Reston, for some reason, attacks Shang Chi and the pair of them fall out of the window of Doom's castle which inevitably turns out not to be a castle after all but in fact a rocket flying over London.
We then cut to a hospital bed where SHang Chi and Reston's boss tells them that he doesn't have a clue what was going on either - and who amongst us can say otherwise? At this point a nurse comes in to deliver a get well present which turns out to be a chess set, with a laughing model of Doctor Doom in the middle.
And that's the end, except for a repeat of the final panel from last time, this time presumably showing the real Doctor Doom and Primer Mover, still at their game.
I have absolutely no idea what this is all meant to be about - was Doom just messing around with Shang Chi and his pals for the fun of it? As far as I'm aware the two characters do not meet again, so it wasn't part of a big plan, so what was it meant to achieve? And why was the whole thing called "The Phoenix Gambit"?
I think it's fair to leave the final word to Reston, who sums the whole thing up for me in the penultimate panel:
link to information about this issue
posted 23/10/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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Comments:
Moments of crystallised wonder...
posted 25/10/2019 by The Legion of Andy