Tales of the Kung-Fu Warriors #12 is one of those comics you buy purely for the cover.
Welcome to a new feature in which I show off a random comic from my collection every day, now that I finally have access to them again. We start with one of the most obscure issues in my library, something I must’ve picked up at some random con or comics shop purely based on the strength of the cover and recognising the character on the left. The issue itself is from June 1989 but I got it sometime in the early nineties as far as I can tell. At that time, the cover artist, Daerick Gröss, had become a minor “hot” artist, due to his work for Innovation on the Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat and Forbidden Planet adaptations. Gröss was already forty when he started doing comics in 1988; judging from his Wikipedia entry his career was largely over by the late nineties. He passed away last year.
In 1991 he had gotten his own series at Heroic, Murciélaga She-Bat, also featured here, which was enough for me to pick this up. At the time I always liked to find obscure superhero titles regardless of quality. Not that this was bad: just one long battle between Gams, with the striking legs and She-Bat, continually on the defence. Well drawn and laid out, it’s the best story in the issue. Gross definitely is the best artist in the issue, though none of the others are bad, just mediocre at best.
There are four more stories in this issue. Silk, by Vincenzo Tripetti, is about an MMA match between Silk and a cheating Soviet athlete, when that just still barely possible as a plot. Fun thing is that she wasn’t cheating for the glory of the USSR but because she was hired by a crooked promoter. Steven Ross’ Dragon Dancer for some reason has machine lettering instead of proper lettering like the other stories and is incomprehensible. Just could not read it properly, also due to the lettering.
Moonlight Cutter, by Dale Berry, is a standalone story about a samurai with a sword that can cut ghosts. Moody and fun it’s the second best story in the issue. Finally, Kung Fu Dog is a Neal Yamamoto funny animal story about two dogs in search of David Carradine. Rounding off the issue were various ad pages choked full of ninja and kung fu stuff and a back cover ad for another CFW title, Shred, featuring a gimp masked leather clad skate boarder (who also cameos in the She-Bat story). As a whole, Tales of the Kung-Fu Warriors is from a time when you could still make a living from doing low effort “sub culture” comics like this; judging from the editorial it used to be a magazine converted to the comics format and it certainly reads that way. A glimpse in an entirely different comics culture far away from ‘mainstream’ superheroics.
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