That time Jack Kirby did a random issue of Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter and didn’t even get to do the cover.
Not that Dick Giordano is anything to sneeze at, but it’s still strange to have Kirby do the interior but not the cover. This is from 1975, at the tail end of Kirby’s involvement with DC, the only issue of the series he worked on. DC had brought Kirby in back in 1970 with a lot of fanfare, but after his New World series were all cancelled they really didn’t have much of an idea of what to do with him. He created several other series like Kamadi and OMAC but none of them really caught fire and by the end he was doing stuff like this. Doing a martial arts comics is not really his forte if we’re honest. Richard Dragon here just looks like one of his working class thugs in jeans and wifebeater.
Worse, Kirby is the third artist in three issues, following Leo Durañona on issue 1 and Jim Starlin on two. It’s only with the next issue that the series would get Ric Estrada as the regular penciler, who would stay until the last issue. The writer for the entire run is Denny O’Neil, “based on a novel by Jim Dennis” (actually a pseudonym for O’Neil and James R. Berry). Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter was DC’s equivalent to Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, but the source material was worse.
Richard Dragon himself for a start is a white dude, unlike MOKF Shang Chi, who got taught by one of those wizened old masters that was all the rage in kung fu. For some reason, this time it’s a Japanese master, O-Sensei, who teaches Richard the Chinese martial art of kung fu, but that’s a minor quibble. There is an overarching plot about an evil pupil and his revenge which takes all eighteen issues to resolve. It never received the same heights as MOKF or even Iron Fist, but seems to have been a fairly decent series.
It’s certainly has had an outsized influence considering its short run, partially due to O’Neil reusing his characters in other series. Richard Dragon debuted two characters who became much more important than the protagonist in the wider DC universe: the villain Lady Shiva and Bronze Tiger, who’d become an essential part of Suicide Squad. Richard himself would show up in O’Neil’s Question series as a mentor to that series protagonist.
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