Imagine as if you started watching a kung-fu movie never having seen one before, just as the climactic fight scene at the end starts and you have no clue who any of these people are or why they fight. But at least the fights are very cool.
Which I guess is why I bought this, one of those weird, anomalous comics you get because you probably won’t see it ever again if you don’t. Probably at that time when I was really into Dough Moench & Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu which I was buying from a market stall as black and white Dutch reprints. Anything that scratched that same itch I’d snatch up.
Oriental Heroes is an interesting title, part of the short lived Jademan Comics line. Originally a Hong Kong publisher owned by Tony Wong, who created Oriental Heroes back in 1970 and his company on the back of its success. It’s still being published today though he is no longer involved. Hugely successful in Hong Kong, Wong decided in 10988 to try his luck on the American comics market, turning Oriental Heroes and three other titles (Blood Sword, Drunken Fist and Force of Buddha’s Palm into proper US style comics, with Mike Baron and Roger Salick providing scripting/adapting duties for them at first. The latter two, like Oriental Heroes were also created and drawn by Tony Wong, who must’ve been the most productive comics publisher who ever lived if he did all that and run his company at the same time.
As you may guess from the titles, all four are kung-fu series. Oriental Heroes is set in contemporary Hong Kong and the overall plot as far as I could make out is the fight between a loose band of good kung fu artists and the evil Global Cult, who uses “an army of kung fu assassins to protect its illegal drug, gambling and slavery operations”. In episode 16 the two sides clash, which is unsuprisingly structured like a kung fu movie, with lots of individual battles between the two sides’ heavy hitters. Lots of punching and kicking of course, but there are also a lot of special techniques each given its own powerful name. In English it’s all slightly awkward but it works nevertheless.
Jademan comics lasted until 1993, when it ceased publication on all its titles, promising to return with new ones but that never happened. Either they were another victim of the superhero boom and burst of that time or developments in Hong Kong put a stop to their American adventures, as Tony Wong had been ousted from his company not long before. Apart from the original four Jademan also published two other kung fu books, Iron Marshal and Blood Sword Dynasty, all of which lasted until the end. They also put out an anthology book that was more like a regular manga/manhua style magazine and a horror anthology but neither lasted long. An interesting experiment to sell manhua to America at a time when country was barely even aware Manga existed.
An interesting footnote is that, according to a news report in The Comics Journal 120, the coming of Jademan in 1988 caused a bit of controversy. Not only was the company promising steep discounts to distributors if they bought enough, it seems two distributors even bought shares in the company, on “a personal base”. Both Bud Plant and Diamond distributor’s owner Steve Geppi bouhgt shares at the time, but both said that was done as a gesture of goodwill…
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