WRITER: SHUIZHU, GREG PAK | ART: GUNJI, ARIO ANINDITO | PUBLISHER: MARVEL | FORMAT: SINGLE ISSUE | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
It’s official. Marvel have noticed that China exists. Not as a geographical expression, or even as a nation (they probably just about knew it was there) but as a market for comics. As such, they have created a brand new, culturally personalised character especially for a nation of over a billion people. Does that sound condescending already? Hold on to your hats.
Lin Lie has been given an unfeasibly huge (and, you would think, unweildable) magical sword by his archaeologist father who then (conveniently or inconveniently, depending on whether you’re Lin Lie or the writers of Sword Master) disappears. Lin Lie is now obsessed with tracking his father down and takes half a comic to get his first lead. He is ably assisted by his sassy and thinly drawn ‘cool’ friend Cheng (he picks locks and dreams about girls – how cool is that?) and by some dastardly and thinly drawn grave robbers and… well, [SPOILER ALERT] that’s pretty much all there is to it.
The second half of the comic sees Lin Lie suddenly at the centre of the Marvel universe (New York) being condescended to by well-established but relatively little known Chinese Marvel character Shang-Chi. And that’s it. If you want to see Lin Lie busting heads, being a superhero in any way or actually, you know, Mastering a Sword, you’ll need to read the recent War of the Realms saga (where he busts up some fire goblins with a few more well known Marvel heroes). In issue 1 of his own series he has about as much agency and clout as Snarf did in the Thundercats.
The art is relatively pretty, we can give it that, with a very heavy-handedly Manga style (I hope Marvel know that Japan and China are different places…) seeing lots of beautifully detailed backgrounds in amongst cartoonishly broad character expressions. The dialogue in the first half, however, tends to read like something in translation and the characterisation and plot are paper thin. Maybe the rest of the run will get better but, if you miss issue 1, you’ll have no problems catching up.
If this review is going hard on how underwhelming this issue is, it’s the condescension in the gesture of creating a character for a market that Marvel has suddenly realised exists (nb – they’ve also churned out a character for the South Korean market who is an aspiring K-Pop star, as well as a superhero, with her own single on YouTube) and making it THIS. Tepid, derivative, culturally empty and just… not interesting. Marvel can do way better than this. We just hope they don’t think this the best 1+ billion Chinese people deserve.
