A Shang-Chi Comic for Summer, Ahead of the Hero’s Marvel Film

The martial arts hero will star in a new mini-series beginning in June, as “Shang-Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings” is slated to hit theaters in February. Next February, the superhero Shang-Chi will become part of the extended Marvel Studios film universe when “Shang-Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings” arrives in theaters. Before that, though, the character, a martial arts expert, will have a five-issue comic book series beginning in June from Marvel Entertainment. The series will be written by Gene Luen Yang, a comic book writer and cartoonist making his Marvel debut.

It will be drawn by Dike Ruan, for the present-day scenes, with Philip Tan drawing for the flashbacks. Yang is a prolific cartoonist whose most well-known work is perhaps “American Born Chinese,” which explores issues of identity. He was also named the national ambassador for young people’s literature in 2016 and won a MacArthur fellowship the same year. Yang could not be more excited.

“I mean, it’s Shang-Chi,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “He’s probably the most prominent Asian — I guess he’s Asian-American now since he’s moved over here — Asian-American superhero. ” When the slate of upcoming Marvel Studio films was announced last summer, the diversity was noted: an Asian lead, an openly L. G.

B. T. Q. superhero and a hero with a disability were all part of the mix.

Shang-Chi was introduced by Marvel Comics in 1973, at a time when martial arts became popular in America, and had a run that lasted nearly 10 years. But Yang, 46, avoided the character until college. “It’s that same embarrassment I had in third grade,” he said. “There was a second grader who moved here from Taiwan and the teachers really wanted me to be his friend.

I felt embarrassed about it and I didn’t know why. ” He continued, “It was almost like picking up a Shang-Chi comic would have been highlighting what made me different from the other nerds at the comic book store. ” But the world since Shang-Chi’s introduction has changed, Yang said: “I just don’t think that kids growing up today, for the most part, have that same sort of embarrassment. I think for a lot of them, it sort of flipped.