Kung Fu Girl: How Shang-Chi Inspired a Secret Marvel Mexican Spinoff

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Welcome to the 948th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In this first legend, learn about how a Mexican comic book company that licensed Marvel comics created its own female Shang-Chi spinoff.

I’ll be frank, five or so years ago, I did a pretty cool Comic Book Legends Revealed about the Mexican comic book company, La Prensa, which licensed Marvel comic books for publication in Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s, and this legend is going to cover a lot of the same ground. That legend was about some confusion that modern comic book fans had with La Prensa’s process in licensing Spider-Man from Marvel. You see, La Prensa, like a lot of the world, was used to publishing comic books on a weekly basis, with anthologies featuring multiple stories. It’s something that England has obviously popularized, but it was also popular throughout Europe, and then it carried over into Central and South America, as well.

Marvel Comics, however, for the most part, were released on a MONTHLY basis, with a spotlight on a singular character (or, during the 1960s, when Marvel was forced to keep its line of comics artificially low due to its distributor being owned by a direct competitor, DC Comics, split-books, like Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish, with two heroes each having 10/11 page stories in each issue). So that meant that if you were to reprint Spider-Man comic books in another country, you could break up each issue into two parts, but that would only cover two weeks’ worth of books. You’d still be shy two weeks.

That’s precisely what happened in England when Transformers became a huge hit. The British Transformers comic book reprinted the American Transformers comic book, split up into two parts, but when demand got so high that the book had to become weekly, Marvel UK was allowed to create new Transformers stories that would fit AROUND the American reprints. The main writer on the British Transformers comic book stories, Simon Furman, was so good that when the main Transformers writer, Bob Budiansky, left the series, Furman took over the main book AND continued to do the British comic.

So that happened with La Prensa and Marvel with Spider-Man, but the company that took over the license from La Prensa, OEPISA (Organización Editorial de Publicaciones e Impresiones SA), didn’t even bother to GET permission when Shang-Chi became a hit character a few years later, and this led to the creation of a little-known kung fu superhero, Kung Fu Girl!

How did La Prensa come to create new characters for its Marvel characters?

As I noted in the Spider-Man legend, according to Edgar Olivares (and this is a Google translated quote, so please bear that in mind), “The need to have more material to publish from the superhero caused the director of La Prensa to travel to the United States, to the Marvel offices in New York, and request a special permission to the license they had acquired from the arachnid hero in order to publish material of their own, created with a 100% Mexican team.

The director of La Prensa did not arrive empty-handed. He had asked some artists of the publisher to do tests that he could show to Marvel, and demonstrate that they could generate their own licensed content. Marvel not only gave him permission to make his own comics, but also selected the artist in charge of performing the feat.”

That artist was José Luis Durán .

Duran himself noted (also Google translated), “The director of the newspaper went straight to propose the test material to see if they would give him permission to make the new Spider-Man material, to fill the holes that were left in the monthly publication of the American comics, compared to Mexico that was biweekly. Then I began to draw with permission, not direct to Marvel but to La Prensa, which was the owner at that time of the license.”

So with that situation established by Marvel and La Prensa for Spider-Man. That legend, by the way, had some confusion over people believing that La Prensa intentionally decided to NOT kill off Gwen Stacy, and even have Peter Parker MARRY Gwen Stacy. That was a mistake based on an issue with a dream sequence where Peter dreams he married Gwen.

It is fair to note, though, that La Prensa stretched out the issues before Gwen died to try to get as many stories of their own comics published so that they could put off Gwen’s death as long as possible. Gwen was particularly popular (as cheesecake comics were very popular), so a lot of the covers were Gwen-centric. Or, I guess you could say that Gwen’s ass was a popular cover figure (Thanks to Tom Brevoort for these cover scans. Tom wrote about this era a few years back on his excellent personal comics blog)…

Okay, so, as noted, La Prensa lost the license in 1974 to OEPISA (Organización Editorial de Publicaciones e Impresiones SA), and OEPISA figured that it was allowed to do the same thing (only I don’t believe they bothered with getting permission, assuming that the same rules applied to them that did for La Prensa).

Who is the Shang-Chi spinoff character, Kung Fu Girl?

Okay, so the same thing happened when the Kung Fu craze hit Mexico, the publisher needed more material than Marvel had to give them.

This eventually led to OEPISA creating Kung Fu Girl, or La Chica de Kung Fu, who was created by writer Enrique G. Talancon and artists Juan Alba and Alberto Leon Abad. Her name was Jaqueline Siu Lin, and she was basically just a female version of Shang-Chi, a secret agent who would fight the bad guys with her kung fu skills…

And a decent amount of cover cheesecake, of course.

Her comic would alternate with Shang-Chi every other week for a little bit in late 1975/early 1976, until it ended after ten issues.

I’m sure using her in a modern Marvel comic book would create ALL sorts of intellectual property questions, so it’ll never happen, but boy, that’d be kind of cool, right?

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Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com.

“}]] In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how the demand was so great for Shang-Chi in Mexico that Marvel let them invent a female spinoff hero  Read More