One of the more unusual titles published by Marvel Comics came out in the mid-1970s. That’s when the company’s Dealy Hands of Kung Fu magazine ran a detailed critique of The Man With The Golden Gun. The article by Don McGregor, then a writer for Marvel, ripped almost everybody associated with the movie.
Some background: Deadly Hands of Kung Fu was a 75-cent magazine on newsstands featuring characters such as Shang Chi and the Sons of the Dragons. Horror comics and kung fu stories were popular for Marvel so the company came out with magazines with black-and-white artwork and a higher price (regular comics were 25 cents at the time).
Issue 12 of the magazine in 1975 was unusual in that the cover story was McGregor’s long review of the movie, not a comic story. Marvel even commissioned iconic comic artist Neal Adams to do the cover of Roger Moore as Bond, in a scene based on the movie’s “karate school” sequence. You can view that cover by CLICKING RIGHT HERE. Our recollection of the article is that McGregor wrote from the perspective of a long-time fan who didn’t care for the lighter tone of the 1970s films that Eon Productions was making. The title of the article: The Man With The Golden Gun Shoots Blanks!
We were reminded about after some Bond fans we know were discussing Golden Gun. It’s been years since we read the McGregor article but it’s definitely one of the more unusual things Marvel had done up to that time. Evidently, nobody at Eon held a grudge because Marvel ended up doing the official comics adaptation of For Your Eyes Only in 1981.
About two decades later, McGregor did his own take on 007 in a comic book story called The Quasimodo Gambit.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Don McGregor, James Bond comics, James Bond Films, Marvel Comics, Neal Adams, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Quasimodo Gambit |
The Spy Command 
I believe I still have those issues of DHoKF (it was a two-part evisceration by McGregor, who never said in 20 words what he could say in 200.) I’ll try to dig ’em out and scan ’em for ya.
Marvel’s connection to Bond also includes a character in the “Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu” comic called Clive Reston who was clearly (but, for copyright reasons, I assume, never explicitly) the son of James Bond. During Paul Gulacy’s tenure on the series, he was often drawn looking exactly like Sean Connery.
Clive Reston was purportedly the son of James Bond and the grandson of Sherlock Holmes. I distinctly recall one panel in which he was driving an Aston Martin DB5 and smoking a bent pipe!
Nice to hear from you, Barry!
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