Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and eighty-ninth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel edited an issue of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu to take out a scene where a character rolled a joint.

STATUS:

True

In the 1970s, slowly but surely Marvel developed a black-and-white line of comic book magazines to go along with their color line of comic books. Back when comic book companies had to deal with news stands, companies were always trying new ideas to reach out to new audiences and the magazine market was a reasonable gamble. In addition, since these magazines were not under the authority of the Comics Code Authority (its rare to actually be able to say that someone was under the authority of the Comics Code Authority), Marvel had a lot more freedom with the content of these black and white magazines. Nudity and violence were both on the table for these magazines.

Amusingly, though, even when Marvel had more freedom, they had certain self-imposed restrictions on the content in these magazines, which became evident after the fact following a Shang-Chi story in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #4. The story was written by Doug Moench and drawn by Mike Vosburg and AL Milgrom (this was very early in Vosburg's career as a comic book artist). Shang-Chi discovers that his father, Fu Manchu, is set to poison the water supply in Los Angeles, so Shang-Chi must travel to L.A. to try to stop him. However, Shang-Chi had no mode of transportation so he hilariously had to hitch hike his way to Los Angeles...

Shang-Chi's friends are nice hippies and sure enough, they make a point on their journey to roll a joint or two and offer their stuff to Shang-Chi if he would like to partake. He declines their very nice offer and they're cool with it.

The next day, though, they do note that they were surprised that Shang-Chi did not partake, but Shang-Chi explains to the reader via a caption that he is against putting any pollutants in his body, so he would have turned down the joint had it been just a tobacco cigarette, as well.

Well, a fan really appreciated the way that Marvel had two folks smoking joints in the comic and had them as being just nice, normal folks. One of the areas where the freedom of the black and white magazine was certainly the idea of having guest starts smoking joints. However, while responding to the letter writer's compliment, the letter column for Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #6 explained that the scene had been edited from its original form. You see, Vosburg had originally drawn the guy rolling a joint and so it was sort of like a picture guide to rolling a joint. While Marvel was not going to object to some joint-smoking in the issue, they held firm to not actually doing, like, a how to on them. So the panels were cut and re-arranged to eliminate the original drawings. I could be wrong, but it looks like we can see a remnant of the original panel alignment in that mini-panel squeezed between the printed panels.

Tony Isabella was the editor of the series at the time, so I asked Tony if that sounded like something he would have said back at the time. Tony wasn't 100% certain that he wrote that response to the letter (but he typically DID write the responses to the books that he edited, so he figured it was highly likely that he did). He noted, "The explanation is accurate. It's possible the alteration to the story in issue #4 was done by the previous editor, but it's what I would have done anyway. Policy or not, and I can't recall if this policy was explicitly handed down to me. I know I would not have shown someone rolling a joint or even a cigarette in a comic book I edited or wrote."

Thanks to Tony for the information!

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OK, that's it for this installment!

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