Shang-Chi: What Kept James Bond & Sherlock Holmes Out of a Marvel Family Tree

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, see why Marvel couldn't confirm that a Shang-Chi cast member was related to James Bond and Sherlock Holmes.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixteenth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel wanted to make James Bond and Sherlock Holmes related to Shang-Chi's supporting cast member, Clive Reston, but were prevented by legal rights.

STATUS:

False

Last month, I wrote about how Jim Starlin accidentally had Shang-Chi kill off a character in the very first Shang-Chi story that he was not supposed to kill and it irritated the Sax Rohmer estate, as the character was one of the ones that Marvel had licensed from Rohomer's Fu Manchu novels. The estate complained to Marvel and so the then-new writer on the series, Doug Moench, had to explain away the death of the character in Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3.

That same issue introduced a new cast member to the series, a British agent named Clive Reston, who is introduced smoking a distinctive pipe...

After he shows up, some of Fu Manchu's assassins attack them and Reston and Shang-Chi have to fight them off and they are successful in doing so. After the fight is over, Reston makes a quip about the fight and Shang-Chi notes how peculiar it is about Westerners and their need to make jokes after they participate in a fight...

This, of course, is setting up the fact that Reston is the son of James Bond, the master of the post-fight pun. Reston explains who his father is without outright stating who is father is, just a bunch of stuff that makes it clear that his dad is James Bond...

Later in the issue, Reston also keeps making note about his Great-Uncle, as well, who is pretty clearly Sherlock Holmes (which would make his grandfather Mycroft Holmes, which would, in turn, make Mycroft Holmes James Bond's father, which really does work quite well and I am pretty sure that Moench is not the first person to come up with the idea of having Mycroft and Bond tied together, although since this is the 1970s, it is possible that Moench was the first one to do so...or maybe not)...

This would explain why Reston was smoking a distinctively Sherlock Holmes-esque pipe earlier in the issue. In any event, this connection between Reston and Bond and Holmes (which continued to be referenced by Moench for years after this introduction) has led to an interesting legend, which is that Marvel was originally going to be explicit about the connection but had to abandon this plan due to copyright laws and a lack of licensing for those two characters.

Now, here's where we get into two of the most common pitfalls that lead to the creation of legends. One is the "telephone" game, where Person A makes statement B and then Person C repeats statement B, but slightly alters it so that it is now statement D and over time, people either repeat statement D or make even further alterations (it's based on party game of the same name where people whisper a phrase to a person who has to then do the same to another person and if you have enough people, there is a decent chance that the phrase will have been altered by the time it gets to the final person in the chain).

The second is what I call "Ourobros linking," which is when an iffy source is relied on by people and then other people link to the person who relied on the iffy source and then other people link to that person and you get this big circle of everyone repeating the same piece of information without anyone really checking to see that the original piece of information was, you know, true.

This frequently happens when people rely on WIkis for sources. Wikis are tremendous resources, but they, in and of themselves, can't step in in place of sources, as they're intended to be the place that shows you THEIR sources. In this case, though, the Clive Reston Wikipedia page states, "Originally, Reston's father was intended to be James Bond, and his maternal granduncle was intended to be Sherlock Holmes, however due to copyright laws Marvel was forced to abandon this."

The cite for that, though, was ComicBookDb, and the actual quote at that site was, "There have been numerous allusions over the years of Clive Reston's rather infamous family tree. His father, though never referenced by name, is British secret agent, James Bond. His great-uncle is London's most notorious detective, Sherlock Holmes. Due to licensing rights, Marvel Comics has never directly stated that either of these literary figures are related to Clive Reston, but the various implications leave little doubt as to their true identities."

See how the "telephone game" slightly but distinctly altered the original quote? The original quote just stated that Marvel couldn't directly state that Reston was related to those characters because Marvel didn't have the licensing rights to those characters. Nowhere does it say that Marvel was ever PLANNING to do so.

As I wrote in a recent Shang-Chi piece, Moench was famous for having cameos of famous characters, just slightly disguised. That's clearly what was happening here. Moench has talked about this in an interview with Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #7, where he explained that Marvel never gave him any grief over the way he would work famous people into the series, the company just sometimes worried over visual likenesses being too close (which I'll detail in an upcoming legend...very, very soon).

That matches the ComicBookDB quote, which was simply misquoted by Wiki and that has been adopted all throughout the internet.