Despite a very short career, Bruce Lee is a martial arts icon. Born in San Francisco, Lee was the child of British Hong Kong parents. Thus with dual citizenship, Lee was able to simultaneously operate in both Asia's burgeoning kung-fu cinema industry and classic American Hollywood.
Dying suddenly of cerebral edema in 1973, Bruce Lee's filmography is relatively short. Lee appeared in about 2 dozen TV shows and films as a child in Hong Kong before having to flee the region due to his hot-headed temper and ability to run afoul of the police. While in the states, Lee started to privately practicing his techniques while in enrolled in a Seattle university studying philosophy.
After meeting his wife Linda Emery, Lee dropped out of college to open his own martial arts school in Oakland, Ca. Bruce started to appear in competitions and developed a strong following. During an exhibition, Lee caught the eye of producer William Dozier. Originally, the Batman '66 exec wanted to cast Lee as one of master detective Charlie Chan's children in a weekly mystery series. While that project never materialized, Dozier eventually cast Bruce Lee in the Batman spin-off, The Green Hornet with Lee playing the role of faithful butler/sidekick Kato.
The Green Hornet only lasted one season. Out of work, Bruce opened The Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute. Lee believed that traditional martial arts were too restrictive. So he developed a system called Jeet Kune Do which incorporated weight training for strength, running for stamina as well as elements of boxing, fencing and other Western fighting styles. While the Chinese community wasn't exactly fond of Bruce's style nor his willingness to teach Americans, the development of Jeet Kune Do opened Lee up to the next phase of his acting career- movies.
Because of his role on The Green Hornet, Lee attracted celebrities, athletes and tinsel town high rollers to his new school. Even though new film and TV roles were pouring in, Lee was not happy with being stereotyped in them. Also being robbed of a starring role and producer/creator credit on what would become the martial arts/Western hybrid Kung-Fu didn't help matters any. So Lee returned to Hong Kong where he learned that his role as Kato had shot him into super-stardom in his former home country.
Bruce's first leading role was 1971's The Big Boss followed up by the immensely popular Fists of Fury (1972). Lee directed himself in his third venture, Way of the Dragon. American audiences really took notice of Lee's films and the growing popularity in kung-fu in general led to Lee returning to America. In 1973, Warner Bros.' Enter The Dragon sealed Bruce Lee's iconic status on celluloid. But it was his tragic and mysterious death while working on his final official film role, The Game of Death that cemented Bruce Lee's legend.
The death of Bruce Lee placed him up there with gone too soon movie icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. All three of these fallen stars have had numerous movies, documentaries, songs and more devoted to them. But neither Dean nor Monroe have ever had a comic book series created about them.
In 1993, Universal Pictures released Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story in theaters. The bio-pic was extremely popular and it unleashed a wave of interest in Bruce Lee to a new generation of fans. Riding on that wave of nostalgia, Malibu Comics obtained the rights to craft a 6-issue miniseries about the adventures of Bruce Lee.
Simply titled Bruce Lee, the comic book is quasi-autobiographical. It has Lee in a more modern set Long Beach California attempting to open his own dojo. Not able to afford his own place, Bruce works out a deal with a landlord where in exchange for free lessons, Bruce can use the site of an old bakery for free until he can get on his feet. Complicating matters is that Bruce's new business is right across the street from a a celebrity-run martial arts school whose training techniques are rather questionable; including use of steroids and the selling of cocaine.
In the first issue, one of the students of the rival school challenges Lee to a fight. Bruce mops the floor up with this guy. Disgraced and enraged, the rival master attempts to frame Bruce and his school by planting a dying man with a nearly empty syringe of some sort of drug on the floor inside Lee's academy. TO BE CONTINUED...
The story was written by Mike Baron. This wasn't Baron's first foray in writing a Bruce Lee related comic. While with Now Entertainment, Baron crafted the scripts for 1991's Kato of the Green Hornet mini and its 1992 sequel.
While working on that sequel, Mike Baron teamed with Val Mayervik (Howard the Duck). A former assistant of Dan Adkins, Mayervik trained with P. Craig Russell. The embellished muscle mass of the characters and the shaded penciled effects of the artwork evoke the influences of both Adkins and Russell. Thanks to Mayervik's affiliation with the Bruce Lee project, Baron was able to achieve his dream of working on a series devoted not to a Lee character but Bruce the legend.
1994's Bruce Lee was not the only series based on the icon. In 2016, Darby Pop released a 4-issue mini titled Bruce Lee: The Dragon Rises. It was co-written by Indestructible's Jeff Kline and Shannon Lee, daughter of the late martial arts actor! In that story, Lee didn't die but was instead transported to the modern day 2010s. With thugs and government agents on his trail, Lee must team with an old friend to solve the mystery of his disappearance and mysterious return.
This issue was an interesting opening chapter. The interior illustrations of Bruce Lee are much better representations than from that on the cover. Though both the cover Lee and the one in this story also have that over-the-top mullet. The main villain is styled to resemble an older Chuck Norris with a Van Damme build. The dialogue, especially of the bad guys is very 1990s action movie fodder. But the story itself reads like the kind of film Bruce might have gotten to make had he lived into his 40s or 50s. Consider this a lost movie adaptation from an alternate earth in which the career of Bruce Lee was not tragically shortened.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.
Completing this review completes Task #47 (Based on a Real Person) of the 2022 Comic Book and Graphic Novel Reading Challenge.
