Thanks to his blockbuster solo film, Shang-Chi has just become the latest breakout star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The lighthearted, high-flying action that Shang-Chi has brought to the silver screen takes a considerably different tone from the kind of action that his comic book counterpart usually finds himself in. Like many of Marvel's grittier, more grounded heroes, the Shang-Chi of the comic book Marvel Universe comics is typically embroiled in a far darker sort of action.
However, Shang-chi doesn't always face the dark forces of the Marvel Universe alone. And in the early 2000s, he teamed up with Black Widow and the other street-level heroes of the Marvel Knights imprint in a team-up that predicted what Netflix's Defenders would later become.
In 1998, Marvel relaunched several then-flailing characters like Daredevil, the Punisher, Doctor Strange and Black Widow under the Marvel Knights imprint to critical and commercial success. In 2000, those heroes came together in the aptly titled team book Marvel Knights, initially by Chuck Dixon and Ed Barreto. A series of seemingly random encounters led Daredevil to cross paths with the Punisher first before officially joining Black Widow and Dagger in their search for the missing Cloak. Punisher made sure to keep his eye on the trio, but it was Shang-Chi's abrupt defeat at the hands of Ulik the Troll that sent the story spiraling. The monstrous villain, in the hopes of obtaining an ancient artifact that would give him the power to destroy Asgard, began ravaging the city's underground with an army of Rock Trolls, all while Cloak's own dark story played out in the shadows of the streets above. Though their first adventure together held fast to some fantastical elements, it never lost its grimy edge, and that trend continued despite the nature of any of the group's following missions.
After dealing with Ulik, the core group of heroes comprised of Shang-Chi, Daredevil, Black Widow, and Dagger all turned their attention to Frank Castle's bloody war against crime. While his teammates considered the Punisher to be a serial killer, Shang-Chi surprisingly understood Castle's homicidal crusade as one being led against the same kind of evil he had watched his own father sew. Not quite coincidentally, Shang-Chi's father would soon enough step back into his life as the next nemesis for the Marvel Knights to face off against. Over the course of the series, the team would find themselves in conflict with alien invaders, nightmarish demon lords, and even a Life Model Decoy of Nick Fury, but the shadow of Zheng Zu's influence was always present.
Even when the series came to a close, Shang-Chi left to continue his own personal war against his father, which was in many ways the fight that tied the events of Marvel Knights together. These conflicts also brought heroes such as Moon Knight and Luke Cage into the fold in an almost seamless manner that would have been right at home on the small screen.
Much like the Hand of the MCU, the villains that the Marvel Knights faced were greater than any of the threats they usually deal with on their own. While this is a fairly odd assortment of characters, they are all distinctly street level heroes, many of whom have fairly unexplosive superpowers. While this wasn't Marvel's first team of more grounded heroes, it brought these distinctly different characters together in a way that saw their worlds collide with each other in the same way the Hand went from a focused Daredevil threat to something that threatened all of Netflix's Marvel heroes.
While the Marvel Knights team isn't terribly well remembered today, its heroes have all gone on to join the MCU in some fashion. While a number of factors make this precise line-up unlikely to appear together on the big screen or a Disney+ series, Shang-Chi and his teammates still set the template for protecting the gritter corners of the Marvel Universe together.
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