Victoria Ying will write and draw a new all-ages Shang-Chi graphic novel as part of the partnership between Marvel and Scholastic.
Shang-Chi and the Quest for Immortality will take a young Shang-Chi and his sister Shi-Hua out of their father’s castle and into the larger world, as Shang-Chi seeks a means to help his father restore his immortality.
“One of the things that intrigued me the most about Shang-Chi as a character was his complicated relationship to his father,” Ying told Marvel.com. “I wanted to explore what it would be like to be a young person and what it felt like to constantly crave and strive for approval, before throwing it all away and rejecting the need for understanding from his father. It’s a journey I can relate to and I wanted to show Shang-Chi in the years before he set out against his father.”
Here’s the description from Marvel:
Twelve-year-old Shang-Chi and and his younger sister, Shi-Hua, are the only children in the grand palace of the Five Weapons Society. Their father, Zheng-Zu, is a harsh master, and all Shang-Chi wants is to prove himself in his father’s eyes.
So when he overhears that his father’s powers may be waning and discovers an ancient scroll that might be the key to helping him get those powers back, Shang-Chi knows exactly what to do. For the first time in his life, he sneaks out of the palace and into the outside world, hoping to return with one of the legendary Peaches of Immortality to gift his father.
But the world beyond the palace is very different from everything Shang-Chi has been taught, especially a boy called Lu, who knows more about Zheng-Zu than he should. With his home and father’s health on the line, Shang-Chi cannot fail in his quest—but does his father deserve to be saved?
And here’s a look at some interior art:
Ying is an accomplished animator and artist who has worked on films like Frozen, Moana, Big Hero 6 and Tangled, among many others. She also illustrated the graphic novel Diana Princess of the Amazons and is the creator of the upcoming Hungry Ghost.
Shang-Chi and the Quest for Immortality arrives in stores on Oct. 3.