Man, You Come Right Out of a Comic Book

The Unbelievable Life & Death of Count Dante

In the early 1970s, the full-page martial arts instruction ads of Count Dante captured the imagination of a generation of comic book readers. But then, just two years after the mysterious death of Bruce Lee in 1973, this controversial fighter would also turn up dead under equally mysterious circumstances.

It was in the early 1960s, way back in the day, that the popularity of Asia’s martial arts began an infectious spread across America’s then still divided racial and cultural landscape. In Los Angeles in 1961, Master Ark Wong of the Wah Que Studio became one of the first teachers of the martial arts to break the long observed “kung-fu color line,” which barred the teaching of China’s sacred fighting arts to anyone not of Chinese ancestry. Around that same time, Wong’s bold action was being mirrored by an unknown martial artist named Bruce Lee, who had started teaching kung fu to non-Chinese pupils at his Oakland, California studio.

But interest in martial arts was on the rise nationwide, and it was at this same time that the soon-to-be infamous martial…