(season 1)
Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, [Doug Moench, Frank Miller, Andy Diggle, Antony Johnston, Chris Claremont, Archie Goodwin], and Scott Buck, 2017
The first Iron Fist comic I ever bought was Power Man and Iron Fist #125, cover-dated September 1986. It was the final issue of the series, and Iron Fist died at the end. Thus did Marvel officially give up on trying to make one of their big 1970s fad characters work in the 1980s. But apparently Netflix thought he’d work in 2017!
The story behind Iron Fist is very similar to that behind his eventual co-star, Luke Cage. With the arrival of the ’70s, Stan Lee had handed over the creative reins at Marvel over to the next generation. In 1971, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft cleaned up at the box office, “blaxploitation” was all the rage, and Luke Cage was Marvel’s attempt to assimilate it into superhero comics. In 1973, the Bruce Lee vehicle Enter the Dragon one-upped those films, raking in over $400 million worldwide (over $2.3 billion in 2022 dollars) against a budget of $850,000, and reaching #1 in the U.S. at the end of August. But Enter the Dragon was just the headliner of a huge wave of martial arts films that dominated the theaters. It was knocked out of the top spot at the box office by Lady Kung Fu. That movie was in turn replaced at #1 by The Shanghai Killers. Before Enter the Dragon was released in the U.S., five other Hong Kong martial arts films had already spent a week atop the box office in 1973 alone, one of them twice. Enter the Dragon then went on to reclaim the #1 spot in October, preceded by Deadly China Doll. Meanwhile, on the small screen—where, in 1966, Bruce Lee had first brought Asian martial arts to American TV as Kato in The Green Hornet—ABC’s Kung Fu brought in a 20.1 rating, which would have made it an easy #1 in the 21st century. The craze even crossed over into the world of music, as Carl Douglas would soon have a #1 hit in the U.S. and at least fifteen other countries with 1974’s “Kung Fu Fighting”. So it stood to reason that superhero comics, a much more natural fit, would want to get into the act.
Iron Fist wasn’t Marvel’s first attempt at this. His original appearance was cover-dated May 1974, five months after the debut of Shang‑Chi in a series called Special Marvel Edition which had initially been doing Thor and Sgt. Fury reprints but which soon changed its name to Master of Kung Fu. Shang‑Chi had a few problems, though. First, though he was created by Steve Englehart for Marvel, he was introduced as the son of Fu Manchu, a pulp fiction character from 1912 whose legal status is complicated: Fu Manchu himself is in the public domain in the U.S., but not in Europe, and many characters from his later books are still under copyright protection even here, so Marvel could no longer use them once the licensing deal lapsed. Second—Shang‑Chi wasn’t a superhero! He didn’t wear a costume and didn’t have any powers—though he might have the occasional crossover with Spider‑Man just to sort of show the flag, Shang-Chi was not rubbing shoulders with the Avengers and the X‑Men so much as serving as the flagship character of a little martial arts line, one that would sit alongside Marvel’s western, war, and horror comics. And then, third—not to put too fine a point on it, but when Englehart brought his idea to new editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, Thomas gave him the green light, with one stipulation: Shang‑Chi’s mother would have to be a white American. Marvel wasn’t dedicating a title to a fully Chinese character in 1973.
So when Roy Thomas took a swing at creating a martial arts character of his own, he went a different way. Danny Rand is a nine-year-old boy on a trek with his parents and his father’s business partner through the Chinese side of the Himalayas, looking for K’un Lun, a fabled realm in a pocket dimension only intermittently accessible from ours. When Danny and his mother slip and fall to a lower ledge, the business partner, Harold Meachum, takes advantage of the opportunity to murder Danny’s father, thinking that he will thereby take possession not only of 100% of the corporation they had co-founded but also of Danny’s mother, somehow. She doesn’t go for it. Instead, she and Danny run for it, and she sacrifices herself to a pack of wolves so that Danny can flee across a bridge to safety in K’un Lun. There he spends many years undergoing rigorous training in the martial arts, eventually passing a series of tests to become the Iron Fist, so named because (as the captions have said in virtually every Iron Fist comic for nearly fifty years now) he can channel his chi—his very life essence—into his clenched fist, making it like unto a thing of iron. In short, Roy Thomas’s response to Shang-Chi’s excessive “other-ness” was to tell the story of a rich, blond Westerner who goes to some faraway place and proves to be better than the natives at their own cultural specialty. Yeah, it’s one of those.
It is weird to me, having started to read comics after Iron Fist was firmly established as half of a duo, to look back at solo Iron Fist comics from the mid-’70s. He seems so bereft of personality without someone to play off—specifically without Luke Cage to play off. Here’s what I wrote about their pairing back in February:
Iron Fist was the graceful kung fu master, Power Man the undisciplined brawler; Iron Fist was the fair-haired heir to an immense fortune, Power Man the product of the slums; Iron Fist was the innocent idealist who would ask the villains to please stop disrupting the harmony of all living things, Power Man the streetwise cynic.
There is of course some internal contradiction in having a New Agey naïf spend all his time dishing out violence, but it’s a potentially interesting contradiction—the core of a more interesting character than the cipher spouting revenge-minded Big Talk that we see in these early issues. But the creative teams building the Marvel Cinematic Universe do seem intent on dwelling on these characters’ early years rather than jumping into their heydays and catching us up as we go, so it’s the Iron Fist solo stories that serve as the source material here. It’s pretty thin gruel, and the result, while not outright bad, is underwhelming.
First, there’s Iron Fist himself, who doesn’t really land as a character. His insistence, upon taking control of 51% of the Rand Corporation, that it sell pharmaceuticals at cost rather than at a 1000% markup, suggests the innocent idealist I remembered from the comics, but if the creators were going for a “fish out of water” angle—which would have been my play—they didn’t hit it nearly hard enough. On the flip side, they have Danny prone to what I guess are supposed to be fits of berserker rage, though it’s left unclear what is going on with that, and as a story element the fits are deployed pretty randomly. And… other than that, he’s just zis guy, you know? Jim Shooter gets across more characterization of Iron Fist in one panel of Secret Wars II #2 than this show manages in thirteen hour-long episodes. As for the casting—Finn Jones, with his broad face, curly locks, and beard (!), is a pretty far cry from the Danny Rand I know. Putting him in that distinctive K’un Lun mask would have gone a long way to hide the dissimilarity—at least if he shaved that fuckin’ beard—but this is one of those Netflix shows that sneers at costumes. At least there’s no “You want me to wear that? But I’d look like a dork!” scene this time around.
The TV folks tweaked Iron Fist’s origin a bit—for instance, the Rands now travel to the Himalayas by plane rather than on foot—but the big change is that Danny’s responsibility as the Iron Fist is not just to defend K’un Lun but specifically to defend it against the Hand, the necromantic ninjas from Frank Miller’s Daredevil who served as the Big Bad of the second season of the TV adaptation. That’s a smart move—it means that, in the Netflix corner of the MCU, you don’t have a group of practitioners of Asian martial arts in one show and a master of Asian martial arts in another show but, oh, it’s just a coincidence. Of course, the issue with having an organization as the chief antagonist of your story is that it’s unsatisfying to have the hero taking on faceless masses. So which specific characters are actually in or at least allied with the Hand? Well, that’s basically what the show is about. It trots out a bunch of supporting characters. You’ve got the evil business partner Harold Meachum, his daughter Joy, and his son Ward—who is Harold’s brother in the comics, but moving him down a generation makes for more of a Don-Jr.-and-Ivanka vibe. Then you’ve got Colleen Wing, an accomplished martial artist, specializing in the samurai sword, who in the comics is half of a duo called the Daughters of the Dragon along with Misty Knight; Misty was in the Luke Cage series, so it stands to reason that Colleen would show up here. You’ve got Madame Gao, a villain from the Daredevil TV series. You’ve got Bakuto, a Hand daimyo from South America, who appeared in a grand total of three issues of Daredevil’s comic, all in 2010. You’ve got Davos, an adept from K’un Lun, who was introduced in the first issue after Iron Fist was promoted from Marvel Premiere to his own title, and whose rivalry with Danny dates back to their childhoods. And the TV series is basically an exercise in shuffling all these characters around from friend to enemy to uneasy ally to secret betrayer to weird gray area and back again. Who’s secretly a member of the Hand? Who looked to be with the Hand, but is actually fighting against them? Who is with one Hand faction, fighting against another Hand faction? And with the alignment of every supporting character changing from episode to episode (with the exception of Claire Temple, who made occasional guest appearances), it eventually became hard to keep caring. I’m weary of who’s-zoomin’-who plots to begin with, and Iron Fist had characters zoomin’, un-zoomin’, re-zoomin’, counter-zoomin’, and pseudo-zoomin’ each other to the point that it all became noise.
(And then of course there’s the fact that, y’know, I don’t like martial arts. More cool superpowers, less punching and kicking, please. All these Netflix shows are just hour after hour of punching and kicking.)
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