The Bronze Age of Comics produced a cavalcade of heroes and heroines. Alas many of them did not catch fire, or only is a relatively small way compared to the powerhouses created by Marvel in the decade before. A few have found some measure of success -- Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel (as Captain Marvel), and She-Hulk come to mind. But others like Skull the Slayer, IT! The Living Colossus, Killraven, and others not so much. But among the successes is most certainly Iron Fist. Created during the wave of Kung Fu madness which swept popular culture in the early 70's thanks to the amazing Bruce Lee, Iron Fist successfully bonded the Kung Fu craze with proper superhero dynamics. While other Kung Fu artists like Shang Chi and Richard Dragon were true to the tropes of the form, they were not immediately recognizable as superheroes (which they were really). Iron Fist was from the get-go, a legit part of the larger Marvel Universe.
Iron Fist is one of the best designs of any hero created in the decade. I'd say his uniform and general look is perfect from the beginning and requires no tweaking, though I see they have done so in modern days -- a mistake. Gil Kane gave us the awesome Green Lantern and Atom designs at DC and he does great work again with Iron Fist. (Or was the design by Romita?) The story of Danny Rand is also pitch perfect, borrowing the story of Bill Everett's Amazing Man (as Pete Morisi's Thunderbolt had done almost a decade before) the story is rich enough for growth yet has the focus necessary to immediately pitch the character --a young boy sees his parents killed and is raised in a hidden land by martial arts masters before he returns to the world for vengeance.
The success of Iron Fist is also due to the talent which graced the book from its earliest days. Roy Thomas and the late great Gil Kane do the origin story and its a masterpiece. Larry Hama steps in for several issues thereafter with scripts by Len Wein and Doug Moench. Tony Isabella and Arvell Jones give the book a respite before the lasting team of Chris Claremont and a youngster named John Byrne take the wheel (where have I heard of those two before). This is the first Claremont and Byrne work, before they went on to refine an exceedingly uncanny book.
The series is also notable in the creation of Nightwing Restorations, the team of samurai Colleen Wing and bionic Misty Knight. Wing had been a part of the story from nearly the beginning, an element of Iron Fist's origin story, but Knight was the creation of Isabella but who was put to fantastic use by Claremont, using the duo to add some of the exploitation flare which was the source of the series to begin with. The romance that blossoms between Misty and Danny is one of the most natural in all of comics, and what I like most about the romance is that race is not even brought up. Kickass dames were right there in the early 70's along with Kung Fu and bonding the two was genius. (Later of course Iron Fist would partner with the best of the blaxploitation heroes Luke Cage to create one of the strongest series of the later Bronze Age.)
Here are the covers from the run, the issues included in the Epic collection (and the Essentials volume before that.)
Rip Off
The character's name may have come from 1972's "Five Fingers of Death", which came to the States in '73 and is credited with starting the Martial Arts craze in American film. It was imported to bounce off the success of TV's more sedate Kung Fu.
ReplyDeleteAll I remember about the movie is that when Lo Lieh employed the "Iron Fist Technique" taught by his master, his hands glowed red and the wild theme from the old TV series "Ironsides" kicked in on the soundtrack. There was a cheap third-run cinema I used to go to that played double-features of Kung Fu and Blaxploitation films all the time. Those were the days.