KIEL [singing]: “Iron Fist, oh Iron Fist, has a fist of iron…”
BEN M.: “Wow, he loves the book so much he made up his own theme song for it!”
[Laughter]
BEN M.: “That’s okay, I feel the same way about it.”
KIEL: “Let me start by saying that I do love this book. I love that it’s given some much-needed weight to the concept of Iron Fist. I love that it’s really a kung fu comic masquerading as a superhero book. I love that it’s introducing new readers to old-school artists like Russ Heath. That being said, I didn’t find this issue to be the ending I was hoping for for the series’ first arc. First off, as much as I love the tongue-in-cheek nature of the book, some of the dialogue in this issue was a little too cliché and off-putting, particularly the dialogue between the guest-starring Heroes for Hire Colleen Wing, Misty Knight and Luke Cage. Sure, we all know these guys are really characters inspired by and living in the tradition of ’70s exploitation films, but lines like ‘Awwww, yeah!’ and ‘10th floor—accounting, lingerie and death by sword’ are just cheesy in the wrong way.”
SEAN: “Agreed. It’s like, we already know that these characters have their roots in the blaxploition and chop-socky and grindhouse flicks of the ’70s. They’re cool enough for that reason without laying it on so thick with the camp dialogue.”
KIEL: “I don’t know if it’s just because we know and love Brubaker’s stuff so much around here, but this felt like a little too much Matt Fraction. While the craziness works in Casanova or even Punisher War Journal, it kind of short-circuited the drama here.”
JIM: “For years, Iron Fist was my default ‘bad superhero’—he’s who I’d compare characters to when I wanted to say they sucked. But this series felt so new and fresh. It’s probably the first time you really liked this character, but now it feels like a lot of it got chucked back into the kind of cringe-worthy stuff you’d read in the Essential Heroes for Hire collections.”
KIEL: “Props to Brubaker and Fraction, though, for delivering at least one line of solid gold in a flashback to old Iron Fist Orson Randall’s childhood, which is in fact our Line of the Week!”
LINE OF THE WEEK
And you should see how the ancients play beer pong
KIEL: “The second slight complaint I have against this issue is that it was really unevenly paced. From almost the first issue, we were aware that old-school Iron Fist Orson Randall was going to buy the farm—hell, the title told us that much. But here, his actual death scene comes suddenly, with only a bit of caption to let us know that he’s really ready to die. For a character we’ve gotten to love so much over the past five issues, it’s a disappointing sendoff in the midst of a really spectacular action sequence by the badass David Aja.”
BEN M.: “They’ve done such a good job with Orson Randall, and you care so much about him, that he’s the de facto star of the book. The current Iron Fist, Danny Rand, is still something of a blank slate in comparison, so I definitely wished Randall had a better death.”
SEAN: “See, it didn’t bother me. I think his death will take on more resonance, and Danny Rand will become more of a star, in the subsequent arc, where you see how this affected Rand and watch the character come into his own to live up to Randall’s legacy. I think it’ll be like what Ms. Marvel is always promising but never really delivering—Danny Rand will step up and become a better hero not because he wants to, but because he’d better do so if he wants to survive.”
KIEL: “But before we get to see what Danny’s reaction to all the craziness that’s going on is, he’s whisked away to a celestial kung fu tournament. Sure, that’s all cool and whatnot, but Danny just absorbed Orson’s powers giving him two iron fists, and he’s got a glowing ninja sword! LET HIM FIGHT NOW, NOT NEXT MONTH!”
[Laughter]
SEAN: “Now that did throw me. It reminded me of the end of the Emma Frost/Hellfire Club storyline in Astonishing X-Men, where instead of resolving the fight, they were all whisked off into outer space all of a sudden.”
BEN M. “I actually liked that this story arc is leading directly into the next one—”
SEAN: “—rather than the standard two- or three-page sixth-issue epilogue? Hmm, that’s a really good point.”
BEN M. “Still, I wish it had had a bit more of its own conclusion.”
JIM: “They could have given the story a little more room to breathe and still led directly into the next arc—it didn’t need to happen literally seconds after the villain was defeated.”
KIEL: “Even so, it seems like Brubaker and Fraction have cooked up a novel way to solve an age-old superhero storytelling dilemma: How do you fulfill the English Lit 101 maxim that a good story should be about the biggest challenge the character has ever faced in a superhero title that by definition will never really end? The answer is this crazy celestial kung fu tournament, which looks like it’ll take both Danny personally and the Iron Fist mythos generally to new heights. Literally.”
SEAN: “Which goes to show that this book is still, on a fundamental level, a great collection of thrilling stuff. Only instead of Johns’ Sinestro Corps’ superhero concoction, this is a witches’ brew of pulp coolness: blaxploitation, noir, Shangri-La, Doc Savage, ‘Kill Bill,’ Bronze Age Marvel, uncredited cameos from Cobra Commander…”
[Laughter]
KIEL: “And isn’t that Storm Shadow’s tattoo on the other guy? But that’s the point: It’s a Bruce Lee movie with comic book costumes.”
JIM: “I think the quirk of this initial arc is that it feels more like a miniseries called The History of Iron Fist than the beginning of an ongoing.”
SEAN: “I think you’re on to something there. You know what it reminds me of? The feeling I got when I read Doctor Strange: The Oath by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin. It worked as a great adventure, but also as a way to get to the core of what made the character cool and set up his mythos and idiom in a really thrilling and fresh way. So just like I was dying to see more Doc adventures from that team—in vain, alas—I’m psyched to see where this series goes from here.”
KIEL: “I think that’s the best way to put it. The next arc will be the real first arc, the first one to truly star Danny. This just whets your appetite. One question, though: Do you think they’ll keep doing flashbacks to the past Iron Fists?”
BEN M.: “Definitely. It’s too good a gimmick to pass up. And it’s been done really well to boot.”
JIM: “Plus, it’s just cool. One of those Iron Fists shot magic arrows!”
[Laughter]
KIEL: “In the end, I really felt like the book would have been better served to stretch out the story to a seventh issue, so you could do all the crazy fight stuff and have an emotional wrap-up, but I’m still extremely psyched to see where this goes next.”
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Originally Posted by Iron Fist
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