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So, while we're all posting about various post-Civil War titles that Marvel are releasing, I thought it apposite to bring one to the table that began during, but is set after, Marvel's popular in the stores/unpopular on the internets mega-event.
I have to confess some interest in the character, probably unusual for even someone like me in their late twenties - given the last time there was a decent (solo, I can't speak to the long run in the duo book Power Man and... having seen none of it; they don't make duo books anymore, whither Cloak and Dagger) Iron Fist title was the mid-1970's where the title ran for fifteen issues from '75, with a pre-X-Men Claremont/Byrne creative team, still raw and hungry; Here's the first cover featuring Danny Rand apparently beating the shit out of Civil War douchebag Iron Man. (I'm sure it was all a misunderstanding and they made friends until fateful 2006.)
Anyway, yeah, I never read any of that either but basically if you were a Marvel trademark fortunate enough to guest star in a Spider-Man title in the late eighties or early nineties, chances are I *heart* you for life (again: see Cloak and Dagger who've the added advantage of guesting in Power Packs I read also. There should really be a good C&D book.) And so, in a roundabout way, we get to Marvel Tales #197, a reprint of '77's Marvel Team-Up #63, the first part of a double-header that was to bookend the Fist-man's original series - I didn't get all that many comics as a young 'in, but used to be able to get a proper American one from the Banff Mace when we visited my Gran, and this was one such - I think I still have it, I'm damned if I know where, but more than almost any other comic, or superhero comic (I ain't forget you, Transformers) I remember it completely vividly without having read it for a good number of years - I even remember the Layton Hercules back-up feature well. It includes a stroganoff(?) recipe and the phrase 'piping hot'.
It's a heavily dramatic affair feauturing Spidey, Iron Fist, his girlfriend Misty Knight, Colleen Wing and the lead character's (because for all that Spidey was the marquee on Team-Up, this certainly was an Iron Fist comic) nemesis Steel Serpent. And at the end - SPOILERS for a 30 year old comic - Steel Serpent wins, basically, taking Danny's chi and leaving him crumpled, broken and powerless. Affecting stuff, when you're eight, I'd say, and something I never managed to get over by, for example, finding the next installment.
Twenty years later, it was time I righted these wrongs, and you might recall me being embarrassingly excited at the prospect of the book; as it went, the first three issues were very well-crafted, beautifully drawn affairs, but rather drawn out I felt - more Brubaker, solid character drama, than Fraction - wild ideas. (Incidentally, you can listen to the latter talking, at about 20-28 mins about this book along with his other, also very enjoyable, comics Punisher War Journal and Casanova and the upcoming Milligan-Infinity Inc.-paralleling Champions.)
With #4, the mix broadens out nicely though; Bru's meatiness is finally complemented and balanced by Fraction's sharp modernism, and it legitimately becomes one of my favourite two, three comics being published today (SPOILERS now follow, I suppose) - the Foreman-illustrated framing narrative, which I've certainly appreciated as a kind of cultural reappropriation with numerous legacy Iron Fists predating Danny in the role and actually instead of being some colonial white master are of the region of K'Un-Lun (fictional) and Tibet (real), brings his immediate predecessor Orson Randall - the Iron Fist of WWI: imo, the best character in the book and, I'd further speculate, Rand's (great?) grandaddy - into sharp focus, though only the crinkly edges of his and by extension the legacy's history remain evident, with Victorian airships, secret enigmatically train-stations and some real gun-fu, dragon-chi bullets - suck it up, Equilibrium. There's also betrayal, balletic and eroticised - and, thereby, all the more distressing - martial arts violence from Davos, the Steel Serpent, a crane-crone and her daughters and staple multitudinous Marvel terrorists Hydra with their not-so-staple war-engine Mechagorgon.
Visually, David Aja makes it a feast - he's been compared, not unreasonably, to the likes of Lee Weeks, Michael Lark and so forth, basically anyone whose drawn Daredevil recently which suggests a judicious use of blacks, a post-Mazzuchelli air, and is to some extent fair (one of the pages in an earlier issue looks identical to a Lark page), but Aja steps up to draw everything beautifully, and has something of a rugged experimentalism, I'd say JH Williams III vibe occasionally showing through; you get Steranko-whirls and impact zones in the panels, for example, and there's a great progressive movement page through nine panels in #3 with Fist evading SHIELD detention that really captures this sensation, something you'll less likely see the two aforementioned trying.
It's hooked onto an Oriental and historical mystique vibe nice and tight now (and there's less of an atrocious parade of ads in the latter issues, which does help) and, as for me, I'm locked on. I know some of you gotta be reading this. |
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