Iron Fist #3 - The City's Not For Burning!

You are Steve Does Comics. You are reviewing a tale of graphic narrative. It is Iron Fist; product of a mysterious land in the Far East, from which no man may return with his soul unchanged. But first, before you can do this, you must endure the test  of...

Oh I give up. Writing a review in the style of an Iron Fist comic is a pain in the backside. It's even worse than if you tried to do it in the style of a Shang-Chi adventure.

Anyway, Iron Fist, I have spoken before of my inherent frustration with him, that, like Popeye, he had a means to defeat any foe but, like Popeye, never bothered to use it until he'd been knocked from pillar to post, making you wonder why he didn't just use it at the start of the fight and save himself the trouble.

I did, however, generally draw pleasure from his tales, mostly because they were nicely drawn and who doesn't like to see a good dose of martial arts mayhem?

I did, therefore, in my younger days, own a couple of issues of his book. One of which was issue #3, in which all kinds of chaos broke out.

So, around forty years since I first read it, what do I make of it now?

Our hero and Misty Knight are flying into the world famous London Airport to look for their friend Colleen but don't even manage to land before their plane's blown up by an armoured villain calling himself the Ravager.

The inevitable fight breaks out between protagonist and antagonist but the villain escapes the scene, leaving Iron Fist to visit the now hospitalised Misty before having an argument with her about priorities, and then setting off in search of the villain.

By following the Ravager's radioactive footprints, Fisty tracks him down to a lab in that well-known scientific research facility the General Post Office Tower, whereupon another fight breaks out.

Finally grasping that it might be a good idea to break out the spinach, Iron Fist revs up his knuckles and delivers the coup de grâce - but that only succeeds in wrecking the armour of his foe who now reveals himself to be Radion and promptly blows up the tower, with himself and Iron Fist still in it. Radion may be named after a brand of washing powder but that doesn't stop him trying to make a mess of London.

It's certainly a tale that isn't afraid of flinging you right into the action, with carnage breaking out from almost the moment we get past the opening splash page.

But, exploding planes aside, the thing that really smashed me in the face, reading it, is it's strongly reminiscent of that early Captain Britain adventure in which the similarly armoured Hurricane smashes up a London airport. As both tales were written by Chris Claremont, it's hard to believe the boy Chris wasn't knowingly drawing on that tale when he conceived this one.

It also struck me that, as drawn by John Byrne, our hero Danny Rand looks remarkably like Captain Britain's alter-ego Brian Braddock.

Also, like Brian Braddock, he's not that interesting a person. The real star of the issue, character-wise, is Misty Knight who probably deserves her own comic more than he does.

Admittedly, she does act like a total jerk at the hospital, berating Danny because he wants to save the whole of London from destruction, rather than concentrate on finding Colleen. To be honest, wanting to save an entire city from annihilation doesn't seem an unreasonable goal for a super-hero. I can only put Misty's weird attitude down to Chris Claremont wanting to ramp up the drama levels the after-effects of her anaesthetic.

More importantly, this issue, we find out she's bionic. I mean, come on, how can they not give Genocide-Ignoring Bionic Misty Knight her own book after that revelation?

Aside from the somewhat manufactured conflict between Misty and Danny, my big reservation with the comic is there's too much human suffering in it. Not only does Misty get impaled on a big lump of metal, have to be rushed to the hospital and spend the rest of the yarn with an arm missing but half the people on the plane die, including a child who seems to be in the story just to be half set on fire and then killed. Call me a sissy but I like super-hero comics where no one actually gets hurt.

It's also quite annoying that Danny and Misty keep talking about Colleen but, as far as I could see, nowhere in the story do they tell you who Colleen is or what's supposed to have happened to her. A quick bit of back story might have been nice for newcomers.

Anyway, it's a competent story with plenty of incident and a solid but not, by his own standards, exceptional art job by Byrne but the overly melodramatic nature of Claremont's writing and the human suffering quotient are somewhat off-putting for me.

It is good, though, to see Radion show up. He was, for me, always one of Marvel's better 1970s villains and a noticeable cut above most of its wrongdoers of that era.