Iron Fist, a superhero created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane for Marvel Premiere 15 (May 1974), was the result of pop cultural cross-pollination.
The Marvel Age of Comics was already more than a decade old, and to freshen it up the Bullpen tried superhero titles reflecting popular trends.
Thanks to a relaxed Comics Code, more vivid horror stories could then be published, so Ghost Rider was born in Marvel Spotlight 5 (Aug. 1972).
The character is presented in his Netflix series as a kind of billionaire super-Buddhist. And that may well ring a bell.
Comics readers might remark on the similarity of Danny Rand to Adrian Veidt, the superhero Ozymandias created by by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for their 1986 Watchmen graphic novel.
Well, yes, and there’s a reason for that.
Iron Fist was in part an homage to Amazing-Man, Bill Everett’s original variation on the Superman theme introduced in Amazing-Man Comics 5 (Sept. 1939). That Tibetan-trained super-being also inspired Pete Morisi to create Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt for Charlton Comics in 1966. And Moore and Gibbons used Thunderbolt as the template for Ozymandias.
The history of superhero comics is a wonderfully multi-faceted and multivariate thing.
Bob Doncaster wrote:
ReplyDeleteWith all the pulp and comic heroes there were, those guys must have been tripping over each other in Tibetan monasteries. At least their abilities landed them on their feet
My friend Cam was going to Tibet, and I asked him to bring me back some super powers. He said, "You've got enough super powers!" It was the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. (Sniff!).
ReplyDeleteGerard de Souza wrote:
ReplyDeleteI know there are several other heroes who were taught skills by monks. When was it first mentioned that Batman trained with monks? Was it in Batman Year One?
Earl Leon Liles wrote:
ReplyDeleteIt's flat-out heartbreaking how ignorant modern fans can be with the Internet at their fingertips, but I love talking with them about this stuff and watching the lights come on for the occasional one who suddenly grasps there's a wonderful, nuanced, inticate history behind the current mainstream multimedia success of characters that started in comic books.
Steven Grant wrote:
ReplyDeleteIron Fist (& Master Of Kung Fu, for that matter) was Marvel trying to ride the popularity of the movie martial arts craze, months after the craze had crested & all but evaporated. (Same with The (Disco) Dazzler, a massive cultural fad they decided to "cash in on" when it was already badly waning.)
Amazing-Man, Thunderbolt, Iron Fist etc were all, basically, knockoffs of Lost Horizon. (Or, alternatively, The Shadow, whose origin also cribs from the very popular 1933 novel.) Though Roy's presence leaves the possibility open, I suspect Iron Fist's origin, like Thunderbolt's, is much more a remembrance of Lost Horizon than the fairly obscure Amazing-Man...
Steven Grant, actually, Roy Thomas says it was Gil Kane who wanted to bring in the Amazing-Man inspiration: "We got together after I got off work one day. We talked it over, and the first thing he said was how much he liked an old character from 1939 that was created by a mutual friend of ours back then, Bill Everett. Everett is primarily known as the full creator of the Sub-Mariner, one of the great early Marvel characters. He was also the co-creator of Daredevil in ‘64. He had also, about the same time as Sub-Mariner, created this character called Amazing-Man for a small company. I think it switched companies, but it was basically usually referred to as the Centaur Group. He had his own comic book right away: Amazing-Man comics.
ReplyDelete"Gil had always loved the origin of that character, which was basically a take-off on [James] Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, and Shangri-La, which, of course, he’d seen. I don’t know if he’d read [Lost Horizon] but everybody had heard of Shangri-La."
Anton Phibes wrote:
ReplyDeleteSince Shang-Chi was introduced to readers just a few months earlier, in Special Marvel Edition 15 (December 1973), it would be interesting to know if sales of that title in any way encouraged the decision to move ahead with the release of this one.