Marvel and DC each have a tier of long-serving characters who never really caught on, but have enough name value to keep getting relaunched.  Unfortunately, they don't have enough name value to stay relaunched for very long.

Iron Fist is one such character.  He's best remembered, of course, for the oddball Power Man & Iron Fist team-up book that did respectably well in the early eighties.  But his original solo title lasted only fifteen issues.  He had less than successful miniseries in 1996, 1998 and 2000, and in 2004, the previous attempt to give him an ongoing title folded after only six issues.  You'd think they'd learn.

This time, the strategy is a little different.  Iron Fist has been given a prominent role in Daredevil, and Immortal Iron Fist is essentially a spin-off from that book.  It's co-written by Daredevil writer Ed Brubaker, alongside indie darling Matt Fraction, and David Aja's art follows a similar tone to the one established on the parent book by Alex Maleev and Michael Lark.  Clearly this title is gunning for the Daredevil fanbase at least as much as the Iron Fist loyalists, and you can't fault that decision.

I've always found Iron Fist an odd jumble of concepts - a mystical martial arts hero who lives in New York and runs a huge corporation.  Often it comes across as a weird collection of random elements, and frankly, I've never found the mystical side particularly engaging.  On the other hand, there ought to be some possibilities in Iron Fist's garbled identity and built-in culture clash.  This book's big idea seems to be that Danny Rand is just the latest in a long line of Iron Fists, at least some of whom may still be alive.  Meanwhile, Danny is chafing at the idea of running a business (or rather, leaving it up to the staff to run for him) and suddenly decides he wants to go ethical.

From the look of it, then, we're doing a search-for-identity story here.  That's probably what the character needs.  He often comes across as a piece of 1980s nostalgia, and he needs a story that defines him as something more than that.  It's certainly the clearest attempt I've read in a while to present Iron Fist properly as a character, rather than just to say "Hey, kids, it's your old pal Iron Fist!  Remember the Rubik's Cube?  He was around back then."

I'm not quite hooked by the first issue, though.  The plot gets off to a sluggish start - lots of nice martial arts sequences, but not a great deal of story.  And I'm still not persuaded that Iron Fist's mystical back story is actually any good.  The writers are going to need to work hard to convince me on that one.  David Aja's art layers on the atmospherics, but can't quite overcome the demented quantity of adverts that Marvel are including this month.  You can't build an atmosphere effectively in that situation, and this book suffers from it perhaps more than any other I've seen so far.

A slow start, then, and I'm not yet convinced by the book.  But at least it's left me open-minded about the character, and gone some way to persuading me that there's more potential in him than I'd thought.

Rating: B

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