IRON FIST: HEART OF THE DRAGON #1

This title was written by Larry Hama, with pencils by Dave Wachter.

First Issue Cover by Billy Tan

Following on from the confusing mess that was “Future State: Nightwing”, I feel that I should be allowed to be forgiven for not really having particularly high hopes for the rest of this week’s releases. Well, all that I can really say to that is just thank the goddamn lord for Larry Hama and Dave Wachter, because they have crafted an exemplary tale that exceeded all of my expectations, considering that while I have enjoyed Iron Fist in the past, I have also somewhat struggled to get into certain series featuring the iconic character.

Quite honestly, the way that Hama and the team went about crafting this tale was possibly the bet method that they could have utilised. While I would not say that it quite meets the criteria to be considered “new reader friendly”, which is such a desire these days, I still
feel that the book does an excellent job of introducing all of the main players that we need to know about, while also still building upon the more recent runs that have come before. From my perspective, as someone who only reads the odd Iron Fist story every now and then, I find that the mythology for the character has always been somewhat complicated, and with this being a limited series of six issues, I do not think wasting time trying to explain his world to new readers would really make much sense, as we would likely be waiting until the end of the third instalment before we even get to anything resembling the main story. The mystery of who exactly the likes of Taskmaster and Lady Bullseye are working for is quite intriguing to me, and the idea of them going around and killing all of the dragons is rather interesting as well. To be honest, all that I am really praying for in terms of the villain of this story is that it is not the likes of Master Khan or the Mandarin, as I never really cared for the former, while the latter is a little bit tainted these days, after the absolute debacle that was the “Iron Man 3” situation. I also pray that little Gork manages to get out of this storyline unscathed, as he is simply the most adorable little dragon that have ever seen (besides Lockheed that is). I guess then that you can now add Gork to my list of adorable Marvel creatures, joining the likes of Jeff the Baby Land Shark.

The character of Fooh is an utterly excellent comedic foil to the slightly more serious nature of Danny Rand. At first, I was not too convinced of this, as he started out as a much more serious individual, but as the issue went on I found myself laughing out loud to some of the antics that he got up to throughout the course of the story. The first of these instances came when they first do battle against the undead ninja hordes, as while Iron Fist is dismantling their foes, Fooh is fumbling around in his luggage to find something. It eventually transpires that he was looking for an axe, but sadly he finds it a little to late to do battle against their enemies. The second of these comedic occurrences took place a small while later, as Danny had already made his way across the death pit, filled with snakes and probably a load of other horrible stuff, soon doing battle with the Taskmaster, and all the while Fooh decided that this would be an opportune time to take a little bit of a rest, despite only being halfway across the pit. The greatest thing about his handling in this story was that it all actually led to a payoff towards the end, as when it looked as though we would get a repeat of the axe incident, Fooh actually managed to produce his massive shotgun in time, blowing all of the enemies away before they could overwhelm our heroes, thus saving Gork for the time being.

Although I thought that the overall writing of the chapter was truly excellent, the real highlight of this book was the artwork of Dace Wachter. All throughout my reading, I found myself feeling as though his work was somewhat familiar to me. Eventually, I did a little bit of reading up on the man and found that he had done a little bit of work on IDW’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” series, which explained the familiarity of the style, although I have only actually seen a little bit of his work, being more familiar with the likes of Dan Duncan. 

 

I AM CHOOSING TO GIVE THIS FIRST ISSUE OF “IRON FIST: HEART OF THE DRAGON” A “B” GRADE.