50 Years Ago, Roy Thomas’ First Time Seeing a Kung Fu Film Gave the World Iron Fist

In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head back to February 1974 to see the historic debut of Iron Fist.

Generally speaking, a truism in comic book history has been that whenever there is a fad in popular culture, comic books will jump on it…JUST a little bit late. For instance, Marvel debuted its disco character, Dazzler, in late 1979, just a couple of months before Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” came out, generally accepted as the last true Disco hit (granted, there were a lot of extenuating circumstances that delayed Dazzler’s debut, but still).

However, when it came to the Kung Fu craze of the early 1970s, comic books had a slightly better track record, at least at Marvel versus DC (DC, more traditionally, jumped head first into the craze right as it was ending). In 1973, Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin had pitched Marvel’s then Editor-in-Chief, Roy Thomas, on a new character to tie in with the martial arts craze, specifically the TV series, Kung Fu, which Englehart and Starlin were both fans of. The hero of the book would be named Shang-Chi. Thomas, told them to work Fu Manchu into the series, and so Shang-Chi became the SON of Fu Manchu who is trained as the world’s greatest assassin by his father, but then splits from his father to become a hero instead. At the time, Thomas didn’t really know much about the Kung Fu craze, but that would soon change, leading to the debut of Iron Fist in February 1974!

How did Roy Thomas’ first Kung Fu film experience inspire Iron Fist?

As noted, while Englehart and Starlin were big Kung Fu fans, Roy Thomas hadn’t gotten into the craze. However, in March 1973, the 1972 Hong Kong martial arts film, King Boxer, was released in the United States under the name Five Fingers of Death. This was the film that REALLY kicked the Kung Fu craze in the United States into high gear, as while the Kung Fu TV show was popular, we hadn’t even had a Bruce Lee Kung Fu film released in the United States at this point (which is tragic, of course, as it meant that Lee had already passed away before he became a film star in the United States with the release of his previously filmed Hong Kong Kung Fu movies)

Thomas went to see the movie with his wife of the time, and while he enjoyed it, he was really struck by the character using an “Iron Fist”…

Thomas thought that “Iron Fist” would be a cool superhero name, but since Marvel already had Iron Man, he thought it wouldn’t work. As he and his wife returned home from the film, though, he convinced himself that it actually WOULDN’T be weird, and so he pitched Stan Lee on the idea that week, and Lee agreed, and so Thomas enlisted the legendary artist Gil Kane into creating Iron Fist with him.

Thomas and Kane were inspired by some other past works, which I’ll get into in future articles, but the resulting comic book was released in the anthology Marvel Premiere #15 in February 1974, written by Thomas, with art by Kane and Dick Giordano. Right from the first page, you could see that this was going to be a special character…

Kane was such a DYNAMIC artist, and Iron Fist really exemplified how great Kane was at movement with characters. You could really see how kinetic this character was. The story opens with Iron Fist fighting against all comers, while we get a flashback to show how young Danny Rand came to the magical hidden city of K’un-Lun after the loss of his parents (he had to watch his mother taken down by wolves, which sucks)…

Danny has now become a martial arts master in his own right, but the key to the issue is the awesome moment that finishes Danny’s final fight of the story, when he turns his fist unto iron and ends the fight with one punch, his “Iron Fist”…

What an awesome setup for the rest of the series, right? Well, here was the “problem.” Roy Thomas was actually really busy at the time (most notably writing Conan the Barbarian, the hit series that has always held a very special place in Thomas’ heart, as he was the one who got Marvel to license the character), and so he really didn’t have the time to START a new book like this, and Kane was only doing the book because Thomas asked him, so the iconic creative team of the series only did this one introductory issue, and they were gone (Thomas DID give the incoming writer, Wein, a plot idea for what would follow this issue’s cliffhanger).

Kane remained the cover artist for a while, though, and he did some amazing covers (Kane had become basically the main Marvel cover artist around this time).

If you folks have any suggestions for March (or any other later months) 2014, 1999, 1974 and 1949 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.