Which Golden Age Superhero Origin Did Marvel ‘Borrow’ For Iron Fist’s Origin?

Welcome to the 923rd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In the first legend of this all-Iron Fist installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn which Golden Age superhero had his origin “borrowd” for Iron Fist’s origin.

A truism about comic book history is that when one comic book company begins to have success with an idea, then the other companies try to follow suit with their own versions of that same idea. This isn’t even always just when comic book companies have successes, of course, as the same thing is true when movies or TV have hits, then comic book companies will often try to do comic book versions of those hit TV shows and/or movies. For a particularly notable (and amusing) example of this monkey-see/monkey-do behavior, look no further than the hit Andy Hardy films of the 1930s and 1940s about a “teen everyman” that turned Mickey Rooney into one of the world’s biggest movie stars in the world. So MLJ Comics then came out with its own version of Andy Hardy, Archie Andrews, and when Archie became a success, every other comic book company launched its own Archie knockoff.

In other words, in the world of comics, everyone inspires everyone else, and then those inspirations then inspire OTHER works. For instance, the creation of Superman by Jerry Siegel was inspired by the Philip Wylie novel, Gladiator, about Hugo Danner, a child whose father experimented on while still in utero, and the result was Danner being born with tremendous super-strength, speed and unbreakable skin. Superman, though, of course, then inspired numerous other superheroes, as well (including a hero I just discussed in the last CBLR installment). That, then, brings us to today’s legend, how Bill Everett’s origin for Amazing Man was essentially “borrowed” for Marvel’s origin for Iron Fist.

Who was Amazing-Man?

In the wake of Superman’s debut, and the realization that there was a big market out there for original superheroes, the comic book creators who were involved in the then-nascent American original comic book industry (which included Bill Everett) were pressed to create new superheroes. I did a legend about how Bill Everett’s mother even wrote to relatives asking if anyone had ideas for a superhero for Bill.

The superhero that Everett came up with was called Amazing-Man, and Centaur loved the idea so much that it changed the name of one of its comics to Amazing-Man Comics, which was obviously a rarity for the time period (I think Superman #1 was literally the first comic book named after the hero)…

Amazing-Man was a man who (amazingly enough) was trained by Tibetan monks to have superhuman strength and speed (this was inspired by the then-recent film adaptation of the 1933 book, Lost Horizon, which introduced the concept of the secret Tibetan city of Shagri-La)…

the ability to withstand great amounts of pain…

and, because, well, why not, turn himself into green mist!

Amazing-Man became Centaur’s most successful superhero, running until 1942.

In 1970, Gil Kane talked about Bill Everett at a comic book convention, and he specifically discussed Amazing-Man:

Bill was one of my original inspirations…he was an artist of great facility, but more than that, he was an unparalleled storyteller. In the Amazing-Man, he did one of the most remarkable jobs of telling a story. You could follow the action so perfectly from panel to panel. The dynamic storytelling, the tension build-up, the action, the continuity of movement; all of these things were done so beautifully that you didn’t realize that you were looking at single frames. The writing on the Amazing-Man was just suberb. I always thought that Amazing-Man was so well supported that in many ways it could measure up against some of the things that Philip Wyllie did in his 1930 novel,
Gladiator
.

Let’s see why that was so important!

How did Iron Fist “borrow” Amazing Man’s origin, and how was it referenced in Iron Fist’s debut?

Last month, I mentioned how Roy Thomas was inspired by seeing his first Kung Fu movie to do a new martial arts superhero for Marvel (Thomas specifically had the name “Iron Fist” in mind). He asked Gil Kane to create the hero with him, and Kane agreed, but Kane wanted to use Amazing-Man’s origin as the basis for this new hero, and Thomas agreed (with his own twist on the concept, of course. And, again, as Thomas knew, Amazing-Man was greatly inspired by Lost Horizon ALREADY). Thomas was a fan of Everett’s work, and was even roommates with Everett for a while late in Everett’s life (Thomas also did a lot of great stuff for Everett late in the creator’s life. Thomas really tried to do everything he could for the comic book great before Everett passed away in 1973. It was very sweet).

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…

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…

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”…

Notice how the masked guy is even there from Amazing-Man’s origin? And then the cleverest bit of the story, Thomas and Kane specifically thank Bill Everett, who had recently passed away, a “Most Amazing Man.” Very clever.

Thanks to Roy Thomas and Gil Kane for discussing this stuff a number of times over the years.

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