If you haven’t been following the daily comic reviews from when this came out, I’ve been doing a review of the “Last Iron Fist Story” arc from the 2007 version of The Immortal Iron Fist. Series numbering has become a bigger mess than trying to follow the Golden Age comics with all the renumbering, restarts, and namesakes. It’s actually kind of annoying. Anyway, I’ve been reviewing the story through a 2011 digital trade collection from comiXology. I don’t know if it was something temporarily marked free as part of promoting the Netflix show (the one people don’t like because they changed too much, something that is now how Netflix AND Marvel operate their adaptations) or what as I wasn’t a big Iron Fist fan in general but the specifics of this story really turned me off. It’s more my tastes than bad writing or anything.
I’ve already discussed that story, obviously, there is also an eight page story that was reprinted at the end of the title story, which is odd because it came out and takes place before that series. For the uniformed, Iron Fist was created in response to the 1970s interest in Chinese kung-fu films. These came in two forms: you had the American who learned martial arts to fight a bunch of baddies, or you had a regular all-Chinese martial arts movie, which is where Shang-Chi comes from, not the wire-fu mess Marvel Studios recently put out. “The Last Iron Fist Story” came out during the events of Civil War, one of those “Marvel heroes fight each other” type stories that usually disinterest me, only without the part where they end up banding together against the real baddies. Sorry, but I don’t want to see the heroes fight each other. I want them to fight the villains. That’s supposed to be the difference between superHERO and superVILLAIN!
Wait, is this the Civil War happening in the Marvel Zombies universe?
Choosing Sides is a one-shot set during that period, cover dated December, 2006. The comic features four Marvel heroes–Iron Fist, Venom, US Agent John Walker, and for some reason Howard The Duck, who you’d think would be the least connected to these events. Venom doesn’t have a secret identity and is a villain or at best anti-hero, I don’t know if John Walker was exposed as US Agent or one of the many former Captains America, and I don’t know that Iron Fist every bothered with a secret identity. At any rate Howard wouldn’t have to register with the Superhuman Registration Act because he isn’t a human and I doubt SHIELD would want to draft him into anything. Even ICE isn’t looking for him because he technically wasn’t an immigrant to 616; he was forced here.
It doesn’t matter because the only story reprinted in THIS trade was the Iron Fist story, again at the end of the story despite taking place prior to it. So let’s finish off this trade collection and read this story.
Iron Fist: “Choosing Sides”
WRITERS: Ed Brubaker & Matt Fraction
ARTIST: David Aja
COLORIST: Matt Hollingsworth
LETTERER: Dave Lanphear
EDITOR: Warren Simons
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BW’s Daily Video> Why Ditching Floppies For Graphic Novels Won’t Work
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Something I wrote in the comments when the video first came out (I really need to clean out my archive):
The “problem” with the floppies is that they don’t write comics in that style anymore. They write for the trade. Instead of making essentially a TV series they’ve opted to make a series of movies and then releases them as multipart episodes. What they should do is write a one or two issue story with a running subplot in their lives to tie them all together as a continuity.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on July 25, 2023 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comic books, Comics By Perch, commentary, Graphic novel, original graphic novel.
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