Once upon a time, Marvel Comics didn’t just have a roster of superheroes in its titles.  Back in the seventies, there were comics set in space, or featuring monsters, martial arts, or the adventures of a misanthropic duck.  Sure, all pretty much rooted in pulp traditions, but at least there was a broader remit than getting across the difficulties a typical Marvel superhero had battling bad guys and studying to be an architect and always futzing when it came to trying to impress that redhead. 

These days, comics sales are low.  And it’s a fault of the industry mainstream to a large extent.  Open stores that sell comics to comics readers, which is what’s been happening since the eighties, and pretty soon you end up producing comics that only people who read the damn things want to buy.  And with that audience ageing, where’s the new generation of readers going to come from if they weren’t able to buy comics at their local newsagent as kids?

Faced with this dilemma, Marvel and DC have pretty much opted to bury their heads in the sand and do minor variations on what they’ve always done, leaving it to enterprising manga publishers to capture the hearts and minds of younger readers with English language versions of their Japanese titles.  Along the way, (some) American comics have without a doubt become better written, and better pay for artists means they can spend more time on quality art than churning out pages as older generations had to.

Where has all this led us?  To Marvel’s revival of a 1970s martial arts hero called Iron Fist.  This time round, he’s written by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction.  Brubaker is a known quantity, and I’ve praised his work on Sleeper, Criminal and Captain America here before now.  Fraction…well, I picked up his acclaimed Casanova, and wasn’t blown away.  It’s very clever, no doubting that, but its influences are more than apparent and the story doesn’t transcend them to provide an emotional hit. 

I picked up Iron Fist because quite a few commentators were saying it was the best comic Marvel was publishing.  Hmm.  Well, it’s very good in some respects, but is it that good?  It all depends on what your benchmark is.  And a frightening number of comics readers have very narrow horizons indeed.  Iron Fist delivers a capably executed tale of a martial arts dynasty that spans centuries and touches on all kinds of pulp notions in the process.  Hidden cities?  Check.  Deadly babes?  We got ‘em.  Pulse-pounding action sequences?  You bet.    

To me, Iron Fist is what an average comic should be like.  I enjoyed it, from the arcane backstory to the art by a team headed by David Aja, with a bunch of guest artists including one of my all time favourites, Howard Chaykin.  It’s solidly entertaining genre fare, and there’ll always be a place in my heart for that.  But in no way is it something special: put it alongside Chaykin’s American Flagg, Mignola’s Hellboy, and pretty much anything Darwyn Cooke turns his hand to and you’ll realise the difference.  Only, the audience that praises Iron Fist to the skies is pretty much the same one that venerates Kevin Smith and Star Wars and really has no sense of scale or heritage about these things.

It’s the same with music: I grew up with The Waterboys, and hearing The Levellers some years later couldn’t help but draw comparisons that left the latter lacking.  But if you’re 17 and haven’t heard any Waterboys, then The Levellers will fill a similar space.  Same with The Cult and Led Zeppelin: no way can Astbury and crew touch the heights of Page and Plant, but until you educate your ears, you can be forgiven for rating the facsimile over the original.

By all means read and enjoy Iron Fist: I’ve had a lot of fun with the two collections I bought.  But whatever you do, please don’t mistake creators who are fanboys for pulp adventure with the best the medium has to offer.  Use Iron Fist as a springboard for checking out the work of cartoonists Will Eisner and Frank Miller, or filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.  That way, you’ll start to develop an appreciation for where this kind of thing comes from, what it can do at its height, and what you might be able to do yourself one day if presented with the opportunity that Brubaker, Fraction and Aja were handed to revive a trademark.