Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon felt at first like a dry run by Marvel to give the titular character a chance to prove that he can carry a solo title like many of its heavyweights. In the end, however, it served to show Iron Fist fans how little understanding Marvel truly has of its own superhero who has been around for almost half a century.

From continuity issues like Pei’s age and Brenda’s change in outlook, to a misunderstanding of the Heart of Heaven, Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon tells fans to forget what we know of the mythos to be true and accept what is being presented to us as fact. Just suspend your disbelief for the sake of an action-packed adventure that will leave you breathless.

Legendary creator Larry Hama returned to a character he is all-too familiar with in Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon. Hama was the artist on Marvel Premiere (1972) #16-19, featuring Iron Fist’s earliest adventures. Hama was joined by fantastic artist David Wachter, known for his work on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as his penciller.

After years of waiting for a new Iron Fist series, fans of the character expected a lot from Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon, to see Danny Rand shine after a long layoff in which he merely appeared as a guest star in other Marvel Comics titles the past three years.

Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon #1 went on sale in January and it quickly took readers on a wild ride from the get-go. After six issues, the mini-series finally came to a close on June 9 with a shocking conclusion that left Iron Fist fans in a woozy.

SPOILER ALERT! This review contains spoiler material from Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon #1-6!

How Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon came to exist

“(Marvel) came to me with the idea, and we hashed it out and refined it over lunch,” Hama said about who initiated the story for Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon in an interview I did before the first issue came out.
Since Marvel was the one that had the original idea for the series, its main purpose began with them. This means that its overarching theme and the repercussions extending from the series were mostly, if not wholly, directed by them.

Given his connection to the character, Hama was a good choice for the job to write a mini-series on Iron Fist given his stature among comic readers. Fans revere him for his work on G.I. Joe and Wolverine, among others, and he brought attention to the title by virtue of his name being attached to the project. Had he been given the proper tools to work with, I believe he would have had a more credible take on the Living Weapon.

Wachter deserves credit for doing a great job with the artwork. The dragons and the settings are particularly gorgeous to look at as he clearly spent time putting as much detail as he can. In drawing the principal character, however, Iron Fist sometimes looks short (he’s supposed to be 5’11) and Wachter didn’t draw the mask particularly well at the beginning as it seemed at times that Danny didn’t have a nose similar to the Ninja Turtles.

All in all, the art was really good as Wachter was able to capture the mood faithfully and the characters’ expressions beautifully.

An action-adventure movie in comic book form

Hama’s plot for the series feels like a big, action movie that’s being told in comic book form. There’s very little pacing involved as the story moves briskly from page to page. If you want exciting action in comics, then Hama gives it to you every issue.

There’s a lot at stake as the big, bad villain called the Hierophant is taking the hearts of the mystical dragons of all the Heavenly Cities and is using them to make himself more powerful. He’s your typical villain who wants nothing more than absolute power to become the ultimate ruler of… well, you get it. He’s a new villain but one who seems to have time-traveled from the 70s and 80s comics.

We don’t know why he does it but we are merely expected to accept it.

Continuity is a fickle thing

The Hierophant’s right-hand servant is Brenda Swanson, whom we know from Iron Fist: The Living Weapon and the digital-original mini-series The Immortal Iron Fists both written by Kaare Andrews. Brenda seeks revenge on Danny Rand for the sins of Harold Meachum and the Rand Corporation for how they have wronged her mom and her.

It’s an unusual twist to the character who had given up on the revenge act, did her best to protect Pei, then rode off into the sunset on a dragon when last we saw her in The Immortal Iron Fists. Pretty cool, right?

But here we are in the present and it’s almost as if the only story that was considered for Heart of the Dragon was The Living Weapon ending and the editors forgot to inform Hama that there was a digital series that closed the circle on Brenda.

As for Pei, the young Iron Fist girl who is training under Danny and is like a daughter to him, she was de-aged to about eight or nine years old after appearing in The Immortal Iron Fists and Contagion by Ed Brisson as a middle-school-aged girl. Moreover, not once did Pei use her iron fist power in the series. It’s almost as if she didn’t have it at all. Perhaps it was Wachter who didn’t know that her iron fist should have manifested during fight scenes. Nevertheless, the editors should have caught that.

Speaking of the editors…

Furthermore, it looks like Hama misunderstood what the Heart of Heaven is. As beautifully as it was portrayed, the Heart of Heaven should not have appeared since the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven did not converge. Each of the cities appeared on Earth in different locations, thus, making it impossible for the city to appear.

Since Hama had been away from Iron Fist for a long time and this was Wachter’s first time to tackle the character, it was up to the editors to make sure that he was up to speed on the character. Unlike Spider-Man or Daredevil, there aren’t that many stories to catch up on with Iron Fist, making the editor’s job much easier than most assignments. And yet, Jake Thomas and Shannon Andrews Ballesteros failed to properly assist Hama and/or Wachter for this series.

The heart of the problem

There were guest-stars galore including Danny’s best friend Luke Cage, Gork the baby dragon Shou-Lao, Fooh, the Immortal Weapons, Sunspot, Radiance, Pinpoint, and Okoye of the Dora Milaje. Okoye is at the center of frustration by Iron Fist fans, not because of her character, but because of how she was used in the story.

She first appeared in the series in issue 3, and by issue 4 had virtually stolen the show from Iron Fist. Okoye was given a noble task by the dragon of the Heart of Heaven to take the hearts of the remaining dragons (including Gork’s) in order to battle the Hierophant. As the main protagonist of the series, Danny should have been given the task to take down the biggest, baddest dude in the story. It was perplexing why this honor was taken from him.

For a superhero who’s in need of redemption after the critically panned Netflix series, Iron Fist should have had the opportunity to be the hero of his own comic. The character could have used the image boost arguably more than any of Marvel’s street-level heroes. But here he is playing second fiddle to Okoye whose primary responsibilities lay in Wakanda, not in K’un-Lun or any of the other Heavenly Cities.

Danny Rand taking a back seat to a supporting character in his own comic was so much like what the Netflix Iron Fist series did to him when they had him surrender the iron fist to Colleen Wing. In fact, Marvel may have taken a page out of that series and followed that same line of thinking when they concluded Heart of the Dragon.
Needing more juice to finish off the Hierophant after her power upgrade from the dragon hearts was insufficient, Okoye is given an iron fist boost by Danny. She takes down the Hierophant which sends the hearts of the dragons back to the cities where they belonged. As Okoye prepares to return the iron fist to its rightful owner, Danny shockingly refuses.

“Not the way it works”

“That’s not the way it works, Okoye,” Danny says. “It’s yours now. And anyway, I wasn’t all that good at it in the first place.”

This statement is so out of character for Danny, completely baseless, and utterly contemptible on so many different levels for Iron Fist fans.
First, Okoye did not go through the trials to become an Iron Fist and cannot just accept that responsibility. Danny knows better than to just give the power away like that. The iron fist isn’t something that’s given to you just because you are “pure of heart.” It’s given to you because you earned it.
Take becoming a pilot, for example. While integrity is something that you value in a pilot, you can’t ask every person with integrity to fly a plane for you. Only the ones who have earned it by studying and training are qualified to be a pilot. Okoye’s heart could get her in the door, but it doesn’t give her the right to become an Iron Fist.

Second, there’s no rule that says Okoye was supposed to keep the iron fist after she received it. “That’s not the way it works?” Giving away the iron fist was never how it worked before and anyone with a basic understanding of the character’s origins and even its subsequent retcons ought to know these things.

Third, even if it was proper for Danny to give up the iron fist, he should have at least asked Okoye if she wanted the responsibility. That’s not an honorable way of doing it.

Fourth, Danny gave away the iron fist so nonchalantly that he seemed indifferent to it, as if it wasn’t important to him. In Ed Brisson’s Iron Fist (2017) run, a depowered Danny Rand was so downtrodden and desperate to regain the power of the iron fist that he went with a stranger to an unknown island just to get it back.

Fifth, why would he think that he was not “good at it?” Says who? Why this sudden melodrama that came out of nowhere? If this series was meant to give Danny a sendoff as the Iron Fist, then it was done poorly and sloppily. There was no setup at all in any of the prior issues nor even at the beginning of issue six that would have prompted the reader to think that Danny was tired of being the Iron Fist or was having self-doubts. This was a shocking statement that wreaks of the Netflix series’ doubting, whiny, and wimpy Danny Rand.

Thankfully and honorably, Okoye rebukes Danny, telling him of her own responsibilities which she could not just abandon, in stark contrast to one superhero in this comic who suddenly abandoned his own responsibility. Sadly, Okoye was written more honorably in this series than Danny was.

In the end, the Wakandan native returns the power of the iron fist to an egg that will soon become Gork the Undying, Shou-Lao the Undying’s ancestor it appears.

What will Danny do now since he’s no longer Iron Fist?

“Live [life] to the fullest,” Danny concludes.

So what was so wrong with Danny’s life? Again, we’re not told, we’re just expected to accept it.

It’s déjà vu all over again!

So Danny Rand doesn’t have the iron fist once more. How many times has this happened? Let’s see.

First, Davos took it from him in Marvel Team-Up (1972) #63-63 by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. He lost it again during the Iron Fist/Wolverine (2000) mini-series to Junzo Muto, then got it back in the Black Panther (1998) series by Christopher Priest. There’s the start of Iron Fist (2017), then he lost his hand and not just the iron fist in the digital-first series Iron Fist: Phantom Limb (2018). In Jason Aaron’s Avengers (2018) run, it was taken from him by Moon Knight.

That’s five times for those of you counting at home.

Now in 2021, we have this. One has to wonder if Hama and the editors thoroughly reviewed previous storylines involving Iron Fist. It’s almost as if they thought it was an original idea to take his mystical power from him. Without meaning to, they have made Danny look irresponsible for not being a good steward of such immense power that was entrusted to him.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Netflix series which did basically the same thing in season 2 and angered many Iron Fist fans like myself. Marvel should have learned its lesson by now that there are fans of the character who care about what they do to him, especially when he’s given the same kind of treatment over and over again.

A new Iron Fist? What’s wrong with the existing one?

So now, Danny’s not an Iron Fist and no one is. We have to wait for the egg to hatch and for someone to win another set of trials to become the champion of K’un-Lun. Much to our dismay, it looks like Marvel will set up someone else to become the next Iron Fist. It feels as if the powers-that-be are trying so hard to distance themselves from the Netflix series because of its poor reception, not realizing that they’re doing the exact same thing and alienating longtime Iron Fist fans. But this time, I suspect they want another character to wear the mantle who will be introduced in the MCU in the near future.

The last few pages of Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon destroyed Danny Rand just like the Netflix series did. As a longtime reader, I have been a fan of both the superhero and the man underneath the mask since 1983, and it pains me to see the Iron Fist I grew up with being treated this way.

I like that we have many other Iron Fists prior to Danny including those that will come after him (like Pei). It gives the fans their choice of which Iron Fist to like and follow. I know many who are huge Orson Randall fans and Wu Ao Shi fans, and that’s fine.

But to send Danny off into the sunset as the current holder of the Iron Fist title in this way is just disrespectful to the character, his fans, and creators Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. Thomas and Kane created a fantastic world full of characters that lived and breathed for decades, and at the heart of it is Danny Rand. He was a strong and highly determined individual who stopped at nothing to become the ultimate Living Weapon. While his intentions were less than pure at the time, his nobility would be in full display when faced with a moral dilemma. He showed mercy on Harold Meachum, the man who killed his father and essentially left him and his mother for dead, thus setting himself on a path to becoming a true hero.

In contrast, there is nothing noble about the Danny Rand that we see in the concluding pages of Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon. All we see is an irresponsible, ungrateful, and happy-go-lucky adult who’s acting like a kid who wants to rid himself of a burden on his back. The series discarded every personal growth the character had in all of his previous series and made him a detestable and immature character.

Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon is not an Iron Fist story. It’s a story that was made to do one thing and one thing only—to replace Danny Rand as the Iron Fist. The plot was just a means to an end and what a dishonorable end it was.