This weekend’s belated superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at this Iron Fist adventure serialized in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. It was penned by Chris Claremont and though it features his X-Men foes the Demons of the N’Garai and a woman called the Firebird whose schtick resembles his later retcons to the Phoenix Force, the story ultimately sucks and is an incoherent mess.
It has the same charm to its awfulness as a bad movie does, so it’s enjoyable on that level.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #19 (Dec 1975)
Title: Shall I Love the Bird of Fire?
Villain: Dhasha Khan
Synopsis: Danny Rand (Iron Fist) is out at night in New York City. He sits contemplating the fact that this was his 20th birthday but he concealed that information from Colleen Wing and her father Lee. He reflects on his life up to this point and how he still doesn’t feel at home outside of K’un-Lun.
Suddenly he hears a woman screaming. He investigates and sees that a long line of attackers are preparing to gang-rape a beautiful young woman they’ve already stripped naked. Our hero takes on the would-be gang-bangers and knocks out all of them.
He then tries to comfort the woman but she panics at the sight of the dragon on his chest and mistakenly believes him to be an agent of a figure called Dhasha Khan, ruler of Feng-Tu, the afterlife for people who die in K’un-Lun – the mystic city where Iron Fist was trained – and its vicinity.
Iron Fist calms her down and gets her to the home of Colleen and Professor Wing, where the woman – called Jade the Firebird – starts to tell her story. (After Colleen and her father stop their recurring argument about him wanting her to stop the dangerous work she does alongside Misty Knight.) She only gets as far as stating that she was sent to find the wielder of the Iron Fist because he is needed.
Before she can continue, two Messengers Who Seize Souls (Kou-Hun-Shih-Cheh) enter the Wings’ home. They are called Ma-Mien the White Ox and Niu T’ou the Black, and they say Dhasha Khan has sent them to take Jade back to Feng-Tu where her soul will be fed to the Soul Slayer.
Iron Fist attacks the pair, joined by Colleen, who is swiftly defeated. Our hero continues fighting the Messengers and when he uses the power of the Iron Fist to finish them off, that somehow causes him and Jade to be transported from Earth to Feng-Tu. They are in the throne room of Dhasha Khan (right), who affirms that he is the ruler of this afterlife and states that he plans to strip Jade of her soul and have it damned forever.
Iron Fist declares his intention to defend her and serve as her champion against the Soul Slayer. Dhasha Khan uses his mystical powers to blind Iron Fist, then sics his throne room guardsmen on him.
Comment: I have no idea why Chris Claremont, at a time when he was using Master Khan as the current villain in Iron Fist’s full-color series, didn’t avoid confusion here by naming Dhasha Khan something else.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #20 (Jan 1976)
Title: Soul Slayer
Villains: Dhasha Khan, Silver Dragon and the Soul Slayer.
Synopsis: Dhasha Khan’s guardsmen attack Iron Fist and Jade the Firebird. Though blinded, our hero fights back against the armed guards, primed by Little Grasshopper-style flashbacks to when he was being trained by Lei Kung the Thunderer to fight blind-folded.
Iron Fist defeats all the guards and Dhasha Khan punishes the Captain of the Guard by utterly annihilating him with a blast of eldritch energy.
Next, this ruler of Feng-Tu orders Silver Dragon, his masked female warrior, to attack the still-blind Iron Fist. She begs Dhasha Khan not to force her to fight “HIM” but the sadistic master of this afterlife insists she must.
NOTE: It can’t still be considered a SPOILER this many decades later that Silver Dragon is really Danny Rand’s dead mother, Heather Duncan Rand. Because she died in the vicinity of K’un-Lun her soul has been in Feng-Tu since her death.
At any rate, the story does not want us readers to know yet what Silver Dragon’s true identity is. The masked woman knocks out Jade after Jade warns the unseeing Iron Fist about one of Silver Dragon’s attacks.
Silver Dragon defeats her blind son, then takes the mask off the fallen hero in order to look upon his adult face for the first time. She also tries to keep a locket she takes from her son’s body – a locket she owned in life, containing a picture of her husband Wendell Rand.
Dhasha Khan cruelly uses his sorcery to force her to drop that locket to the ground and crush it with a martial arts stomp, then relishes her tormented sobbing after the fact. (Any readers who couldn’t figure out at this point who she was were being pretty stupid – Feng-Tu IS a land of the dead, after all.)
The unconscious Iron Fist comes to, able to see and back in New York City, seemingly on the same night he and Jade were transported to Feng-Tu. A church before him suddenly suffers damage from a bombing. When the dust settles Danny sees that Jade is being attacked by a crazed and rabid mob who want her burned as a witch.
A priest inside the ruins of the church tries to stop the crazed mob but Marvel Comics’ female embodiment of Death shows up, telling the priest that his God is dead … and so is he (she blasts him to death). NOTE: This female embodiment of Death is the same one fruitlessly wooed by Thanos during the original Thanos War and is the same one who assumed the form of Deathryder in a battle with Ghost Rider.
Death then orders the rabid mob to tie Jade the Firebird to the altar and set her – and it – on fire, so that the Soul Slayer can then feed upon her soul. Iron Fist comes to her aid, engaging in a one-man stand against the seemingly endless numbers of the crazed mob.
He knows that numbers will eventually tell the tale but he is fine with dying if he must to save Jade because of his feelings of lust, I mean LOVE, for her. (C’mon, they just met earlier this evening.)
When things seem darkest, Colleen Wing shows up to fight at Danny’s side. Her father shows up, too, but it soon becomes apparent that he shares the mob’s bloodlust. He uses a sword to kill Colleen from behind, angry with her for defying Dhasha Khan by helping defend the Firebird. The enraged Iron Fist then kills Professor Wing in turn.
By now the mob has tied Jade to the altar, ready to be sacrificed, so our hero once again throws himself into their midst to fight off all of them. Death herself begins fighting Iron Fist, to leave the mob free to complete the ritual summoning the Soul Slayer. Once that entity arrives, Death mockingly departs, telling Danny nothing can save Jade now.
The Soul Slayer turns out to be a being of pure energy, like the Soul Drinker which Chris Claremont would use as a villainous servant of Emperor D’Ken over at The X-Men in 1977. Iron Fist does his best to fight the creature and ultimately strikes it with the greatest amount of Iron Fist energy he’s ever unleashed. The result causes what’s left of the church to collapse and kills the entire raging mob.
The shocked Danny approaches Jade, thinking that, despite all the death and destruction, at least he saved her. Jade sorrowfully tells him that he didn’t save her, however. The Soul Slayer took her soul as it fled. She turns to face Iron Fist and he sees that her eyes are blank, indicating how soulless she now is. Even worse, she tells our hero that with the Soul of the Firebird now taken away, Dhasha Khan can condemn everyone on Earth and in K’un-Lun to eternal damnation in Feng-Tu when they die.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #21 (Feb 1976)
Title: And When I Died
Villain: Dhasha Khan
NOTE: Though the cover refers to the Sons of the Tiger appearing in this issue, actually their series was already canceled and the White Tiger (Hector Alaya) had taken their place (and all three of their tiger amulets).
Synopsis: Iron Fist and Jade stand amid the ruins of the entire New York city block wiped out by the unleashing of the full power of the Iron Fist upon the Soul Slayer. She refuses to listen to his reassurances that they will still find a way to defeat Dhasha Khan. Her eyes are still blank, reflecting her soullessness.
From beyond the circle of destruction more savage mobs close in on the pair and again Iron Fist is drawn into battle with them. He gains an unexpected ally when a Caucasian archer in outdated garb starts fighting the rioters alongside him. Jade calls the man the Bowman and says he formerly protected her as Iron Fist is doing now.
(Instead of a caucasian bowman why not make him Yi the Divine Archer from Chinese Mythology? He even had a connection to K’un-Lun.)
As the battle goes on, Iron Fist has a Little Grasshopper style flashback to his childhood in K’un-Lun. Yu-Ti, the August Personage of Jade, was advising him on strategy. This particular lesson was about how an inferior foe can defeat a superior fighter by making that fighter engage in pointless side-conflicts, wearing themselves out and making themselves weak enough for their inferior opponent to defeat them.
Iron Fist at last sees the truth. He and Jade never left Feng-Tu. This New York City and the battles waged against the mobs have all been illusions inflicted upon them (and now the Bowman) by Dhasha Khan’s sorcery. He is wearing out our heroes by making them fight these side battles.
But the Bowman points out that with the Soul Slayer – which was real – having made off with Jade the Firebird’s soul, if Dhasha Khan now succeeds in killing her body as well, then all of Earth and K’un-Lun really WILL become inhabited by soulless, animalistic mobs like they’ve been fighting.
The trio race through the illusion of New York City, trying to find a way out of the mirage. They are periodically cornered by the mob and have to fight their way out. At long last the soul of Chuin, a man Danny knew – and saw die – when he lived in K’un-Lun, steps forward to lure Iron Fist, Jade and the Bowman out of the New York City facade and into the Throne Room of the Yama Kings.
Tuan, who in life was the previous Yu-Ti of K’un-Lun, is their spokesman. Danny sees them as Asian men in business suits and their throne room in strictly 20th Century terms. Tuan tells him that is because he still sees things through his living eyes and is still a victim to the illusions that Dhasha Khan casts.
The entity further explains that Feng-Tu used to be a paradise where souls could rest until they wanted to reincarnate in new-borns. Then awhile ago Dhasha Khan invaded and conquered them all, dethroning the Yama Kings and turning Feng-Tu into this hellish domain of conflict and sorrow. He enslaved and masked the woman called Silver Dragon (secretly Danny Rand’s mother Heather, but still being kept a secret from the reader) and all the other souls in the dimension.
Dhasha Khan wanted to rule over the living as well as the dead, so he set out to enslave the Firebird, the living symbol of the collective spirit of humanity. That spirit inhabited the body of Jade and sought out the wielder of the Iron Fist, the only one who might be able to defeat Dhasha Khan.
Tuan tells our hero to focus the power of the Iron Fist into his eyes for once instead of his hands, and he will see Feng-Tu for what it REALLY is, instead of the New York City illusion cast by Dhasha Khan. It works and while our hero is overwhelmed by the true, opulent appearance of Feng-Tu, Tuan has the Bowman draw his sword.
Jade argues with the Bowman about his clear intentions toward the transfixed Iron Fist and tells him she loves Danny. This arouses the Bowman’s jealousy but Tuan intercedes, telling Jade the only way a still-living being like Iron Fist can successfully clash with Dhasha Khan is to be dead himself. The Bowman, feeling a bit of distaste, uses his sword on Danny from behind. The narration tells us Iron Fist is dead before he hits the floor.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #22 (Mar 1976)
Title: To Storm the Gates of Hell
Villain: Dhasha Khan
Synopsis: Now dead, Iron Fist again encounters the figure of Death, who is now clad in an Iron Fist costume like his own. This time Danny loses to her and lapses into a form of unconsciousness. Time passes, then he wakes up on a plush bed beside Jade the Firebird in a bedchamber of the Yama Kings.
He is just a spirit now and Jade informs him that if they succeed in defeating Dhasha Khan, then eventually our hero will drink of the cup of Lady Meng. That cup contains her Broth of Oblivion and after drinking it he will lose all memory of his previous existence and his spirit will animate a newborn child to begin his next life.
Iron Fist eventually presses Jade to at last fully explain her nature and she agrees. Despite her seeming youth and beauty she is incredibly old and was alive in the distant past when the demonic N’Garai race ruled the Earth.
NOTE: These N’Garai are another Marvel Comics imitation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, like the Undying Ones over at the Defenders. Chris Claremont introduced the N’Garai in the pages of the X-Men and went on to use them very often.
Back to this story – the N’Garai used ancient humans as food, slaves, sex-toys, torture-toys, whatever their depraved desires of the moment demanded. At some point the One True God banished the N’Garai to their own dimension and recreated the Earth without the N’Garai’s presence polluting it. Jade was alive to witness the pre and post-N’Garai world.
Primitive humanity was savage and lustful and the day came when Jade’s human body was mortally wounded by a would-be rapist. As she lay dying the Firebird, some sort of benevolent, zoomorphic entity, joined itself to her body, healing it and keeping her alive.
Somehow this made Jade the Firebird the sustainer of humanity’s collective soul. (Claremont did not describe it very well. He rehashed and revised this whole “Firebird/ Phoenix entity which can attach itself to living beings” concept again years later with Jean Grey in the pages of the X-Men.)
Jade ends her tale by reminding Danny that her body will be dead within a few days if the Firebird is not restored to her, and that will give Dhasha Khan control of that Firebird and of all the souls of the living on Earth and in K’un-Lun. The two again pledge their love to each other and begin having sex while the jealous but seemingly resigned Bowman – who was eavesdropping until they started making out – silently wishes them both well and walks away.
The next day our heroes put their plan into action. Iron Fist uses his stealth abilities to overcome the guardians at Feng-Tu’s Gate of Demons. Jade and the Bowman surreptitiously join him there after he has taken the Gate. The Bowman will remain there to help keep the gate open for the approaching army of the Yama Kings. Meanwhile, Iron Fist and Jade will raid Dhasha Khan’s castle to try to retrieve the Firebird and reunite it with Jade’s body.
Danny and Jade reach the River of Hell and try to cross the Bridge of Pain which leads over it, only to find their way barred by the masked Silver Dragon, whom Iron Fist still does not realize is Heather Rand, his dead mother.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #23 (Apr 1976)
Title: Bridge of Sorrow, Bridge of Pain
Villains: Dhasha Khan and Silver Dragon
Synopsis: Iron Fist and Silver Dragon fight it out on the Bridge of Pain over the River of Hell, with Danny reflecting to himself that Silver Dragon’s voice sounds familiar even through her mask. While their battle goes on and on, Dhasha Khan stealthily approaches Jade and takes her captive. One of his officers arrives to tell him that Tuan’s army of the virtuous dead is swarming Feng-Tu because the Bowman kept the Gate of Demons open for them against overwhelming odds.
Dhasha Khan announces that he could not care less. Ruling Feng-Tu for these last several years was merely done in furtherance of his main goal – restoring his N’Garai masters to domination of the Earth. Now that he has Jade’s body AND her Firebird soul captive, he only needs to use the Spell of Spells to return the N’Garai to Earth.
Hearing that, Iron Fist redoubles his efforts against Silver Dragon, finally defeating her and knocking her mask loose. At last the readers (and Danny) are shown that she is Heather Rand, our hero’s dead mother.
We learn that after she died and found herself in Feng-Tu as it used to be, she still longed for her old life. Then when Dhasha Khan invaded and conquered Feng-Tu she agreed to serve him in exchange for the mask which shielded her from her pain. He then spent years teaching Heather martial arts.
Being forced to fight Iron Fist back in part two was rough enough for her, but now without the mask all her pain comes rushing back. Mother and son embrace and talk briefly. Heather refuses Dhasha Khan’s order to resume fighting Danny and lets him blast her soul to utter annihilation rather than attack her son again.
The furious Iron Fist and Dhasha Khan start to battle each other but the villain boasts that he has both sorcery AND martial arts at his command. He insists on fighting Danny where he will have the advantage. He teleports himself, Iron Fist and Jade back to Earth, where he still has his living body but our hero is merely an insubstantial spirit since the Bowman killed him earlier. It appears there is no chance that Iron Fist can prevail.
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #24 (May 1976)
Title: The Young Dragon Kills
Villains: Dhasha Khan and the N’Garai
COMMENT: If you thought this aimless tale, which kept contradicting its own developments and rules with each passing installment was making it up as it went along before, get ready for the ultimate shrugging of the author’s shoulders as Chris Claremont serves up an absolute disaster.
Synopsis: I’d been cleaning up some of the inconsistencies in my previous synopses just to avoid confusing you readers too much, but for this final installment I’ll put as little effort into it as Chris Claremont did and just summarize his half-assed story.
(One bit of cleanup I did was ignoring the way he had Silver Dragon seem to realize Iron Fist was her son for the first time last issue, even though it was clear in Part Two that she knew who he was and even wept about it.)
Back to the story, Dhasha Khan stands atop a skyscraper in New York City with Jade lying nearby him. Iron Fist’s spirit form hovers nearby as Dhasha Khan taunts him that the Spell of Spells has been cast.
He also holds up a fist-sized jewel he calls a Soul Gem, but it seems to have no connection to Adam Warlock’s Soul Gem or any of the others in the Marvel Universe.
The gem – or is it the Spell of Spells, Claremont? – causes the Earth below to revert to what it looked like in the ancient past when the N’Garai ruled the planet. Dhasha Khan says again that once Jade is dead there will be no human vessel for the Firebird to return to, so … uh, Chris forgot where he was going with this, I guess.
Iron Fist taps into the power of the Iron Fist to give his spirit solidity so that he can fight Dhasha Khan. So, Iron Fist ex machina is now a thing. Up until now, it was an entertaining writing crutch like Popeye’s spinach, called upon toward the end of every battle, now it can do anything the plot requires.
Iron Fist battles Dhasha Khan in a pure martial arts match, even though Dhasha Khan boasted that he could use magic, too, but for just plain no reason he simply doesn’t use it here. Danny is full of his own contradictions, like one minute claiming the power of the Iron Fist restored him to life and the next minute saying he is still dead and is having to struggle to keep his spirit form solid.
The Bowman suddenly appears from Feng-Tu because, why not? Dhasha Khan threatens to destroy the Soul Gem, an act which we are now told will destroy the Firebird within it but previously we were told Iron Fist and Jade had to try to free that Bird of Fire from the gem so that it could reinhabit Jade’s now-soulless body.
Before the Bowman can come to Iron Fist’s aid, Danny knocks Dhasha Khan off the skyscraper roof and he falls to his death … even though we were told in the first few chapters that he was already dead and that’s why Iron Fist had to be killed so that his spirit form could battle Dhasha Khan’s spirit form.
Iron Fist now grabs the Soul Gem before it can fall to the ground – or streets? – below. (We are never told when or how, but by story’s end New York City and the rest of the world are back to normal.)
Now the N’Garai tempt Iron Fist telepathically, promising him riches and power if he frees them. Even though earlier this issue Dhasha Khan said “the N’Garai are FREE!!” with 2 exclamation points.
Danny resists those temptations but fears that he’ll lose Jade if he reunites her body with the Bird of Fire. AND even though we’ve been told plenty of times – including earlier this issue – that her body will die “soon” if she is not reunited with the Firebird. And that would result in the loss of all of humanity’s soul, too. Somehow.
The Bowman attacks Iron Fist but is held off by our hero. Jade gives Danny a talk about how she hates the thought of losing him, too, but she needs to become the human vessel for the Bird of Fire again, etc. She goes on and on about their supposedly deep “love” for each other and Iron Fist at last turns over the Soul Gem to her. She extracts the Bird of Fire from within it and after a long kiss with Danny she assumes giant bird form and flies off.
Claremont now makes this slipshod “make it up as you go” ending even worse by casually tossing in a parenthetical reference that before she left, Jade restored Iron Fist’s body (which was still back in Feng-Tu at Tuan’s home) to life. Even more idiotically, to try to justify why Colleen Wing and her father aren’t really dead, Claremont tells us that the adventure just past was “like a dream” and that Danny and the Bowman are in New York City on the night it all began – the night of our hero’s 20th birthday. Hence, Colleen and her father are still alive.
YES, Claremont needlessly did that because he apparently FORGOT that he had already shown us back in Part Three that the Wings never really died. It was all part of Dhasha Khan’s illusion of New York City. He, Jade and the Bowman were really still in Feng-Tu that whole time.
Anyway, for the stupid cherry on top, Claremont now has the Bowman reveal that he is really Sir Lancelot from King Arthur stories. Oh, and he somehow knows that Heather Rand’s soul was not really annihilated but is going to inhabit a new-born baby with no knowledge of her past life. How that’s better than annihilation, I don’t know. He tells Iron Fist that he should feel honored that Jade bestowed her love on him, and walks off. The end.
NOTE: Chris Claremont just couldn’t let go of some of the formless ideas in this wasted 6-part story. Years later, when he retconned the tale of Jean Grey/ Phoenix/ Dark Phoenix, he moved away from the more meaningful tale of Jean further mutating into Phoenix, then letting herself die rather than risk losing control of her incredible power and wiping out a planet again.
He made it instead be that the Phoenix was really a “Phoenix Entity” that periodically inhabited human vessels. Like the Bird of Fire did with Jade in this Iron Fist story.
Oh, and the Phoenix Entity fell in love with Scott Summers through Jean’s memories, like the rushed way that Jade “fell in love” with Iron Fist here. Chris would use the N’Garai again, too, when he was writing for Satana, the Devil’s Daughter.
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