Power Man and Iron Fist, v. 1: The Boys Are Back in Town

Collects: Power Man & Iron Fist v. 3 #1-5 (2016)

Released: September 2016 (Marvel)

Format: 112 pages / color / $15.99 / ISBN: 9781302901141

What is this?: Luke Cage and Iron Fist help an old friend by “recovering” a necklace, but the necklace is enchanted, and the old friend uses it for a crime spree. Plus: Are Danny and Luke back together? Like, for good?

The culprits: Writer David Walker and artists Sanford Greene and Flaviano

In Power Man and Iron Fist, v. 1: The Boys Are Back in Town, everyone is obsessed with whether Luke Cage and Iron Fist (Danny Rand) are back together. Have they reunited? They’ve been working together; obviously they’re back together. Why don’t they just admit it? The story is as relentless with questions about their relationship status as a ’shippers’ message board.

Back in Town is obviously attempting to cement Power Man and Iron Fist as a big deal in the Marvel Universe, even though it’s uncertain whether Luke Cage is Power Man any more. (The presence of a new Power Man, even one who has worked with Danny before, is not a barrier to Luke reusing the name, a fact pointed out by two Spider-Women as they watch the duo fight second-rate villains.) The book is pushing the importance of Power Man and Iron Fist as heroes, as everyone — fans, villains, other heroes, and Luke’s wife — are speculating on the two reuniting with differing levels of enthusiasm.

I’m not saying Power Man and Iron Fist aren’t cool. I’m saying the duo have never seemed that popular within the Marvel Universe.

But on the other hand, writer David Walker and artist Sanford Greene, who draws #1-4, undercut that idea. Everyone acts as if Luke and Danny are a big deal, but the magical item that fuels the first arc is specifically one that only works with powerless wielders. The villains the pair fight are low-rent at best; as much as I enjoy Gorilla Man (Arthur Nagan version), he’s not someone you throw at a hero you’re trying to show is important.

Rather than representing the book Walker’s trying to sell to readers, Greene’s art does a decent job representing the book as it is. Greene’s art does not depict a world of front-line superheroes. I admit Green’s Cage dresses sharply; he’s certainly a cut above everything else in the book, although he’s not dressed like a hero. On the other hand, I have no idea why Iron Fist is wearing a high-collared track suit. Overall, the art has a loose, non-mainstream look to it, one that exaggerates violence by making recipients of punches rubber-faced. This is the look of a book that’s on the fringes of the Marvel superhero universe. It’s not low quality, but it’s not a look that says, “This is a book featuring two very popular heroes in it.”

Even colorist Lee Loughridge contributes to this diminution of the leads. The world of Cage and Iron Fist isn’t decorated with the bright colors of superheroes or even strong, clear colors. The pages are muddy and grimy: mustard yellows and browns, muted purples. Even Danny is not in his usual colors; instead of his usual green costume or the white one from the previous volume of PM&IF, he’s wearing a reddish-brown tracksuit. It’s not even the bright red of that his costume turns when he turns evil. Its color is too boring to say anything about Danny — except, perhaps, that he’s boring, and that’s not what anyone wants.

The actual story has Luke and Danny helping their former office assistant, Jennie Royce, after she is released from prison. After being thrown in prison for murdering her abusive boyfriend, Royce asked for Iron Fist’s help in the previous Power Man and Iron Fist series, one that featured Victor Alvarez, the second Power Man. The duo discovered Royce was possessed at the time; the story ends with Danny saying She-Hulk, who is a lawyer, “almost guaranteeing an acquittal.” Back in Town glosses over this, mentioning the possession and murder a few times but never mentioning what book the story appeared in.

Oops! Looks like She-Hulk spoke too soon (although it also looks like everyone’s forgotten what she said). Jennie’s out on probation, not acquitted, and she wants Luke and Danny to get her grandmother’s necklace back from Tombstone. They take it back easily, but instead of being a family heirloom, the necklace is a magic device that gives power to the powerless. Luke and Danny have to deal with the consequences of that, with Danny willing to rob a gangster on her say-so and not believing Royce lied to them. (In the previous volume, he’s willing to believe Royce killed her boyfriend; he investigates before giving his opinion on Royce’s innocence. Perhaps that’s why the previous volume isn’t footnoted.)

This book has a glimpse into the secret world of supervillains that I’ve wanted for quite some time now. The world in Back in Town is a lovely slice of New York inhabited by villains who communicate with each other, spread rumors, and generally complain about each other and heroes. I want to read more of this world in which people know the villainess Nekra by her first and last names (Nekra Sinclair), where Tombstone has two incompetent henchmen who can’t understand his whispering speech, where a strip-mall wizard named Señor Magico calls Dr. Strange a “pendejo” and claims he knows much more than the Sorcerer Supreme. The book also brings back Black Mariah as Royce’s partner-in-crime, and it’s a good choice; her previous (rare) appearances indicate she’s exactly the right person to help Royce: underestimated, familiar with New York’s gangs, and on the lookout for quick grabs for cash.

On the other hand, it’s not that Luke and Danny are dull, but when they are the only two characters on the page, the book gets a little less interesting. The villains get all the best lines, naturally. Luke’s minced oaths, like substituting “fiddle-faddle” for curse words out of his wife’s concern for their daughter’s vocabulary, are funny, but they aren’t enough to cover the pair’s squabbling about whether they are a couple again. A team! Not a couple. A team.

Luke’s wife, Jessica Jones, is a problem in Back in Town. For the first three issues, she’s a shrew, complaining about her husband destroying his shirts while accompanying Danny. It’s sitcom characterization; she’s the nagging wife of every screw-up husband in every sitcom ever. Matters improve somewhat in the two issues, but she’s in a total of two panels in those issues, so it’s hard to say definitively that she’s turned a corner.

Royce is a problem as well. Her powerlessness is a major part of the story; the necklace won’t work for someone who has power. We’re supposed to feel some sort of connection to Royce’s plight, but we’re not given enough time and information to build that relationship with the character, especially given how little we’re informed about the story in which she was incarcerated. (The book seemed to have enough room for this line of development.) What little characterization we get about Royce suggests not that she’s a figure who should be pitied for how she’s been pushed around but someone who has willingly decided to pull a caper after her release, inspired and abetted by better criminals she met in prison. The book tries so little to tie her to Danny and Luke’s past that we never see her in the same flashbacks as the Heroes for Hire. Danny feels guilty about her time in prison; that’s clear. But what Royce feels is more ambiguous, and not the good kind of ambiguous.

Despite all the negative things I’ve said about Back in Town, I enjoyed the book overall. I’m looking forward to the second volume, where hopefully the will-they / won’t-they nonsense and the bad Jessica will be gone and the ground-level villainy and heroism will be front and center. (Also: stop trying to convince me about how important the characters are.) With all the shortcomings the book has, though, I’m not sure I can recommend it until the second volume shows which way the series is going to go.

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

Power Man and Iron Fist: The Comedy of Death

Collects: Power Man and Iron Fist (v. 2) #1-5 (2011)

Released: November 2011 (Marvel)

Format: 120 pages / color / $16.99 / ISBN: 9780785152477

What is this?: Iron Fist tries to clear the name of his former secretary, Jennie Royce, with the help of his student, the new Power Man.

The culprits: Writer Fred Van Lente and artist Wellinton Alves (with help from Pere Perez)

A few reviews ago I mentioned zombie comics titles — the ones that go on forever without direction or life animating them, published simply because they were always published.

That species is almost extinct. What is still common is the unkillable concept. I’m using the word “concept” in a loose sense; usually it’s a team or character name or a comic title that has been used over and over again for decades without ever being popular enough to graduate to the ranks of the A-list titles or become a zombie. Copyright renewal, I’ve heard, is the reason for the recycling of these names, and publishers do seem keen to hold on to those copyrights.

At its worst, these unkillable concepts result in eternal retreads of “getting the band back together” setups in which the title character(s) pop up in the shipping schedule and expect to be taken seriously again. Punisher gets away with this, for some reason, but no one cuts Defenders that same slack. Or maybe the worst are the new titles in which only the names are the same, such as Scott Lobdell‘s widely panned Alpha Flight relaunch in 2004. Most split the difference, making slight changes and having fans ask, “Where’s the hook?” (Sometimes in a literal sense, in the case of Aquaman.)

Power Man and Iron Fist: The Comedy of Death is actually only the second go-round for the Power Man & Iron Fist name, but the concept has been around for 35 years, and the duo headlined Heroes for Hire in the ‘90s. In Comedy, however, writer Fred Van Lente seeds the story with elements from the classic ‘80s run of the title while integrating a new Power Man, teenager Victor Alvarez, into the story. Victor has powers similar to those of the original Power Man, Luke Cage (superstrength, resistance to physical injury), and he’s the son of one of Cage’s old villains, Specs. Iron Fist decided to take him on as a student, teaching him how to focus his powers more effectively. Why did he do this? I don’t know. Are his connections to Cage significant? They don’t seem to be, although I don’t know for sure. I suppose it’s my fault for not having read whatever storyline Victor was introduced in — Shadowland, I believe — but screw that noise. I can’t read everything.

Van Lente has a lot of fun with the new Power Man. Victor gets all the best lines in the book, and his natural teenage impetuousness and sense of morality allows him to move the plot along in ways the reserved Iron Fist cannot. When Iron Fist hesitates to help his former secretary, Jennie Royce, prove she did not kill Crimebuster, a competing hero for hire and her lover, Victor forces the issue. He has a strong sense of wrong and right and a modern sensibility that clashes with Iron Fist and his training in a way that Luke Cage no longer can.

Victor’s most memorable quips are reactions to Comedy‘s bizarre villains and supporting cast. Van Lente’s weird ideas should be the envy of his contemporaries; they manage to be memorable and enjoyable without being so stupid they break believability. The most outlandish is the Commedia dell’Morte, a Renaissance commedia dell’arte / burglary troupe who had the misfortune to rob Baron Mordo; the master of dark arts bound their souls to their masks and forced them to murder once a day, so they became international assassins. Pokerface has a less complex backstory but a more compelling visual; he is a gambler who literally has a poker driven through his skull, with the point emerging from his face. Tiowa Bryant, one of Victor’s classmates at Alison Blaire School for the Performing Arts (go Dazzlers!), constantly speaks in ‘20s slang and dresses like a flapper.

After that, Noir, a vigilante out of for revenge for the death of a Muslim cleric, seems normal, despite her use of darkforce bullets. This also has the unfortunate side effect of making the Divine Right, a white supremacist prison gang, seem mundane, even if they are an excellent choice for Power Man & Iron Fist villains.

There are some odd choices, though. Allow me to list the ones that stand out so much they make the plot stop dead, as if it were looking at Van Lente and saying, “Even I think that’s a bit too much”:

• The Don of the Dead — a Mexican Day of the Dead-themed organized crime boss — has a great name, but every speech bubble out of his mouth reads like an ethnic stereotype.
  
  
• El Aguila pops up for one scene. Why? He was a supporting character, both as an ally and a rival, during the original Power Man & Iron Fist run, but he seems to have no purpose in this book but to remind readers that he existed and still exists.
  
  
• I find it hard to believe that a high school named after Dazzler would succeed in the Marvel Universe, given its virulent anti-mutant prejudice.
  
  
• Tiowa draws Victor’s attention to a black-market auction Web site named “Twilight Idol.” It’s an awful name, as if somebody wanted a name freshmen girls in high school would react positively to.
  
  
• The main villain of the piece — Joseph Duffy, a.k.a. Gerry Kammill — is named after Jo Duffy and Kerry Gammill, a writer / artist team on Power Man & Iron Fist in the early ‘80s. Van Lente likes to link Comedy to that era, but naming two creators after a racist, murdering thug seems an odd tribute.

Still, Van Lente gets away with these digressions. Referring to Power Man & Iron Fist‘s and Marvel’s history is a nice nod to long-time readers, and other than El Aguila’s appearance, none of them take up much space. No one takes the Greeked name of comic-book products and services very seriously, and Van Lente tells the entire story with his tongue placed so firmly in cheek it’s impossible to believe that anything about the Don of the Dead is meant seriously. A good sense of humor goes a long way, and anyone who reads this (or Van Lente’s other work, such as Incredible Hercules) knows he’s got quite a sense of humor.

However, less forgivable is the resolution of the story. By the time the final issue rolls around, Van Lente is scrambling to wrap things up. Victor’s personal issues are dropped; nothing about Victor’s family — his dead supervillain father and his pacifist, hardworking mother — is mentioned outside of issue #2. In fact, his mother’s only appearance is in two pages of #2, despite Victor still living at home. The identity of Noir, a major plot thread in Comedy, is revealed in an “oh, by the way” narrative box after the rest of the plot is wrapped up, and it turns out that Noir is a character who hadn’t previously appeared in the series. The main goal of Pagliacci, the leader of the Commedia, was to get his beloved Columbina back, but when Iron Fist frees the latest Columbina from the mask, he doesn’t resist. (Pagliacci does get the mask, though, so I suppose she shouldn’t be hard to replace.) But Iron Fist’s romantic relationship with Joy, the woman he freed from possession, is stopped there, despite it not being developed enough for us to unequivocally believe it will survive the trauma. Power Man and Iron Fist seem to let the Commedia dell’Morte — a band of international assassins, mind you — escape rather than imprison them or free the people whom the masks have possessed. Jennie is still in prison at the end of Comedy, waiting for her new trial. And then, in the middle of issue #5, there’s a panel with a sniper putting Iron Fist in his crosshairs, and it’s never mentioned again. I suppose we should assume Iron Fist is too good to be taken out with a bullet, but if that’s the case, what opposition can the Divine Right, a bunch of normal humans, give Iron Fist?

The series really needed a sixth issue. Did Van Lente run out of space, or did a planned sixth issue get axed? I don’t know.

Wellinton Alves is given the task of making the absurd visuals, such as the Commedia and Pokerface, look weird but not laughable, and he succeeds. Pokerface’s gruesome wound and his faceless, playing-card themed servitors are a particular triumph. He also does a good job shifting between action and talky scenes. I’ve never seen Alves’s art before, but I’m looking forward to more of it. His grittier work clashes with Pere Perez’s assisting pencils on issues #2 and 3; Perez’s style is more manga-influnced and could work on its own — an Iron Fist series, perhaps. But his Iron Fist is too youthful and fresh faced compared to Alves’s, and his light, clean artwork clashes with panels like the ones that show Pokerface’s disfigurement or Power Man’s big fight scene.

I want to like Comedy a lot. I like Van Lente, I like Alves. I like the weirdness and the light-hearted vibe. I like Iron Fist having a new role in the Power Man / Iron Fist partnership, and I really like the new Power Man. But I don’t think the story holds together well enough or has enough room to do with it sets out to do; rather than being very good, it has to be content with “good, but flawed.”

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

Essential Power Man and Iron Fist, v. 2

Collects: Power Man & Iron Fist #76-100 and Daredevil #178 (1981-3)

Released: March 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 624 pages / black and white / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785130727

What is this?: A two-year slice of early ‘80s street-level Marvel superheroing, featuring the Heroes for Hire: Power Man and Iron Fist.

The culprits: Writers Mary Jo Duffy, Denny O’Neil, and Kurt Busiek and pencilers Denys Cowan, Ernie Chan, and Kerry Gammill, with many other writers and artists

When people get nostalgic for the early ‘80s, Jim Shooter-era Marvel, they don’t often wax nostalgic about Power Man & Iron Fist. (Not in my experience, anyway. I’m sure there are corners of the Internet where that is exactly what happens.) But in many ways, Essential Power Man & Iron Fist, v. 2, is part of the bedrock of that time.

Power Man & Iron Fist has its flaws, but it was a second-tier book that kept chugging along, month after month. Once past Cage’s “Sweet Christmas!” (not much in evidence here) and jive, there’s not much laughable about the title, unlike Dazzler or U.S. 1. Every month is a solid story — well short of unforgettable, usually, but rarely disappointing. There was a consistent supporting cast, well used. The villains … OK, these were mostly second-tier, and even with Sabretooth, you know no one had figured out quite what to do with him yet, other than use him as an Iron Fist villain. But these villains were appropriate to the heroes, they had a score to settle, and they frequently had an interesting hook or visual.

The writers all have solid credentials in similar low-powered superheroes, although Kurt Busiek found his success a little later than Denny O’Neil and Mary Jo Duffy’s best-known writing is probably Power Man & Iron Fist. The artists are nothing to sneer at either, although Ernie Chan is better known as the inker for Conan than a penciler and neither Kerry Gammill nor Denys Cowan are current superstars or objects of nostalgic veneration.

There is no overarching plot for the volume, of course; there never is in an Essential. So let’s talk about the writers. Duffy uses humor well, rarely letting it get in the way of the plot (except for #79, which is essentially a Doctor Who story, with a cut-rate non-licensed Doctor Who). Unsurprisingly, she’s also the most deft with the largely female supporting cast. O’Neil, who takes over with #85, does away with Duffy’s last shocking change — the scarring of Harmony, a fashion model and Cage’s girlfriend, as soon as it is safe — and … well, I’m not sure what to say about his run, which lasted until #89, except that it’s mainly forgettable: a couple of adventures outside New York, a rescue of Moon Knight, an anti-drugs story. Very ‘80s, in its way, I suppose.

Busiek takes it the rest of the way (except for #91, written by Steven Grant), but this isn’t the Busiek we know from Marvels or Astro City. He’s unpolished here, indulging in legacy characters by bringing back the ID and gimmick of Chemistro and picking up on hints from the O’Neil run that Luke might not be looked upon kindly by his Times Square neighbors. That’s an interesting idea, but he conflates the scum of Times Square, who might want to kick a hero out of their midst, with the African-Americans who think Cage is too white. (The word “Oreo” is used a lot.) Both those groups are wrapped up in the newest Chemistro, who is black and promises to keep the area safe for criminals — not like that Cage, who works with the po-lice. There’s a good story about the heroes escorting Hammerhead to a different prison (although why do they have to ride on the top of a truck to do it?), and Busiek does manage to keep a group of subplots moving forward quite ably, wrapping them up in the double-sized #100.

Gammill supplies the best art in the volume. His pencils are sharp, vivid, and kinetic, and for readers, it’s a shame he only stays on for only for only three issues, #77-9. In many ways, this style of art is underappreciated: without enough tics or exaggerations to be memorable, it has to settle for an understated excellence. Cowan’s style suffers from the black-and-white reproduction and a series of inkers; I remember his work being much better in color in the original issues. The inking of Carl Potts, who finished almost half Cowan’s work on the title (#80-4, 86-90, and 92-3), does him no favors, and that and the lack of color sometimes makes it difficult to make out details with his scratchy style. Chan works #94-100; his art starts off stiff, but it improves greatly when he stops inking his own pencils.

Some call it mediocrity, others consistency. But most of us who enjoy comics from that era can’t quite put our fingers on what to call it; we only recognize it has a familiar feel, comforting without being exciting. This isn’t probably the best way to spend your $20 — and don’t think I haven’t noticed that price increase, Marvel; you’re on notice — but most readers won’t regret the time or money spent with this volume.

Rating: (3 of 5)