Review: Iron Fist #78

At some point, there is going to be a psychologist in the Marvel Universe who is going to become very wealthy treating everybody who was in Las Vegas when Dr. Strange tried to fix everything. That list is going to include every superhero who showed up to help him out. Especially Danny Rand, who starts off having to confront everyone around him that he has failed to save.

Once Danny gets through confronting many of his issues without making a breakthrough, he wakes up on the streets of the new hellish version of Las Vegas run by Mephisto. He and Fat Cobra battle their way to the Hotel Inferno where according to the posters he is scheduled to fight 24 people in 24 hours.

Danny has plenty of failures to make up for and Ed Brisson (Old Man Logan, Cable, Prophet) sure is having fun running him through all of them. But the real problem with Danny Rand is that he can never seem to really learn from his mistakes. That may be a problem here, since this looks like it calls for more introspection than we are used to from this incarnation of the immortal Iron Fist.

I have to say that I get why Danny is having a hard time telling the people from the demons in Las Vegas. Damian Couceiro“s (Planet of the Apes, Irredeemable, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) art is pretty rough in places. I get that this is hell on Earth time, but his street fighting art remains pretty rough and while it fits well with the first half of the story, by the second half it is getting pretty tiring. He“s done sharper work in the past and I think this book could benefit if he tightened things up a bit here as well.

I guess part of my problem with the fights is that we are told a bunch of exotic names for all of the fighting moves Iron Fist and Fat Cobra use are but we never see anything that doesn“t look like a regular punch or kick. I get that these get hard to illustrate, but it does seem that they are just letting the text boxes do much of the work.

It looks like next issue should be the last in the hell-bound Las Vegas for Iron Fist and hopefully he“ll be able to bring some semblance of normalcy to it before he leaves. If not maybe we“ll get to see him do the flinging dragon snot and the unbalanced panda twist in one of his next fights. Overall, this has been a good story and an interesting tie-in to Dr. Strange: Damnation.

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Damian Couceiro
Colorist: Andy Troy
Cover Artist: Jeff Dekal

Author Profile

Andy Hall

Sent from the future by our Robot Ape overlords to preserve the timeline. Reading and writing about comics until the revolution comes. All hail the Orangutan Android Solar King!