Over a year ago I visited Iron Fist: The Living Weapon. Being a working stiff has a way of distracting a person. Last weekend I returned to the title -- both the writing and the art supplied by Canadian powerhouse Kaare Andrews -- and got weepy reading issue #8. Danny Rand, a.k.a., Iron Fist, journeys to Diyu, the realm of the dead, to rescue his mother.
If the superhero is a nihilist fantasy of autogenesis, what does that mean for the mother? A couple weeks back I mentioned that the superhero comic book is a way for the adolescent to come to grips with the absorption of his childhood into the adult world. An example of this is the Batman origin tale, in which the primary event is the street stickup murder of Bruce Wayne's parents. Iron Fist's origin is a variation on this with a conniving, lustful business partner standing in for the stickup man, and the location, rather than the dark streets of a Depression-era Gotham, is the snowy, icy peaks leading to the mystical city of K'un L'un.
In the six scans below, Iron Fist fights his way through the demons of Diyu to find his mother. But when he tells her, "Come on. Let's go." She declines. There is no going back.
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