jo duffy

There's no getting around it; Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist. the champion of K'un Lun, is an insensitively conceived character; a white guy who stumbles on an immortal race of Asian people and turns out to be better at their whole existence than them. That's the bedrock any creator has to deal with when crafting his stories. A similar challenge faces the blaxploitation-themed Luke Cage, who became Danny's partner in 1972 in Luke Cage, Hero For Hire, which became Power Man & Iron Fist, in order to save both characters from cancellation. Originally written by Chris Claremont, the book passed to Jo Duffy when he left to focus on the increasingly popular X-Men franchise. Duffy's solution to Iron Fist's problematic backstory? Make him an idiot.

We’re more than three years into the Disney era of Star Wars. Since 2012, when Disney purchased Lucasfilm for $4 billion and change, we’ve seen a new canon take the place of the old Expanded Universe, with two seasons of the animated Star Wars: Rebels; the release of the most successful movie in the franchise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens; multiple new novels and short stories; and the launch of a new line of Star Wars comics from Marvel. But Jedi and Sith have tangled in the Mighty Marvel Manner before. Marvel was the original publisher of Star Wars comics. Starting in April 1977 --- a month before the original film’s release --- and running until June 1986 for 107 issues and three annuals, the original Star Wars comic book was many things: zany comedy, thrilling adventure and, in its final years, a meditation on soldiers in peace time, all written and drawn by some of the greatest writers and artists in the industry. But before all that, it was a logistical problem.

In this week's installment of the X-Men episode guide, I mentioned that there was a comic from the early '80s where Power Man and Iron Fist, Marvel's mismatched mercenary superheroes, battled against a slightly off-model version of Doctor Who's Daleks. It's one of my favorite old-school oddities, but it occurs to me that some of you might not know about this, and that is a shame. I can't imagine g