It's time once again for First Strike, exploring our favorite superheroes' first battles with their most famous villains! This week, the Armored Avenger takes on Marvel's own Lord of the Rings - the Mandarin!
(Originally posted on The Comics Bolt) It's time once again for First Strike, exploring our favorite superheroes' first battles with their most famous villains! This week, the Armored Avenger takes on Marvel's own Lord of the Rings - the Mandarin! By the time our story begins, the Mandarin has amassed quite the fearsome reputation, where even the highest-ranking Chinese generals dread petitioning him for help with their atomic science program - a request the Mandarin indignantly turns down. Meanwhile, the United States military has informed Iron Man of the menace of the Mandarin and ask him to find out more about him - a request Iron Man accepts. He heads to the Mandarin's secluded castle, only to find himself in a fight for his life against a villain with power, combat skill, and brains to spare. The Mandarin gives us only a taste of what he's capable of in his first story. Some might be especially disappointed by how little he uses his iconic rings in his fight against Iron Man, opting for hand-to-hand combat instead (karate instead of a Chinese martial art - you may commence eye-rolling) and the way he's taken down is...less than impressive. On another unfortunate note, the Mandarin was also a continuation of the "Yellow Peril" stereotype, a long-standing trope in Western fiction, and there's no getting around that. Still, he's obviously a villain with a lot of power at his disposal, and I'm sure the little we saw of what he could do only served to whet readers appetites for even more - and his later clashes with Iron Man were indeed much longer and more exciting that their brief fight here. Plus, there's a grandeur to the Mandarin that later stories would build on even further, making the character himself more memorable than most plots of the actual stories he was in, to be honest. It's no surprise that the Mandarin not only ended up as Iron Man's arch-enemy over the years, but a major threat to the Marvel Universe as a whole. In addition to Iron Man, he's also faced off against Captain America, the Hulk, the Avengers - sometimes allied with other villains, sometimes alone - and the X-Men, among others. Still, Iron Man is number one on his hate parade, although the reasons have changed with the political climate. Finding a reprint in a volume of Marvel Masterworks or an Epic Collection shouldn't be too hard, and well worth the effort if you want to see Iron Man's original encounter with his most persistent foe.
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