Immortal Iron Fist #17 - I would have preferred that Aja variant that's a take off of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly DVD cover, but it's not any big deal. New creative team! What'd they do? How'd they do?Danny is concerned about this "Only 1 Iron Fist lived past 33" deal, what with him having just turned 33 and all. Also, there are some bookkeeping irregularities with his holdings (never a good sign), and he's uncertain what he and Misty Knight have right now. At the end of the issue, he's attacked by the cause of the deaths of those Iron Fists, and things don't look particularly good for Mr. Rand.
When I was first reading the issue, something felt similar about it. On the way home, it came to me. This is like JMS' first arc on Amazing Spider-Man, only with a thus-far unnamed servant of Ch'i-Lin, instead of Morlun. It's not exactly the same, since this fellow and Morlun have different purposes, but it is a story about our hero confronting a being designed to treat him as prey. Which is fine. It seems to provide a solution to the question of how Shou-Lao can be undying, and keep popping up to be killed by the next Iron Fist. And it continues a theme of Danny having to clean up after Orson Randall, since he might have been better trained, and certainly aware sooner about what was coming if Orson didn't abscond with that book about the Iron Fists decades ago. I'll be curious to see how the advantages Danny has help him overcome his deficiencies.
As to the art, Travel Foreman's work worries me less than it did when I saw preview pages of it months ago. It's still rough, and at times I think he might be overusing shadows to obscure faces, but he does a nice job of giving people different facial structure, and his fight scenes are pretty well laid out. They feel well paced, and he's not overly reliant on double pages spreads, he works well sequentially, so that's good with me. Russ Heath draws a flashback to 1878, and I like it more than I did his section of the Orson Randall and the Green Mist of Death one-shot. I think part of it is the inking, which makes the figures stand out from the backgrounds more, but a lot of it is the colors. The colors on the earlier work were too light, too bright maybe, and I couldn't figure why they would be. Here the colors are more subdued, more realistic (in the sense everything in a craphole West Texas town looks kind of dusty), and it's more appealing to me.
So, not a bad first issue. I'm glad Swierczynski is starting with a 4-part story, rather than a 6-parter, since it encourages hitting the ground running, and I think this was at least a jogging start. So I won't be giving up on the title for at least another few months yet. How where your books?
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