Overheated Iron Doesn't Last

Iron Fist: The Living Weapon - Rage finds Danny Rand drifting through life, haunted by unfulfilled promises. Lots of panels of him staring blankly into space, or just going through the motions of his day-to-day life. He keeps thinking of his parents' deaths in the mountains near K'un-Lun, how he trained and killed a dragon to gain the power to come back to New York and take revenge.

Except the Howard Meachum he found was a shattered man, having already broken himself waiting for the sword to fall. So what did Danny get? A company he doesn't care about, a skyscraper that was destroyed some indeterminate time ago (~5 years ago our time, at the end of Immortal Iron Fist) he just leaves standing as a wreck, a mystic city he's supposed to protect that he never visits.

That last one's a problem, because the city comes under attack from a new foe, that's also an old foe. Or a couple of old foes perhaps. Danny doesn't know a thing about it until a small child shows up with a big package strapped to her back, begging him to return.

That. . .does not go well, in a lot of ways.

Kaare Andrews takes a real scorched earth approach to, basically everything from Immortal Iron Fist. Lei Kung the Thunderer is the new Yu-Ti? Nope, he dead. The new Thunderer, just one of many girls Lei Kung was training in secret to overthrow the previous Yu-Ti, gets perfunctorily blinded by Davos, who, the last we saw him, was trying to make amends by guarding the dragon egg until it was ready to hatch into the next Shou-Lao. Well, he backslid in record time.

The new dragon, somehow already very large, is beheaded. The city is burned to the ground. Davos chases the child to earth and slaughters a bunch of cops and other people in a hospital. John Aman, the Prince of Orphans, is hanging out in K'un-Lun when Danny gets there, even though a) he's the Immortal Weapon to an entirely different city, and b) he apparently didn't do shit to stop the burning and murdering.

He does expect Danny to take over as Yu-Ti, though what good that would do while the enemy is still out there I don't know. Moot point, as Danny destroys the Tree of Immortality in a fit of, you guessed it, rage. Danny's abdicating all responsibility to anything other than beating the shit out of people, but he failed at that, so what's left?

Andrews draws and colors the book, and definitely goes for stylish for effect. Characters as dark outlines against backgrounds of solid color. Lots of close-up panels on a fist striking someone, or blood spattering, or bones breaking, often colored like a photo negative. The fact Danny gets broken to pieces, forcing him to essentially pull himself back together from scratch, doesn't do much to dispel the Dark Knight Returns vibe the art gives me. The bit where the word "DEATH" is in the background, and sometimes are the panels themselves is a nice touch. The attempt to bring a real style to it works, I'm just less sure of the story that style is in service to.

Oh, and Andrews throws in that Danny suppressed memories of his mother having an affair with Harold Meachum prior to the journey into the mountains. Not sure what that added, other than some additional destruction of innocence. Andrews does repeated flashbacks that show that, actually, Danny was bullied by the other kids under the Thunderer's tutelage, and kind of a crybaby unless you taunted him about his mother. In which case he turned into a berserker. To be fair, Duane Swierczynski did the same thing in his initial arc of Immortal Iron Fist, having Danny kill a thing that killed Iron Fists by essentially just fighting like a pissed-off child.