The Netflix show Iron Fist was about a billionaire kung fu master who did mostly stupid, boring things and couldn’t fight for shit. This wasn’t exactly a faithful adaptation of the comic book where he’s so good at fighting, but only against weirdly helpless idiots. Welcome, reader, to…
EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED WORDS…
ABOUT IRON FIST’S EIGHT MIGHTIEST FOES!
This is a revolutionary comic book character describing format where I’m both required and only allowed 100 words to describe each Iron Fist villain. To explain why, I once wrote an article about six, only six, Golden Age superheroes for Cracked and it was so absurdly huge we had to make it a two-parter (One, Two) and each one was by far the longest article on the site that day. I know enough about myself to know if I don’t have a hard rule in place for when to stop, I will never shut the fuck up about Drom the Backwards Man. And this is a Daily website, not a 20,000 Jokes About Drom the Backwards Man Every Six Weeks website. For instance, Drom the Backwards Man fucks by laying on a wet spot and waiting for a disappointed woman to fall on him and de-moisten. Drom the Backwards Man hates using public restrooms because peeing backwards means just inhaling a quart of urinal water with his dick hole. I mean, look at this nonsense. We’re still in the intro and I’m saying Drom the Backwards Man has to wait for some asshole in the Home Depot parking lot to back out of the dent in his car to figure out why he’s so pissed off.
Scimitar
There are three types of Iron Fist villains. One, a nonsensical thing only a madman could conceive of. You’ll see a couple of those here today. Two, a Chinese guy who knows kung fu, but if you live in a world with nine Avengers teams, two dinosaur islands, and 3,000 X-Men portals and you’re Hop Hsu, Chopsaki Crime Lord, your business card might as well say “Some Fucking Dude, Background Extra.” Three, the most common, is a normal guy holding a weapon and named after that weapon. Scimitar is a man with a scimitar and oh, that’s 100 words.
Montenegro
Montenegro is an evil mountain climber, which sounds like something Vince McMahon would shout at a WWF executive meeting right after the words, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up! I have the next great rivalry! Stevenegro is a good witch doctor and!”
Being a great mountaineer and having your own pickaxe isn’t nothing. If Montenegro was sent to kill a roofer or a family of woodpeckers, that’s a bloodbath. Unfortunately, the first thing he did was pick a fist fight with Iron Fist and Power Man whose powers are “fist fighting” and “immune to all manner of climbing gear attacks.”
Impasse
Impasse was arrested for smuggling and given a choice– jail or be used in germ warfare experiments. He, of course, chose ja– wait, he chose germ experiments!? Haha, okay, Impasse.
After things went very wrong, or maybe exactly as planned, Impasse became infected with a disease never explained. He escaped because the writer forgot freedom was part of his sentencing, and stole a gun that squirted little clouds of his own infectious germs. He basically had the same powers as a farting Charlie Sheen, so all he did was hope you got sick before you were done kicking his ass.
Warrant
Warrant had most of a face and a big gun and he looked like the 1991 winner of The Edgiest Comic Character of Mrs. Bunfield’s Pre-Calculus Class. He was the comic idea equivalent of unbuttoning one button of your overall shorts. He was like a government committee created an X-Man to promote corn whose only power was amyl nitrate awareness. Any nerds reading this will recognize the current sentence as the most vicious criticism any comic character has ever received, but Warrant looked like something that would make Rob Liefeld shriek, “No, mom, no! Don’t look! He’s not done yet!”
Fera
Iron Fist’s origin is he and his parents crash landed in the Himalayas. His parents were eaten by wolves, but Danny found a kung fu city and became their greatest warrior because white supremacy is built into everyth– you know, what? I’m not sure I have room to explain all that.
Anyway, 97 issues into Iron Fist’s comic, someone thought, “WHAT IF THE WOLF THAT ATE THIS GUY’S MOM WAS, LIKE, A WEREWOLF AND SHE CAME TO NEW YORK TO ALSO EAT HIM!?” Also, Fera’s weakness is very specifically Iron Fist’s iron fist making her the most perfectly stupid idea.
Drom the Backwards Man
Drom the Backwards Man is a man who, as a concept, exists backwardsly. The idea was far beyond its own creator, so Drom talks backwards and also decays anything that touches him because I guess that’s the backwards of getting punched? He literally begs, through a language-reversing gadget, his enemies to touch him because they’ll die.
As Drom’s story unfolded, he justified how he could even fucking exist with increasingly strange explanations like a mirror that un-reversed his chronal energy and a special machine that reverses food so he can eat and oh my god I’m at 100 words already?
Gideon Mace
Gideon Mace is a man whose name, hand, and superpower is a mace. And thank God because I still need to explain how Drom the Backwards Man somehow invented a field of science that reversed the timeflow of food and built a prototype machine that actually did it before starving to death. Oh, also, he was born an old man! It occurred to the writer Drom’s condition would cause him to burst from a birth canal as a 170 pound elderly man, then decided no, he should be a baby who then transfo– shit, I ran out of words again.
Discus
Discus, to his credit, owned a jetpack. But otherwise, yes, he was a regular man who threw a discus at his enemies, one of whom was extremely, famously discus-proof. Which leaves me 71 words to try to explain how when Iron Fist defeated Drom, he broke his own incredible chronomirror over his head while he begged for his life. Iron Fist watched the laws of reality mangle Drom into baby form and did nothing while this whimpering, backwards fuck had his shame and agony smeared across all eternity.
Unrelated to this, Discus thought, “I’m going to throw this sweet discus!”
