Iron Fist

Danny Rand was nine years old when his father died on a mountain pass in the Himalayas and his mother fed herself to wolves so he could keep walking. What he walked into was K'un-Lun, a city that touches Earth once a decade, where he spent the next ten years being forged into a weapon. At nineteen he thrust his hands into the molten heart of the dragon Shou-Lao the Undying and came out with a brand on his chest and a fist that glows like iron in a furnace.

He came home to New York to avenge his father and found something better: a partnership. The Heroes for Hire shingle he hung with Luke Cage turned two struggling loners into the definitive Marvel double act, a martial arts mystic and a bulletproof cynic covering each other's blind spots for decades. Danny is the wealthiest of the Defenders and the least interested in acting like it.

Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction later revealed that Danny is one of sixty-six mortals to hold the title, part of a lineage stretching back centuries and tied to the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven. That turned a 1970s kung fu import into the keeper of a genuine mythology, complete with a tournament, a stolen legacy, and a predecessor named Orson Randall who had been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Marvel launched Iron Fist in Marvel Premiere #15 to ride the 1970s martial arts boom that Bruce Lee and the Kung Fu television series created. Roy Thomas and Gil Kane built him as a mystic counterpart to Shang-Chi, and Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over the solo book, giving Danny his most fondly remembered early run before cancellation at issue 15.

Power Man and Iron Fist rescued him in 1978. The Cage partnership ran nearly a decade and remains the character's commercial high water mark. Marvel then did something almost unheard of and killed Danny off in 1986, replacing him with a plant-creature duplicate, a plot later undone.

The Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction and David Aja in 2006 is the run that redefined him. It introduced Orson Randall, the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, the tournament, and the idea of an unbroken line of sixty-six Iron Fists, retroactively giving Danny a mythology as deep as Thor's.

Since then Danny has served in the Avengers, headlined Immortal Iron Fists and Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon, and eventually passed the power to Lin Lie, a Chinese hero who took up the mantle with a sword of his own.