Iron Fist debuted in the pages of 1974’s
Marvel Premiere #15, an origin tale from Roy Thomas and
Gil Kane that is a a mixed cocktail of borrowed tropes (with a savage chaser). We first meet Danny Rand — the future Iron Fist — as a child, trudging through Himalayan snows with his mother, his father, and his father’s evil business partner, looking for the fabled city of K’un Lun, a kind of Shangri-La that opens to the outside world only once per decade. In short order, Danny’s father is kicked off a cliff by his partner (evil, remember?), cartwheeling and ragdolling off the rocks while young Danny looks on … and then if that wasn’t enough, after Danny and his mother are abandoned to die, Danny gets to watch his mom torn apart by starving wolves before he is rescued by the warrior monks of K’un Lun.
It’s enough to make you yearn for a benign origin, like watching your parents gunned down in a Gotham City alley,
but this trauma is put to good use, as Danny is adopted into the mystical city of K’un Lun, and montages into a vengeance-fueled martial arts master,
eventually wrestling a dragon to the ground to steal the power of its heart,
and refusing the gift of immortality to leave the city on a mission of vengeance when the gates reopen a decade later.