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What If… Netflix's Iron Fist Was More Like a Buddhist Monk?

Published Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:30:10 -0500

Last updated Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:10:36 -0500

A year ago, comic book writer Marsha Morman — an American who has spent a lot of time living in the Himalayas, India, and Nepal, working in the Tibetan refugee communities and then helping refugees here in New York — got in touch.

Marsha told me about not being particularly happy with the depiction of Buddhism in the Netflix series Iron Fist.

Marsha asked me if Marvel Comics was likely to consider a more realistic version of the Iron Fist comic book that criticised the TV series. That if Danny really was a Buddhist monk, which means that instead of learning kung fu, he would have just spent a lot of time meditating and memorizing sutras, and when he gets back to America, when people ask him to use his Iron Fist powers, he just tells parables about the Buddha to explain the cycle of negative karma.

I said that this would be unlikely, but it sounded like the basis of a comic book op-ed piece which I would be happy to run on Bleeding Cool.

A year later, he got back in touch with that very thing… with a page drawn by Saul Haberfield.

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