Originally posted by OneDumbG0
Jinzin, the dragon swoops down and whacks him. Simple as that. I told you Danny didn't try to defend himself, so reading rolling with the blow into the scene takes your assumptions two steps too far from the plain presentation of the comics. The comic pretty much ends with that and opens with him waking up, captured in a dungeon. Wolverine, Sabretooth, etc. would wake up without any injuries. Depowered Iron Fist with no chi reduced to a mere human? Not so much.Wolverine suffered from having no popularity in an Iron Fist comic? Chris Claremont and John Bryne were the creators of those Iron Fist comics and they were doing that and Uncanny X-Men concurrently. The 'Phoenix Saga' was ramping up and Wolverine was being showcased in those books. If anybody were going to portray the X-Men correctly, it would be the creative team that first made Wolverine popular. Especially since Byrne was Canadian. Wolverine was not as underdeveloped as you might think and he wasn't the victim of sloppy writing. I'd take Chris Claremont/John Byrne's version of the fight over your objections any day. So no, I don't think his "underdeveloped-ness" played a significant role in the fight.
Was it a factor? Perhaps. But you believe it to be such an intrinsic factor, that you would readily dismiss the canon fight entirely. In fact, you want to dismiss it so entirely that you actually would take a non-canon What If comic as being more valid. I don't agree at all. It doesn't take me more than half a second to disagree with that conclusion. If I flipped that kind of logic on you, you'd scream bloody murder and you'd be right to. And what you're ignoring as well, was this run by Claremont and Byrne was basically the first 15 solo issues Rand ever had. And most of his better feats that are contained in the Iron Fist respect thread come from after this run from the much longer Power Man and Iron Fist run. So if you want to really play this weak "underdeveloped-ness" card, you better recognize that it applies to Iron Fist even moreso. Which pretty much makes your reasoning moot.
It definitely does not play second fiddle to a non-canon What If story. Is it the end-all be-all between the two of them? No. We both know that Wolverine's become more skilled since that fight. But so has Iron Fist. A rematch today where Iron Fist isn't recovering or depowered, would be interesting.
I'm not discarding the fight though. 😕
I've never once regarded it as PIS, nor have I refuted that Wolverine was handled in that fight to a fair degree.
I simply don't think that it proves: Wolverine has no/little fighting skill or:
Iron Fist> Wolverine to a legitimate degree.
Iron Fist was better than Wolverine THAT DAY in THAT FIGHT. I think that's perfectly acceptable.
Inclusive of Wolverine's and IF's entire history, Iron Fist is a good enough fighter to keep Wolverine at bay for a bit as evidenced by his ability to stalemate DD and keep pace with Cap for a few.
But that fight ALSO isn't the deciding factor on Wolverine's skill when it doesn't come close to representing his standard majority nevermind his high end feats.
Since then, Wolverine has beaten those as skilled as Iron Fist, more skilled than Iron Fist and everything in between.
It simply stands to reason that the fight holds little validity over fleshed out versions of the characters. Otherwise Sabretooth would be a character who has NO skill.
We know that's not the case these days.
If you think that underdevelopment had nothing to do with the fight, that's your perogative, but I personally think you have to be under some fairly decent bit of denial to really believe that. And don't confuse points here, high feats and low feats for Fist are next to irrelivent for that fight, what's important is characterization...
By issue 15 Iron Fists skills were set, his powers were set, his history was explored to a degree. The whole point behind his character was to have him be that of a skilled fighter.
Wolverine on the other hand: His powers were not set, his skill not explored, his history completely unknown. The whole point of his character was to be small, fast, and ferocious.
As for character conception: Byrne has stated that had he kept writing Wolverine, Logan'd been as strong and fast as Spiderman, and mutated into a human from an actual Wolverine.
Claremont didn't like Wolverine when he started writing him, it's the whole reason why Claremont began the conception of turning Wolverine into a samurai spirited warrior to begin with.
Taking their version of the fight is one thing, and hell, I don't even have a problem with that, I didn't ignore what took place during the fight. But what about characterizations?... I would hope my opinion concerning such would be more valid than theirs was at that point given that I have 30 decades of information over their interpretation who was still yet to debut a history, a healing factor, and was intended to be Sabretooth's son.
Wolverine fought with more skill after that fight, he's fought with more skill in retcons before that fight (both after his character developed) the fights stands as a little hiccup in his long running history of owning asses but it's not indicative of his skill as we know it today. 😬