Iron Man #100

[iamrman]

Iron Man doesn’t even get a giant-size issue for #100. It’s just another fight with the Mandarin.

Comments

[dan_ingram]

Ouch.

Iron Man: You're basic, Mandarin.

Still better than his recent non appearances, lol. His rings have shown up more than him.

[thanekos]

The downside of the preferred styles of Iron Man stories being " Tony's ethics! ", and/or " technothriller " - nothing other than the MCU's figured out how to do anything with the Mandarin that isn't " cut-rate supervillain ", and they only did it cause they needed somebody to be Shang-Chi's dad.

[agharta75]

When Marvel found out Fu Manchu was still copyright protected, they had to use their knockoff instead if they wanted to keep their Bruce Lee knockoff Shang-Chi's backstory.

None of this reflects well on Marvel at all. Making "the Mandarin" actually an actor deliberately using stereotypes was an attempt to get something out of the mess, but then they had to ruin that by creating a real Ten Rings lord. It would have been best to leave all that in old comics limbo ("yes, they were all really Space Phantoms!") and forget "continuity".

[beyondthefringe]

What always baffled me, after reading about Mandarin's rings in the OHUTMU was just how versatile and powerful he was with all 10 of them. Ice, mind control, darkforce, disintegration, etc... it always felt like his power set was overkill on top of being a scientific genius/martial artist/warlord. And yet despite all of this, Iron Man regularly beats him.

Of course, separating the rings doesn't fare any better, since then you wind up with a whole gang, and gangs are like ninjas--the more there are, the less effective they are en masse. So you either get the Infinity Gauntlet problem, or the Infinity Watch problem.

[obsidianwolf]

Honestly I've always kind of felt the rings should have been written out of the story for good at the end of the Dragon Seed Saga since during the build up the Mandarin learned he'd been using only a fraction of their power and finally used their full potential only for his team up with Ironman to result in a big explosion that apparently killed the Makluan dragons who originally owned them and the Mandarin survived missing his hands.

It would have been a good stopping point for the rings.