Iron Fist Creator Roy Thomas Hits Back At Cultural Appropriation Claims For Netflix Show

The Creator of Danny Rand Speaks

♦Over at website Inverse, Iron Fist creator Roy Thomas speaks about the accusations that Netflix’s Iron Fist show is guilty of cultural appropriation and what else he’d like to see on the show. Thanks to bleeding cool for bringing this to our attention…

How involved have you been with the creation and execution of the upcoming Netflix show?

Not at all. Marvel doesn’t really ask me or most other writers, unless they’re also producing the show or something like that, for any input. I just find out about it after the fact and eventually collect some money for it. And that wouldn’t have happened until the last few years because Marvel didn’t do that. Of course, they didn’t have that much going in movies and especially TV until the last few years, but they changed their policies. I kept pushing them whenever I would talk to them because there would always be these depositions and these lawsuits with regard to people like my old friend Gary Friedrich on Ghost Rider, and Steve Gerber on Howard the Duck and Mark Walton on Blade and the [Jack] Kirby thing.

All I know about Iron Fist really is what I read in press releases and what I see on the one-or-so bits of tape or film footage or whatever that have been released. There’s somebody who always sends me this kind of thing when he sees it. I didn’t see the costume in there. Otherwise, it looked like a pretty good adaptation. Although, then, of course, people began making me aware of the fact that some people are complaining — as I think they have over the years — about cultural appropriation and crap like that, which just makes me furious.

Sounds like you’ve been involved with a lot of the creators’ rights discussions with Marvel.

I wouldn’t talk about Iron Fist if I weren’t going to get any money out of it, because I’d be annoyed, even if I did just write the first story.

Instead of spending all this money [fighting lawsuits], they should just give a little money to the people who did it, and give them a little credit on the screen. I don’t know what settlement [Gary Friedrich] finally made with Marvel over Ghost Rider; that’s kind of confidential. He hasn’t even told me, and I haven’t pushed. He always said that if they’d offered him something like credit on the movie, there’d never have been a lawsuit. It cost him a lot of time and trouble and probably cost Marvel up to six figures.

This is just guessing — nobody’s told me this — but I think the Kirby family thing was always uppermost in [Marvel’s] minds and now that’s sort of been settled. So they’ve been a little more relaxed about other stuff with people like me and the other writers and artists who created stuff after Stan and Jack Kirby, giving us a little money so that we instead become what I always said we would be: people who will do interviews, who will push things, and so forth. Instead of being bad publicity, we’ll be good publicity. It finally caught on.

You mentioned before all of the whitewashing controversy that’s been swirling around Iron Fist. Could you expand on that a bit?

Yeah, someone made me vaguely aware of that. I try not to think about it too much. I have so little patience for some of the feelings that some people have. I mean, I understand where it’s coming from. You know, cultural appropriation, my god. It’s just an adventure story. Don’t these people have something better to do than to worry about the fact that Iron Fist isn’t Oriental, or whatever word? I know Oriental isn’t the right word now, either.

He was a character for a comic book at a different time. It’s very easy to second-guess anything. You can argue about Tarzan, you can argue about almost any character who came up then is bound to be not quite PC by some later standard or other. Okay, so you can make some adjustments. If they wanted to kill off white Iron Fist and come up with one who wasn’t Caucasian, that wouldn’t have bothered me, but neither am I ashamed for having made up one who was. He wasn’t intended to stand for any race. He was just a man who was indoctrinated into a certain thing.

I just think some people have too much time on their hands, I guess. They have an infinite capacity for righteous indignation. By and large, that tends to be misplaced quite often because if you’re becoming all upset over things that are just stories, and if you don’t like it, instead of trying to change somebody else’s story, go out and make up your own character and do a good job of it. That’s just fine, but why waste time trying to run down other people’s characters simply because they weren’t created with your standards in mind?

Now if something is really racist or degrading to a sex or race, an ethnic group or something like that, that’s something else, but Iron Fist isn’t that and never has been. It’s all about a fictitious race, a fictitious place like a Shangri-La, and one person who happens to be its emissary. There’s no reason why he can’t be Caucasian.

Is there anything that you’re hoping to see in the Netflix show?

I hope they keep the dragon on his chest.

I think they do, yeah. He has the dragon on his chest.

That’s really the only thing I care about because it’s the only thing I really added by myself to his visual look. The rest of it was mostly Gil with my guidance and kibitzing. The dragon on the chest is the main thing I have a feeling about, but if they decided not to, fine. They have their reasons. I like the fact that, as Gil did, they sometimes have this kind of fiery aura trailing up from his hand. I like that. After all, he’s Iron Fist, so it’s good to do that.

The main thing is just the feel of it, but I really don’t care. Things have to be adapted for different media. When you get heroes like Superman or Batman or even Spider-Man sometimes, they’re so adapted in so many people’s minds that you need to keep them very faithful. Iron Fist, like Luke Cage, is more of an open book you can do almost anything with because there are not that many people who know the character that well. Even Daredevil had a lot of play, but they’ve been reasonably faithful. They’ve still got Karen Page, and they’ve got Foggy. They’ve got the legal situation, a few things here and there. There are a lot of changes made, but you can still see the roots of the comic book in it.

To read the whole interview, head over to Inverse

Iron Fist Inverse interview