The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

Hot damn, just typing that title got me all hot and bothered. Is there any fanboy out there who is not excited by the prospects that this title brings? Now just imagine it with some David Aja cover work. Niiiiice.

I like Steel Serpent (who Spider-Man needs to describe as “Davos, so hot right now.”) as a character and a concept. The guy is a force of nature and he’s always interesting when thrown into a story. He’s also a bad ass anti-hero, almost, who just screams of Kurt Russell, whenever teamed with John Carpenter…and now I want a Carpenter film of the Steel Serpent. Damn. Anyway, here’s some of his history.

He lived in K’un-L’un as the first son of Lei Kung The Thunderer, just the guy in charge of training and teaching the warriors of the awesome warrior city. Life doesn’t go as planned, and soon Davos has a massive chip on his massive shoulder, a dangerous thing to occur. He gets angry, and that’s a big kung fu guy to have constantly angry. He’s not gonna emo chop his arm and let it bleed, he’s going to punch people in the chest harder than Rick James could ever kick them.

He gets a major Jones for the Iron Fist title and certainly doesn’t appreciate it when some Earth-kicker takes it from him. This is a guy who grew up training and fighting, he’s a Spartan warrior but with the fu behind him. He’s big and scary and constantly wanting to fuck someone up.

As it stands now, after cool kung fu tournaments and a stint working with HYDRA, where he was sponsored by K’un-Zi and took the name of the Steel Phoenix, Davos is back in K’un-L’un as caretaker to a dragon’s egg and working in his old man’s previous role. He’s got a good status quo, though he’s not done. There’s plenty more to go. He’s sent his friends, the other immortal weapons, into the dreaded eighth capital city, not of heaven but of hell, to aid with a sticky diplomatic job for K’un-L’un, and I can’t help but think that HYDRA doesn’t quite know exactly what he’s up to now. And I want Davos to exploit that fact. I want him to infiltrate HYDRA and finally get the full redemption he is so sorely in need of. There have been plenty of villains turn the corner and become good guys, hell most of the popular X-Men started off that way (Emma Frost, Rogue, Gambit, etc), so why can’t Davos overcome his prior indiscretions?

The way I see it, Davos, the Steel Serpent, is a bigger, tougher, nastier version of Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist. He’s got the power of the chi, he’s got the training of a master, he’s got the soul of a killer, and he’s got the size of one hurting bastard who knows how to use all of that. Sure, he’s done some pretty harsh things in his time, but once he realised he was being played he quickly bowed down, admitted defeat and responsibility and took whatever was coming on the chin. He has shown that he is sorry and wrong, but that doesn’t stop him still being awesome and a kick ass fella who needs his own story told.

I’d like to think that looking after the egg of the next Shou-Lao the Undying will give him some amped up chi credits and he’ll be able to fix that hand that he lost against Tiger’s Beautiful Daughter. Imagine being punched with a hand made solely of chi. That would suck. He’s spent his whole life in some form or another of a lie. He’s been used and stupid and he’s lost. Davos brutally needs to find his path and it’s about time we gave it to him.

HYDRA is just sitting around, waiting for a good ass kicking, and everyone knows the best writers love to use HYDRA; Brubaker & Fraction, Hickman, Stan Lee, Ryan K Lindsay. So, we have a limb of HYDRA and then the Steel Serpent walks in, they know they’ve dealt with him before, but they don’t know the extent that it went sour because any carded HYDRA agent there got well and truly dusted.

So, Davos says he needs a favour from HYDRA. Maybe wants to borrow a mechagorgon and take it for a spin, he’s got some things in China to collect. Says it’ll help him take care of the egg, but then put it to work for HYDRA; imagine HYDRA with their own Shou-Lao? A dragon with the HYDRA symbol burned over its beating heart of power. Awesome splash page.

HYDRA will, of course, help a brother out, but that’s where Steel Serpent comes into his own. He starts digging around HYDRA, starts to learn some higher names, starts to believe he can cut off a few limbs and handle the ones that come back to replace them, hell, maybe he even opens up his own limb, starts ‘dealing’ for HYDRA, but all he’s doing is outsourcing information to Nick Fury or Danny Rand. Why does Davos want to do this? Because HYDRA messed with his heavenly city and he doesn’t like them anymore. Maybe they’ve even put a few HYDRA sleeper agents into K’un-L’un, and he catches them stealing important stuff, orphans thumbs or chi credits, and he stops them but one gets away, it is then that Nick Fury’s man within K’un-L’un shows himself, no herself, because she can better move around the mystical city without people questioning her and she has the element of surprise as she knows how to fight, even though lots of those K’un-L’un broads know how to dust now. This will lead the Steel Serpent to come to Earth to find the one HYDRA agent who got away, and he’ll bring his girl Friday along with him, a new sidekick, just what he didn’t want, haha.

Eventually I want Madame Hydra to come looking for Davos, and I want their meeting to be full of all sorts of fun and subtext. How do you resist a buff dude who gets around in kung fu pants (maybe we’ll give him a nice suit though) who has a wicked chest tat and guns carved out of wood? She’d love him, and sleep with him just to get info, which he’d happily do in return. That’s what makes the Steel Serpent such a good operative, there is no sense of going too far, he’s already gone there, so he’s fine with it. He gets intel, so does she, then they fight like nothing that Brangelina could offer us on screen. They fight up close, they fight on a global scale, as Frank Miller would say, they bring down buildings with their love, their passion.

This could be the ultimate mini-series for the coming Australian summer, or at least would be a nice expansion of the Daredevil family of titles, which I feel that the Immortal Iron Fist falls into. It could set the Steel Serpent up as a major bad ass, flesh out some of his current status quo, give him some wicked scenes, and completely redeem him in all sorts of awesome ways. I don’t see what’s not to love. Now I just need to write it, with Clay Mann drawing it. Yeah?

It would be the ultimate story of spy fu.

‘Nuff said.

Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by ryan
Filed under: comics