Today, we look at how the origins of the Mandarin’s Ten Rings have evolved over times through retcons and near retcons.
In every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively contradicting an earlier story (so the more passive definition of retcons as being anything that is retroactively added to continuity, even if there is no specific conflict with a past story). Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
Everything got started when Stan Lee and Don Heck introduced the Mandarin in the pages of Tales of Suspense #50 in 1963. As I mentioned in a recent article, for the guys of Lee and Heck’s generation, Fu Manchu was a major villain that they were all quite familiar with and so the idea of a classical “Yellow Peril” villain was very tempting for them. The Mandarin, therefore, debuted as basically Fu Manchu but with power rings, as well. The comic book also came out in late 1963, which was soon after Marvel made a major change where Stan Lee would do script work on nearly ALL of Marvel’s regular titles, and this was achieved by forcing ALL of Marvel’s regular artists to work the same way that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did, which as to go out and draw the comic book themselves (based on a plot that either they came up with or worked on with Stan Lee) and then Lee would add dialogue to the finished pages. This, now referred to as the “Marvel Method,” would allow a scripter to work on multiple books at once so that, in the case of Lee, the comics would all have the same voice, as fans were starting to really notice that the non-Stan Lee comic books sounded a LOT different than the Stan Lee ones, since the other writers were typically working full script. Once these artists, like Don Heck, started having to plot their own books, there were some growing pains, and I believe that Stan Lee was a lot more involved on the plotting sessions of the books early on, to which that I say that I bet that Lee was still working on the plots with Heck when they decided to give the fans what they wanted to see and give the Mandarin an origin.
Tales of Suspense #62 (by Lee, Heck and Dick Ayers) saw the Mandarin’s early days, where he came across a spaceship and the skeleton of what looked to be a giant dragon!
Instead, the Mandarin discovered that that was Axonn-Karr of the planet Maklu-4. Here, you can see an idea that was popular at Marvel at the time, which was to suggest that an alien was behind certain myths on Earths. Like how an alien in Avengers #4 was behind Medusa and so, here, too, the Maklurian being was behind the idea of dragons…
The power source of the spaceship were a collection of powerful rings that soon became the Ten Rings of the Mandarin.
Okay, so that remained the BASIC origin of the Mandarin for the next forty plus years. Don’t get me wrong, the Mandarin’s origin was honed a number of times over the years (and in one thing that never made any sense, the Mandarin would occasionally introduce NEW rings, which doesn’t really make sense), but the general idea of him finding a ship that was powered by these rings that were very powerful remained the consistent string in the story.
That changed in Invincible Iron Man #522 (by Matt Fraction, Salvador Larroca and Frank D’Armata). As part of what really turned out to be the LAST Mandarin story (although I guess that remains the be seen, of course), Fraction had the Mandarin reveal that each of the rings was actually host to the soul of a long-dead cosmic warrior and the then-current plotline involved Tony Stark and Zeke Stane being forced to build giant robot bodies to host these souls…
The end of that story saw the Mandarin dead and only a few of the giant robots built (and they ended up destroyed, as well).
Then, during Kieron Gillen’s follow-up run, he showed that the rings, in wake of the Mandarin’s death, were each looking for new hosts, like a fiery anarchistic reporter who found herself as the new host of one of the rings (she also later had her hand chopped off when Malekith, the Dark Elf, tried to collect all of the ten rings for himself, as one of the rings foolishly tried to recruit him all the way on Asgard)….
Eventually, Tony and his friends were able to defeat the rings, but as they were taken into “space custody” by the alien race known as the Rigellians, the history of the rings were explained to Tony Stark. Tony had brought a special Recorder back home with him and when it interfaced with the rings, it kickstarted a program that had been left latent on the rings, which was that if the souls deal ever didn’t work out, the rings would gain sentience themselves and were tasked with not just finding a new host, but trying to make improvements to Earth. The problem was that they had spent so many years on the Mandarin’s fingers that they were also still being influenced by his psychic residue, as it were, so the rings wanted to help save the Earth…but also take down their hated enemy, Tony Stark!
It will be interesting to see if the rings are re-retrofitted for use on a MCU-inspired newer version of Shang-Chi, especially since the Mandarin is still mostly out to pasture in the Iron Man books.
If anyone has a suggestion for a future edition of Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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