10 Subtle Changes That SAVED Iconic Comic Book Characters
4. Forming The Heroes For Hire - Iron Fist And Luke Cage
These days the Marvel Netflix shows have done more than enough to make people love Luke Cage (the less said about what they did to Iron Fist the better), and Iron Fist has been kicking around since the seventies. But there was a time when these two heroes were about to be scrapped for good.
Iron Fist and Luke Cage were both products of the martial arts and blaxploitation film movements of the 1970s, so when martial arts movies and blaxploitation cinema started to die out, Marvel frankly had no idea what to do with either character. The solution was devious in its simplicity: team the two up.
Very little about the two as characters changed, but putting them together in one book - Heroes For Hire - turned their luck around practically overnight. The two characters are alright on their own, but together their chemistry is electrifying.
This one simple change made these two almost forgotten minor heroes into legends of the Marvel universe.