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The Mandarin

Mandarin

Real Name
Unknown
First Appearance
Tales of Suspense #50 (February, 1964)
Creators
Stan Lee, Don Heck
Team Affiliations
Mandarin's Minions, Hand, Tong
Aliases
Gene Khan, Zhang Tong, Tem Borjigin
Base of Operations
Mandarin City
Powers
Various powers provided by special rings, Access of Chi
Skills and Abilities
Martial Arts and Chi Mastery
Paraphernalia
The Ten Rings of the Mandarin

The Mandarin is a supervillain in the Marvel Universe and the archenemy of Iron Man.

Origin[]

A man (true name unknown) who was an outcast from society and swore revenge on it.  During his journeys, he discovered a space ship with powerful alien technology, which he used in his quest to conquer the world.

Biography[]

The man who would become the Mandarin has born the son of an English prostitute within the small village of Habuquan in Inner Mongolia, China and his entire childhood was spent doing forced labour. After his mother died of an overdose, the young child killed her procurer, whom he suspected was his real father. Finding freedom and power in a life of crime, he rose to power but also became a fugitive from the communist government.

While on the lam, the nameless criminal discovered a crashed spaceship in a land called the Valley of Spirits. The pilot, Axonn-Karr was near death and the criminal discovered 10 ring-shaped objects spinning in the engine of the ship. The criminal killed Karr who tried to warn the criminal of their power and stole the rings, wearing them on his fingers and after study and experimentation learned each had a unique ability. When he wore them all at once, he connected with the spirits trapped in the rings, warriors long dead who desired to be resurrected. The criminal decided he would try to help them in this regard.

The criminal soon took the name The Mandarin as he conquered nearby villages. He used the strange powers of the rings to become a powerful weapons runner that not even the government could easily oppose. Eventually, he acquired his own city, Mandarin City, off the mainland coast. The Mandarin often tried to escape from his troubled past by creating elaborate histories for himself. One was that he was the son of an English noblewoman and the direct descendent of Genghis Kahn and was raised a respected aristocrat. For his own reasons, it is very possible the Mandarin began to believe his own falsehoods and self-made mythos.

Powers, skills, and equipment[]

The Mandarin possesses the power to channel chi, the savage force of his spirit, into physical enhancements. He can go for years without food or water by living on stored chi, enhance his strength and durability sufficiently to engage Iron Man in hand to hand combat, and enhance his martial arts strikes(the most common of which are karate-chops) sufficiently to dent or chop off chunks of Iron Man's armor.

The Mandarin is highly educated in science, martial-arts, chi-mysticism, warfare, and political/economic deviousness. He routinely combines these skills into multilayered attacks that exploit all available resources to bring down or enslave an enemy by attacking him or her on multiple fronts.

The Mandarin wears ten rings, each of which has a different energy-attack. These attacks include psionic illusions, gravity enhancement, entrapping ice, the molecular rearrangement of the environment into grabbing/entrapping shapes, tornadoes, electricity, magnetism, concussive force, disintegration, fire, and blanketing the area in pitch darkness.

In other media[]

In the Iron Man cartoon, his rings started out as magic jewels that he put on rings to take with him always, the character went through changes in appearance because at the time his appearance was a stereotype, in this cartoon he was green and with pointed ears . In the cartoon Iron Man Armored Adventures, in addition to not being a stereotype, his rings created armor for him, and his rings were advanced alien technology. The Marvel Disk Avengers anime, put him in that armor. In the Iron Man movie he had problems with a terrorist organization called The Ten Rings, when Mandarin debuted in these films he was the leader of that terrorist organization.

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