Comics mandarin any day of the week.
He has a straight up disintegration ray if nothing else.
I feel like The Mandarin / Trevor Slattery from IM3 would just kind of bumble his way to victory somehow. He’s an addict and clearly a survivor. Don’t underestimate him.
What about Killian? He orchestrated it and used him as an imposter so he could get revenge on Tony.
Killian: I AM THE MANDARIN!
Oh, is that The Mandarin you meant in IM3? That changes things.
I guess I’d say the comics Mandarin (my memory is very very foggy so forgive me if I’m off). Creative use of teleportation technology can be very powerful, even against Extremis.
One thing I always liked about the original Mandarin in the comics is that he had a big “M” on his chest.
But the casual anti-Asian racism of the 1960s was a trip.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1a/22/a3/1a22a3665a6d1b68bb26ea09ddd73027.jpg
Stan Lee was anti-racist, but the way he went about it was sometimes questionable.
I saw a movie called ‘The Stunt Man’ many years ago. Fantastic movie I would recommend to anyone. It was made in 1980 [apx] and is about a Vietnam vet who is running from the law. He hides on a movie set and gets involved with the lead actress and the crazy director.
There’s a scene in the movie where the screenwriter and the stunt man are talking about the actress. “Did you think she was a virgin?” Then the screenwriter goes on to recount the time he flew to Guatemala and paid $1,000 to sleep with a 14 year old virgin.
When the movie was made, it was a cute throwaway line; a joke about a silly middle-aged man being silly.
We have to accept that we’re creatures of the culture that created us, no matter how much we don’t want to be.
Comic, hands down.
Genius level intelligence on par with Tony Stark, trained his body enough to be able to split open Iron Mans armor with just his hands and survive years without food and water, and the ten rings he manufactured out of alien technology that give him ten different powers ranging from ice blasts to rearranging matter on a molecular level.
The comics, the 10 rings have actual powers.
The Mandarin from Iron Man 3 was obviously Jack Dorsey. He would win by selling his criminal gang for more than it was worth to someone stupid enough not only to buy it but to then crater its value by 90% in the first year, and use that money to found a competitor.
I’m going with mandarin, the orange fruit.
