Previous Post Mandarin having his own city ruled by propaganda is much like North Korea's Juche system. And Kim Jong-Il was notorious for kidnapping an award-winning South Korean film director and his actress (ex) wife in the 1970s in order to force them to make ridiculous propaganda films for him; the Mandarin does just this in the annual. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Sang-ok As far as I know, this is (in the real world) a pretty singular and famous act, so the Mandarin repeating it seems like a pretty clear allusion to Kim. Both Kim and Mandarin kidnap the director because the director is critically acclaimed, and the bit about also kidnapping the actress wife of the director makes the allusion almost too close. It's even accented by both of the real victims being lured to Hong Kong for the kidnapping, since the Annual has the Mandarin kidnapping his creative team from Hong Kong's film industry.

Okay there's that, I had forgotten that connection. Still, how does making him an Kim analogue make for an interesting supervillain? Especially an arch-enemy for Iron Man? Kim was such a banal little boy, with no real philosophy that I know of. Can you imagine Kim in, lets say, "The Dark Knight"? The Joker there comes across as a kind of High Priest of Nihilism, with a very sharp contrast between his beliefs and Batman's, to the point where the whole thing is a kind of Nihilsm/Humanism debate conducted physically, operatically.

Come to think of it, that's why movie Red Skull fell flat for me. There was something so banal about his evil.

Heck, the reason why Fraction may have seemed to abandon the Kim analogue take is Kim was such a thin brat that there simply wasn't anything left to mine from him past the Annual.

Personally I prefer for the Mandarin to have more in common with Bane and Kraven The Hunter than Kim. I think he should have Kraven's basic philosophy but expressed in a much more ambitious way most of the time.

Leonard seems to want him to think like Doom at his grandest, and by extension like the Paradise Lost Satan. I don't agree, but I'd take it over Kim's utter banality.