Friday Night Fights: Bone Breaking!

I know I’ve already used a couple of fights from the Savage Dragon recently in Friday Night Fights — but frankly, I’ve already got the scans done, so that means you’re going to get one more.

This one is from January 1996’s The Savage Dragon #25 by Erik Larsen. The backstory on this one is pretty good — the Dragon had previously been captured by a villain and badly beaten up, breaking most of his bones, then stuffed into a smokestack so his super-healing abilities would make his bones heal crooked.

Now the Dragon finally regains consciousness to find Mighty Man, one of his allies, bearing down on him ready to administer another brutal beatdown. Has Mighty Man been mind-controlled by another villain to do the Dragon in permanently?

And as it turns out, it’s not mind control — it’s medical treatment. In his secret identity, Mighty Man is a magically transformed nurse, and at the request of his doctors, he’s using medical knowledge to re-break the Dragon’s bones so they’ll heal properly this time. It wasn’t a particularly big moment, but it was one I always enjoyed because it showed that Larsen was able to think in creative ways that the other Image founders at the time weren’t able to match.