The first trailer for “Iron Man 3″ arrived online last week, and I broke down some of the key scenes for IFC.com. I love doing these breakdown articles, as they allow me to take a deeper-than-usual dive into the comic-book origins of movies and speculate on how the comics will overlap with the films.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Behold, The Mandarin

Fans have been speculating since the first “Iron Man” about the future of the character’s best-known foil, The Mandarin, and when we’ll get a glimpse of him in Marvel’s cinematic universe. Well, we get our first good look at Kingsley as the iconic villain right around the 1:09 mark, after a set of early shots tease his debut in the trailer. And while Kingsley certainly strikes an intimidating visual as The Mandarin, it’s also worth a little freeze-frame action at the :59 mark to see the set of ten rings he’s wearing. Comic-book fans know that Mandarin’s ten rings are the source of much of his power, and though early reports indicate that the rings won’t have any magical abilities in the movie, their inclusion is — at the very least — a nice nod to the source material. While the live-action incarnation of Mandarin seems a little more gritty and a little less regal than his comics counterpart, it’s hard to see fault in what we’ve seen of Kingsley’s terrifying take on the character.

Oh, and for anyone wondering about Kingsley’s distinctly non-Asian look, it’s worth noting that the original version of Mandarin in the comics was actually only half-Chinese, and the son of a British mother and Chinese father. Much like the casting of Liam Neeson as the half-Arabic, half-Chinese villain Ra’s al Ghul in Christopher Nolan’s recent Batman franchise, it appears that we’ll see a more mixed-race take on the Mandarin in Marvel’s movie-verse.

You can read the rest of the article at IFC.com, and just in case you haven’t seen the “Iron Man 3″ trailer yet (or want to watch it again — I’ve replayed it about 20 times now), I’ve embedded it below: