Review The Invincible Iron Man Vol 1 TPB 1 Spoilers

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captainhammerica
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Review The Invincible Iron Man Vol 1 TPB 1 Spoilers

Post by captainhammerica »

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I hate to give out 2 stars to anything. Especially if it’s in a genre, like comic books, that I love. Even more so when it’s in the hands of a talented writer I enjoy like Matt Fraction. Maybe it’s the way the book was put together, with just four issues, or the writers were forced to conform to the new direction Marvel wanted to take that their comics. Whatever the reason though this is one of the dullest collection of Iron Man comics that I’ve ever read.

Like the other comics I’m getting reacquainted with, this one takes places after the Siege event. Norman Osborn has been disposed and that status quo of Marvel comics is being reestablished. Iron Man though, in a previous attempt to keep Osborn from getting at the secrets in his head, has erased his brain and restarted it like a faulty hard drive. As a result of not having an effective save point though, parts of his brain are missing. Now broke, Tony decides to abandon the war games and instead creates Stark Resilience in an attempt to supply the world with free renewable energy powered by his repulsor tech.

Now this part of the storyline I like, because it’s a very different way to take the character. It’s just horribly executed. You know how exciting it is to start a company; securing funds, hiring people, and making plans for the future? Yeah….it’s not always exciting, and this is no example. And sadly it takes about half the plot of the four issues. Another thing that can be a genuine problem with Iron Man is the guy is so grandiose with speaking, that his comics can be pretty dialogue heavy, and this sadly happens here too. The four pages of him talking to Reed Richards about his brain and why it’s broken were pure boredom on a torturous scale and so unnecessarily science jargoned. What was wrong with the faulty hard drive analogy in the beginning of the comic?

Another problem with Iron Man is that Tony Stark can be such a fricking douche. An entertaining and likeable douche, but a huge douche. And he comes off as especially douschey in these issues, when really you’d think he’d be humbled by the chaos his decisions have caused in the recent past. Even though he has no memory of what happened he apologizes and gets annoyed when he has to apologize. And ironically enough in order to keep the identities of superheroes form Norman Osborn, which was a stance he took against Captain America in the Civil War, he voluntarily deleted his brain. Clearly he betrayed the principals he fought for, yet he claims he would do the same thing all over again.

What was most annoying though was how he told this to Thor in the first issue when the God of Thunder drops by for a cameo. Fellow scribes and comic nerds like myself may recall that Iron Man cloned a version of Thor while he was dead to fight against the Anti-Registration forces. Thor was so pissed about this that in previous issues he bitch-slapped Tony with a bolt of lightning. But now when they meet again and Stark brazenly claims ‘hey, I don’t remember what I did, but I’d do it all again, because I did it for the right reasons, because I’m awesome’ Thor’s like, ‘that’s the Stark I know, you want a bunch of gold for your new company?’ It just felt so out of character on Thor’s part and a deliberate attempt to absolve Tony of his wrong doings. Not to mention a way to conform to the Heroic Age where all the heroes are buddies again.

All of these complaints I have, why not a 1 star you ask? Well, quite simply the antagonists of Justine and Sasha Hammer seem very promising. With Stark out of the war games this mother and daughter team they step into become numero uno in the industrial military complex. They’re selling used H.A.M.M.E.R. goods to terrorist, while at the same time stopping them with their armored Detroit Steel. It’s a sinister look at capitalism at work and I want to see where it goes. Hopefully the next volume will be much more enjoyable than this one.
isah Tajudeen
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Post by isah Tajudeen »

well i have not not read the comic but anything that has to do with iron man am interested in i love iron i think i will look forward in reading it i think i will add it to my book shelves right away
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