War Machine #10 & Iron Man: Iron Protocols #1

Dark Reign hasn’t done War Machine any favors.  To quote the character of Ms. Hand in this issue “this is ridiculous” and by that she could well mean the heaping manner of story telling and retro-awefulness. This title lost its way pretty quickly but now ten issues in it still is scrambling to pull a collection of bad elements together that results in a worse mess. Marvel can’t cancel this quick enough.

The title was relaunched out of Iron Man: Director of SHIELD and thematically predicated on War Machine making war as super-tech vigilante on the war mongers, the “real world” dictators and tyrants of the world and societal scum who use institutions of power to get their rocks off all while getting the rest of the world to suffer and die for it.

Sadly writer Greg Pak went for the soft targets and easy applause lines of Iraq and headline news items in mention and took them out of the “real world” into the fantastical and just far-fetched relations of power stereotypes. As an allegory he just affirms everything that one believed already and added nothing to understanding or exposing what pulls such evil together. If anything Dark Reign just makes the project worse by simply associating Norman Osborn as just a defender of the type of persons that perpetuate the institutional evils of the world. From what one can make out from this issue is that it was further coalesced into a plot last issue involving old Iron Man menace – Ultimo

Ultimo was more or less done in last month and sent off stage here to be mothered by Suzi Endo. Rhodey and Osborn resume battling it out for what amounts to no more than bringing War Machine radical efforts to heel and winds up being as unsatisfying good and evil brawl simply because of a stacked deck of grievances culled from the news. The between Tony Stark and Osborn in Invincible Iron Man at least has the personal animus to give it weight. Further hindering the story this month of reality are the shabby additions of old allies from the Force Works and West Coast Avengers along with new and as poorly thought out team of ‘good guys’ taking out the bad in collective effort.

Regular artist Leonardo Manco seems to be gone. The absence of his chaotic lines and detailing adds little to the coherence of the story. The thankless task of putting the cobble together falls to R.B. Silva, whose style departs as far from Manco’s as possible. Silva’s figures have a cartoonish render and are oddly distorted in the various poses. The coloring too has changed tone to suit to more accepted superhero mode aimed at but adds to the rushed feel of just wrapping all the half-baked intentions in pretty solutions.

It’s disappointing, because the book really promised much-needed gritty, political undertones to Dark Reign which begins to wind down and The Siege forms. While Secret Invasion set-up Dark Reign, readers may have felt that Osborn’s abuse of power in the “real world” hadn’t been properly documented. Apart from Thunderbolts perhaps Marvel hasn’t done much to make the villainy come across as something other than something done to Superheroes. War Machine and Rhodey in particular deserved better than this half-hearted commentary on the state of the world serving neither superhero escapism or thought-provoking associations.   
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Iron Protocols is just one story in the two offerings in the One-Shot that begs the question of just why this was published.  One can only suppose this is the kind of lite superhero action that is intended to placate those readers of Iron Man who want a unambiguous Hero back in action.  However the concept and execution here are, apart from being hackneyed, are at odds with each other.   To call it a cartoonish exercise is to insult fine cartoons like Iron Man: Armored Adventures when it is more like that misguided dumbed-down Marvel Adventures line of comics that has lost what comics for all-ages is about and makes kid friendly (read as kid safe) retooling of Marvel characters.  While not quite as nausea inducing as Super Hero Squad the Protocols story by Robert Venditti is a digested combination of  Arc in Space of Dr Who meets HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  All of the tension of dire and death is undercut by the nonchalance  and humor that the John Byrne imitation art  plays into with emotionless figuration.

Better of the two but not great is the use of a wry tone in the second story by Rick Spears called His Gal Friday.  While joke-ish and deflated somewhat as well of real peril for the hero, the concept of an old A.I. program growing up and giving its father a hard time uses the One-Shot’s disposability in its favor in this story. 

The original series is proving to be far more full of depth and understanding that while pop culture products may be disposable that is not the undercutting understanding of what they were doing.  When Archie Goodwin wrote one at least got the idea that he himself was entertained and challenged.

The Invincible Iron Man #16 – Of Beasts and Men!

Of Beasts and Men sets before the reader a change in the Iron Man story as the political takes a back seat to the personal story while remaining a charged moral tale.  This shift to the humane is in part is also a reaction to the charged socio-political history embedded into the title and its main character such that writer Archie Goodwin sought a correction for.  As noted in my last post on these issues from 1969: “the drug culture and politics of the late sixties had taken hold of the themes and styling of the issue and potentially the series at this point and was leaving behind the Cold War foundation of the title character” such that communists weren’t the “bad guys” anymore; systems and institutions were.  By 1969 the US and world popular culture had already digested much revolutionary rhetoric and ideas.  Specifically, in Goodwin’s liberal humanist perspective, power over people becomes the greatest evil that must be guarded against or as this story would conclude any sentient being.

Goodwin brings us right into the paradox of power being used for good in the first page of this issue as SHIELD agents try and get the details of what has transpired with Tony Stark and Iron Man from their own agent, Jasper, by literally sifting through his mind with a coma inducing device that clearly isn’t a painless experience.  Jasper in fact was depicted last issue as having perished in an aircraft crash but as we see here Agent Sitwell survives from some fantastic actions taken on his own.  The pressing question of Iron Man’s survival of the Red Ghost’s duplicitous detonation of his own secret base along with the Unicorn at the end of last issue comes to us to five pages into the issue and functions to both delay and anticipate in the reader any cynicism of the genre’s cliffhanger’s actual danger to the hero of the story.  Both Iron Man and the Unicorn survive and eventually escape the wreckage of the base by working together.  As we already knew as the Unicorn didn’t until recent events, the Red Ghost had just used the Unicorn and his condition to motivate him to work together toward fighting Iron Man and taking the Cosmic Ray intensifier for his own ends.  Goodwin brings the Unicorn and Iron Man together not only common cause but by material connection as both are dependent on the other’s technology to power their devices that will allow them to bring the Red Ghost to heel.  Tony realizes that the Red Ghost’s ultimate plan can only be realized by the advanced devices in one military location run by SHIELD only in Africa.

At this juncture one should consider again the conflicted nature of such a fictive construct as SHIELD like its pop culture kin from the 1960’s U.N.C.L.E.  Which is an acronym for the fictional United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, a secret international intelligence agency featured in the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  Within Marvel comics SHIELD is not just a super powered institution but a supra-powered one as well implying a law and morality above nations which has an authority to use violence in defense of such values. Setting such an installation in Africa would serve the writer in two purposes of this plot and furtherence of international nature of the struggle to pan-human concerns.  The battle between Communism and Capitalism in such a frame becomes a parochial one of nations obscuring the greater battle of good and evil on the global stage.  Goodwin’s Humanism would inform and re-form the “greater good” motivations of  Tony Stark throughout his tenure as writer on the title.  This reform however could not reject the role of  the rational and scientism that made-up the character.

In Africa the Red Ghost  penetrates, in fog form, and then subdues the SHIELD agents within using an ape army gathered by his super ape Alpha, who possesses cosmic-ray enhanced strength, and his super ape Beta, who has mental control abilities.  As the Red Ghost completes his modified Cosmic Ray Intensifier, Iron Man and Unicorn attack, but are overpowered by the controlled apes due to the severed power connection between them.  However, when the Red Ghost tries to activate his device to empower his primate army, Beta mentally stops him, telepathically revealing his enhanced intellect and rejects the Red Ghost’s plans for power.  Beta orders Alpha to destroy the Intensifier, and all the apes return to the jungle.  Disconnected Unicorn returns to his own motives of seeking a cure and revenge and abducts the Red Ghost, leaving Iron Man behind to repair his armor.

In perhaps one of the largest leaps in Humanism Goodwin extends the grasp of what is “good” to humanity’s closest relatives and gives this moral tale its triumph of good over evil simply in the rejection of power by reason.  If as Victorian novelist and Humanist George Eliot, wrote to a friend:

the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man . . . the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human)

Then what is most like Man, our cousins, is not alien to them and would be no surprise to well-known animal rights as extension of human rights advocates primatologist Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkins, former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University; and attorney and former Harvard professor Steven Wise.   All of whom follow in the same moral strategy of meta-narratives - or  ’grand narratives’ - as in grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom such as the ‘universalist’ claims of the Enlightenment.   (foundational in science heroes like Iron Man)  In a single fictive narrative a comic book writer like Goodwin expands a grand narrative with such logic making to push his hero beyond the barriers he sees in place to the character being received as a hero to humanity and to life itself.

In very practical terms the writer was exploring like many of the sixties generation what could be found in the millionaire corporation man like Tony Stark could be a force for good in the world without abandoning the project altogether and dropping out.  This story comes very close to suggesting the irrelevance of such a hero in that the heroic act is not conducted by the titular hero but by an uncorrupted sentient being.

Invincible Iron Man #18 – World’s Most Wanted Part 11 : Kids with Guns vs. The Eternal Angel of Death

Can it really be that we are at part eleven of this World’s Most Wanted arc?  Is there any end of it in sight?  Part twelve would make for a nice hardcover compilation but for the rest of us who have slogged through this ‘bottoming out only to be reborn’ year-long saga it is all a bit much.  That goes for this issue’s title and might well serve as writer Matt Fraction’s style: all a bit much. 

The issue picks up on the flight of Tony Stark to one of his remaining repulsor stations and perhaps the one that started it all in Afghanistan.   That’s right, not Vietnam but Warren Ellis’s reboot/re jigger of some years ago which also gave us the Extremis virus.  The only development of any note in issue #17 was one of the sub-plot involving Maria Hill and the Black Widow. That sub-plot pays off in this issue in what is perhaps one of the best turns in this whole Most Wanted story if altogether yet another example of re-setting a character in compliance with the movie. Not to spoil much here but Pepper Potts pulls a fast one here on Norman Osborn & Co. and sets the character in the camp of gutsy sidekick that the movie and perhaps current sensibility can only justify as a departure from Pepper’s early days as the damsel in distress.

Tony otherwise runs on the programmatic descent to his origins and motives set by the writer for this entire storyline by rediscovering through some “kids with guns” in war ravaged Afghanistan the change he once made against war and weapons when he became Iron Man. A change by the way which is not part of the first origin story but was grafted on to the story and then simply retold as being so in both the re-launch of the comic and in the film. To be fair the convolutions of the dialog aren’t exactly making Tony a born again pacifist but he does use the word with some reverence and shame at being the war-maker. Of course this war making isn’t just about weapons manufacture but that war he waged on his fellow superheroes which I am sure that readers of this blog are as sick of me referencing as I am having throw back in fans of Iron Man issue after issue. One does not even have to think as I do that Tony has nothing to apologize for much less change to see this ongoing theme in these issues. See http://fourcolormedmon.blogspot.com/2009/08/tony-stark-is-being-disassembled.html for others picking up on this pointing to the forever rants that this comic keeps re-heating the guilt or non-guilt of Tony.

Rifter
on Aug. 27, 2009
@Vance Astro said:

” @speedlgt said:

” OMG this is to all stark defenders……………………………STOP just STOP hes been a prick and hes getting whats comming STOP IT. I always feel like I have state that I dont hate the guy just so his defenders dont make it a flame war and go all fanboy on me. Hes great I like him but hes to blame for everything and I dont see how (or that he should ever) be redemmed. so STOP your WRONG all of you…….just STOP “Stop making a big deal over it.Everytime Stark is brought up..Civil War doesn’t have to be.It’s 2009… “Woot sense  

It won’t end even when this storyline technically ends as FourColorMedia’s Avi Green shows us in the upcoming issues #20 & #21.  Until everybody gets to give Tony the ‘what for’ and  come-upance that will clear his soiled being even mindwiping him and re-writing him won’t do it all.  If it all seems a bit much it is because it is just a bit too much stretching this story and theme out to hit every part of the character so that Tony Stark’s Bush era ideology can be considered paid in full – forever.   

“He’s making this ultimate sacrifice for the good of the many and I think that’s the one of the reasons why Tony was never villainous,” explains Fraction. “He made a difficult decision and he’s owning the responsibility for it. You might have disagreed with him, but now that everything’s gone off the rails Tony’s the one cleaning it up single-handedly and is making sure no one is paying the price but him.”  

WTF? I suppose it is better than being brought before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague but this whole storyline has been just as tortuous and humiliating for this character and those that loved what he had developed into being as a multi- dimensional counter example to the otherwise flat morality of superheroes.

Invincible Iron Man #17 – World’s Most Wanted Part 10 : Ashes and Snow

 The World’s Most Wanted storyline continues this issue with an exercise in what comic readers formally call decompression and on irate fan message boards…filler.   What holds any story together is the manner in which one plot point progresses to the next as well as how a plot point unfolds.  Any storyteller knows that engaging the readers, listeners or viewers is not just about a succession of events but the sense time and stresses of the various levels of emotional engagement by the type of event or events.  In comics one of the formal elements to control the sense of the passage of time is the single panel within the page rather than real time or shots that movies for example might employ.  That clearly is what the writer and artist team are going for with this issue to introduce a sense of pace as a part of the whole story arc that is World’s Most Wanted.  In that sense this is the deep breath before the final plunge to the story’s conclusion.

That is what is intended not what the reader holds their hands as a single issue a month since the slam-bang events in the russian tundra.  While it is true that the creators are in control of the intended effect of slowing the pace and do just that it results in a very tiresome issue of only slight importance to the course that is already being carried by the pattern and momentum of issues past.  Arguably this issue provides the necessary details to take the next step and to provide the emotional and character weight to make the coming events meaningful however the obviousness of such intent hinders rather than helps this process.  For this reader, at least, the intent puts itself before the content and with it the immersion into content’s emotions.   

 Just how this is the case can be seen in the sequence this issue that shows in two pages and eleven panels of Tony Stark finding an internet cafe and writing an e-mail to Maria Hill recounting recent events. The text of these panels is all in caption that recreates the text of the e-mail misspellings and all. It is a dialogue free two pages and in cinematic terms would be as is it were a voiceover. Out of context this is an otherwise very sophisticated use of the narrational caption box and it even serves as plot point later in the issue having compromised Tony’s security protocols. In context however all that it delivers is the that Tony has not left Russia with that much ease and the deletion process is taking its toll as much as being on the run is. It is also a nod to that this is a single issue requiring some catch-up for the readers yet this not the only instance of the decompressed style. The writer has a lot of details that he wants to fill in with the various characters and the art for the most part has to act as camera shots of the conversations. Page five being perhaps the exception of page construction that uses panel as more than storyboarding.

All these conversations converge on the closing in on the fugitives by the government forces as Black Widow, Maria Hill, Norman Osborn, Col. Bukharin, Ms. Hand, Madame Masque and even some anonymous HAMMER flunkies has a good deal to say about Stark and the situation.  The key events in all this talk though are the capture of Maria Hill and Black Widow espied by a shadowy Captain America and the crash landing of Tony Stark inside Afghanistan in his next to last armor.  Having been shot down by a rocket propelled grenade by Afghan militia in his crudest armor yet in this story line Tony finds himself on foot in the wastes of Afghanistan making his way to last repulsor station.  Programatic as this whole storyline has been to the devolution of Tony Stark and his Iron Man armors leads the reader to expect a last armor to be in waiting which is also the first armor of Tony’s origins as Iron man.   In a full page coming attraction is just the cover to the next issue featuring Tony donning just that expected armor in two weeks. 

Two weeks? Issue 18 will be cover dated as December here in September so it seems that the tricks with time are not just contained with the covers.   I’ll probably only get the issue by October so check back then here as this thing wraps up.

Invincible Iron Man #16 – World’s Most Wanted Part 9 : Titan of the Nuclear Age

The issue you have been waiting for!  The battle of the ages that you demanded! Pepper Potts vs. Madame Masque!   Forgive dear reader the sarcastic use of the Stan Lee hyperbole here but no what I had hoped for in this issue was not Pepper Potts telling Whitney Frost to “bring it” in a cat fight.

Following in the long tradition of Iron Man covers being the cliffhanger cue to the next issue’s contents what one hoped for in the exercise that Matt Fraction has set renewing the Iron Man franchise along with resetting the character was defining the characters in broader and more complex ways than the movies have time to lay out while keeping to the forms. If last issue had Tony Stark under the knife on the front cover it was Madame Masque that we want to read about being psychologically dissected before us and her relationship with Tony.  

 

What does happen in this issue is that Madame Masque comes off as a needy psycho bitch  obsessed with her looks and junks much of the character’s pathos which owes much to Eyes Without a Face (French: Les yeux sans visage) at her inception as a character in the Iron Man comics.  Further, in a reversal of this issue’s cover, it is Pepper and her armor which rescues Tony from Masque in her deadly oscillation between being wanted as a woman and bitterness.   As seen last issue Whitney Frost a.k.a Madame Masque had gotten the drop on Pepper and then Tony at the Tunguska repulsor facility in Kirensk, Russia and bound and tortured Pepper while he lay hapless under her gun.  Despite being bound and out of her armor Pepper is able to interact with the Jarvis Interface that controls her armor such that she able to mount an counter attack and escape from Madame Masque.

The structure of what the writer is trying to accomplish comes through pretty clearly but it is the details and superficiality of it that will leave any fan of the depth or range of the characters wanting something meatier than what is offered up in this issue.  At no point does Madame Masque become a person to the reader other than as adversary or threat to Pepper and Tony.  Pepper on the other hand is beyond the development that last issue afforded in its pages of gooey admiration and devotion to Tony in dialogue.  This issue has Pepper in full heroic mode that anyone might recognize from Ashley Judd movies or on Oxygen TV as part of the female that fights back sub-genre.  By the issue’s end Pepper both saves Tony from physical harm and the perversity of his relationship with Masque.  Tony may want to help Masque but its is not that absolute of good namely love. 

So the issue hits its marks as to what it wants established in theme and in the plot but borrows from other media to give it semblance to life through motion.  It is a hollow semblance though as none of the actions seem to have any basis other that they said to be.  We the readers come away with knowing that Masque is crazy in love/hate with Tony and that Pepper and Tony have an emotional relationship that might be called love.  We also know that Norman is still after Tony.  The only major shift this issue brings is in the sub-plot involving Maria Hill and the Black Widow where Hill although safe from the time being from Norman’s pursuit is psychologically suffering from the after effects of her being the mental prisoner of the Controller.  We see a far more moving breakdown in the shower of Hill than any of the more perfunctory emotional scenes in the main plot.

The main plot step taken at issue’s end is that Tony is suited up and on his way to Afghanistan and the last repulsor station which just happens to be where he first created the Iron Man armor in this now totally retooled origin history that again meshes with our movie understanding of all things.

In case I have not been clear about the movie aspect of this comic I mean that in a under-serving manner despite my love for movies and the cinematic arts.  It is not that movies are limiting and truncated products that distort but that the Iron Man film was just such a movie than has shifted the persona of  Tony Stark as was developed in the comics over the years.  Comics, as I have tried to bring out in these posts, have their own unique ability to tell stories about characters and the world.  When they are less than that in drawing on that special intermix of the medium’s capacity then it comes across to the long time reader as being less than good comics.  I expect better from this title and hopes are that once Most Wanted has done its job then it can get back to doing that.

Invincible Iron Man #15 – World’s Most Wanted Part 8 : The Danger We’re All In

There is something strange about this issue’s story title to my view and it goes back to my last post’s question of a paradigm.  Which is just a fancy word for  a philosophical or theoretical framework or model.  The model here or rather the one being purged from the Iron Man story is that of  ’ends justify the means hero’ to be replaced by the conventional hero as would be recognized the masses who have seen the movie. 

To be frank there really isn’t anything in the movie that departs from the conventional and monolithic notion of the hero as a person who does what is “right” as situations present themselves.  Tony Stark in the movie maybe a bit more “edgy” than the square-jawed heroes of old movie serials but in terms of moral outlook he follows the same categorical or Deontological ethics that dominate the superhero genre and common religio-civic ideas about good and evil.  It comes into use in that regard as a part of the dialogue in this story when the Black Widow uses the title of the issue when talking to Maria Hill.  I’ll just quote it in full here  with its bolding for full effect:

You Idiot.
Let’s say you are still
on the Right Side –
Do you have any Idea
the Danger We’re All In?

and you thank I’ll just
Hand Captain America
over to you for a Coffee Date?!?

For those keeping track here, Maria Hill was once the Director of SHIELD during Civil War and then subordinate to Tony Stark at SHIELD during the Secret Invasion sharing both the same outlooks and then fate when the Norman Osborn took over the security organization.   So when the Black Widow says Right Side it is a category that is absolute not just as concept but as it has played itself in the fictional shared publishing universe.  A universe where Captain America has gone from beloved hero to criminal to dead only to be carried on by a successor.  In such a universe there is no equivication, no alternate views, no diverstity and matter of opinion shaped by the inner being or independent thought; only Good and Evil.

If there is a “Danger We’re All In” it is one of uniformity and a coercive narrative that directs thought rather expands it to potentials and possibilityof human feelings, ideals and lives.  It is not just Tony Stark losing his ability to think, reason and remember in this narrative but the readers as well as they are brought along to think that this course of events is a natual outcome of the realm of possibility assessed by the natual world not an artifical one constructed by writers and editors.  This is the “authority” of fictions to present simulacra as the world as it is a.k.a. reality.  It is the same authority which the writer and Marvel editorial are using to full florish toward aligning its characters with mass marketing and mass morality in hopes of mass returns.  A logic which has its own narrative authority that brooks little to no dissent despite history and evidence in the arts of all kinds.  Too be sure this is not subversive fiction making but rather a clear example of co-opting fringe thinking for gross ends.

This however isn’t a blog entry about Marvel comics in general within popular culture but about the process of erasing the dangerous ideas that were unleashed by Civil War and Iron Man’s role in that story.   Clearly the discomfort that it presented about heroism of a kind that does not fit within the bounds being on the ‘Right Side’ is being replaced with a new version of the character that would and will find common cause with the superheroes  of all stripe if all the same way of thinking about what is good and evil.   World’s Most Wanted presents to the process of substitution and affirmation of what that new character will be like. As such this issue sets its sights on the role of romantic interests of Tony Stark and their effect upon him as a person. It is not coincidental that both Pepper Potts and Madame Masque are central at this point in the over all story as both a dislocation from the political and the establishment of emotive truths.  The issue consists of creating the bond between Tony and Pepper that leads to the cliffhanging arrival of Masque and the torture, both mental and physical that she presents. Pepper sleeps with Tony and then over the pages commiserates with his slipping mind and what he must do.   The implication here is that he will be someone else but at his heart he will be the same person that she loves.  That is if Madame Masque doesn’t get her way by killing  or turning Tony in first.

Invincible Iron Man #14 – World’s Most Wanted Part 7 : The Shape of the World These Days

It has been a while loyal readers of this blog and of the old shellhead’s story but not that much has changed except perhaps… everything.  While that might be true regarding the reasons for my being away from this project it is even more true that as far as Iron Man is concerned this is a character that we would hardly recognize from only over a year ago.  That is unless you are coming to this comic and character from the 2008 movie.  It seems fairly clear now that  part of the plan for relaunching the Iron Man character under the title Invincible Iron Man was to jettison the past and reshape the character and trappings to conform to the movie conception of the what Iron Man is and stands for.

Issue #14 continues this process of shedding the past by revisiting it and tweaking the elements that it wants to carry forward.  Writer Matt Fraction has hit upon the the snide simile of plot point being the task he has been set for the character by Marvel by successively deleting the memory and mind of Tony Stark as the story arc “World’s Most Wanted” progresses to the now inevitable cleansed re-version of Iron Man the hero.  The function of such a story is evade the question of was he not not heroic already.  Much as Dark Reign is a final editorial comment on the conundrums of Civil War so this story arc falls within the larger Marvel publishing universe mega-story of Norman Osborn’s ascent to political and military power within the government.  Thereby Reign’s affirming the view of government and raw power being hostile to the greater good of all.

Norman Osborn and his HAMMER organization continue to track and seek out Tony Stark and the secrets he holds in his enhanced mind.  Flight from Osborn serves two parts of Tony’s plan to keep those secrets from ever being used for evil ends.  Escape from the U.S. on the one hand simply keeps Tony out of the law enforcement capacity of Osborn but flight to specific places around the globe like Russia this issue are to access the workshops of Stark Inc. and the repulsor generators that he is using to wipe his extremis enhanced brain like a computer. 

Russia of course looms large in the history of Iron Man and it leads rather quickly to an encounter with Col. Dmitri Bukharin, returning as the current Crimson Dynamo.  Intercepting the Iron Man armor in-flight into Russian airspace a near deadly exchange arrives at former friends finding common cause to thumb their nose at America’s Osborn.  It is all very convenient that Bukharin has found himself back in with the Russian government after some crosses with the KGB but these are the least of problems one can find with issue.  While Tony’s mind is slipping his Russian seems to not be at all and Tony takes the Dynamo armor out on a loan-er to complete his journey to his workshop in Russia and other encounters of the present and past.

Out of the past and Russia as well is the ongoing sub-plot of Maria Hill and her attempt to make contact with Natasha Romanova in New York who old time readers of Iron Man know as the Black Widow and is still in the espionage game.

Those who have come to Invincible Iron Man from the movie have found that the familiar character of Pepper Potts has an important role in Tony Stark’s life yet again as head of what remains of Stark Industries and pilot of the Mark 1616 armor that she is calling “Rescue” after this issue’s scene with her doctor.  Potts too has been under the gaze of Osborn as a link to all things Stark and in her attempts to find Tony and help him she leads the trail to him in Russia.  Although stymied in official cooperation to bring Stark in from the cold by the Russians that hasn’t prevented Osborn from dispatching one of his own villainous coterie as he did in issue #12 with the Sub-Mariner to either capture or kill Tony Stark.

The much anticipated meeting again between Madam Masque and Tony Stark, at least by this fan of the baddie, comes to a head at this issue’s end as she has lined-up in her assassin’s rifle sights the bare head of Pepper Potts meeting with Tony in the tundra.  A meeting like so much in this story arc which will set to re-orient the character and his relationships going forward to fit within the revised paradigm of personal and moral choices for one such as Tony Stark.   Having seen the movie one knows where this is going and what that paradigm is; it’s only the details that we are waiting for and some detours into the past before it is obliterated.  That is the final irony of the issue title here as it is the shape of the world these days for Marvel to wipe down its characters and make them part of the mass mind set rather than reflect and consider alternatives and personal character difference much less take up challenges for writers to sort out other than plot puzzles.

It’s been a hell of a year

2009 Eisner Award Winners

via icv2

Published: 07/26/2009, Last Updated: 07/27/2009 04:49am

The winners of the 2009 Eisners were announced at the San Diego Comic-Con. There weren’t a lot of surprises at the Eisners this year. Dark Horse’s Hellboy collected three awards and Chris Ware won two. DC appeared to have garnered fewer than normal, but they were big ones including “Best Writer,” “Best Continuing Series,” and “Best Publication for Kids.” As they continue their push into the world of comics, mainstream publishers made their presence felt with Harper’s Childrens Book winning two awards and Vertical earning the “Manga” award for its edition of Tezuka’s Dororo. while Abrams took home the “Best Comics-Related Book” award for Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics. And the ladies did well–Jill Thompson (“Best Painter”), Carla Speed McNeil (“Best Digital Comic” for Finder), Lynda Barry (“Best Reality-Based Work for What it Is) and Eleanor Davis all won well-deserved awards.

Here are the 2009 winners. For a complete list of Eisner Award nominees see “Eisner Nominations Released.”

Best Writer

Bill Willingham, Fables, House of Mystery (Vertigo/DC)

Best Writer/Artist

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library (Acme)

Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team

Guy Davis, BPRD (Dark Horse)

Best Continuing Series

All Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC)

Best Limited Series

Hellboy: The Crooked Man, by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben (Dark Horse)

Best New Series

Invincible Iron Man, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larocca (Marvel)

All I am going to say for now is I just don’t get it.  Or rather I do all too well as snark boy remakes Stark in his own image.  Other news out of the Con was word on Fraction working the video game connection to Iron Man 2 so I guess that hopes for his leaving Iron Man alone are like looking at the current state of the economy.

Invincible Iron Man #13 – World’s Most Wanted Part 6 : Some King of the World

The manhunt for Tony Stark continues with this issue on a downbeat clue washing ashore of Norman Osborn’s recent attempt to bring Iron Man to heel.  Osborn’s H.A.M.M.E.R. has however taken the 1616 armor in along with its pilot Pepper Potts ‘for questioning’ as it is put. Tony in the meanwhile is abroad scrapping together tech to build and maintain a simpler Iron Man that will function with his ever diminishing mental abilities. While it hasn’t been explained all that well it seems that the delete process of his mind along with all of his secrets is an ongoing process that will take some time to happen. How long?   Well that’s something even the current writer is a bit evasive about as in this excerpt from Newsarama gives us:

Matt Fraction: He’s engaging in a repulsor-drive powered deletion process of his mind. A kind of zeroing out of his data, if you will, that requires a tremendous expenditure of energy because of the modifications that Extremis made to his biology. So he’s running from secret base to secret base and hooking himself up to these big repulsor-powered machines that are wiping out all of the data stored in his brain because it’s the only power source large enough to handle such a job.

NRAMA: The “hard drive” that the information is on – it’s due in part to Extremis, but still…in your view, what form does it take? Is it a physical thing, or just a re-wired section of Tony’s brain due to the Extremis?

MF: It’s his brain. Tony is post-human; his biology is different than ours. The whole of it is more than the organ we have in ourskulls. Extremis rewrote him, rebuilt him, recreated him.

NRAMA: The question was asked in the story, but still – why can’t Tony find a way to make this happen…quicker? He’s Tony Stark, and he can’t figure out a way to 100% destroy his head so there’s nothing left? Or is he making it go slow on purpose?

MF: As answered in the story: this is the only way to be sure. The only other person that this has happened to died violently. There are no maps for the territory Tony finds himself in.

I of course have my own theory that I put forth in my post about last issue which amounts to however long Marvel needs Fraction to lengthen the story and keep Iron Man below deck as a major player in the Marvel Universe is how long it is going to take.  Until then this story will keep serving up the pieces and players as a side drama to Dark Reign.  Which isn’t to say that I am not enjoying Dark Reign’s many facets and effects all over Marvel or here in Invincible Iron Man it is just that it really isn’t quite Tony Stark’s story that much anymore as it is Norman Osborn’s that readers get to revel in.  Matt Fraction has flip way with the dialogue that suits Osborn but I have found just off-putting in the mouths of every character including Tony but will certainly strike a cord with those who are familiar with the movie’s Downey version of Stark.

I just really in fact don’t understand where the praise is coming from on this title like over at fellow blogger: http://weeklycomicbookreview.com/2009/05/09/invincible-iron-man-13-dark-reign-review/

Fraction makes all the wrong moves for me but is completely on the company plan and delivers what is expected of him regarding the character’s Q score.  It’s completely stupid but not brilliant stupid either as a diversion out and away from the Civil War entanglements and implications as I have said before that he has been tasked with.  I just don’t understand how it can be mistaken for strong storytelling as it inflates each issue with panels with stereotypical character moments and is becoming the poster child at Marvel for decompressed, issue churning, writing for trade, time-wasting bullshit.  All of which wouldn’t be all so very bad if it was a touch better at being likable; vis-à-vis the overarching tone of the book being so grating in all its characters snideness and gabby mouthed moronic.  In case you have not quite gotten it yet this issue has sent me over to a more active dislike for both Fraction and this storyline where nothing is happening except the genre demands for action.

What does happen this issue is more non-cooperation from Pepper, more Maria Hill resisting the Controller and escaping and Tony fighting with one of the Hood’s superpowered bounty hunters and escaping.   This issue is much more than a boring director’s cut version of last issue as it even ends on the same Hood and Madame Masque getting put to task by Norman Osborne.   Apart from the trivia nod to include Shockwave as this month’s bad guy there is no there here and if it weren’t for the fact that I get Invincible Iron Man by subscription this would have been a wasted bit of money.  For the sake of the rest of my subscription I can only hope now that Dark Reign and Matt Fraction are finished with Iron Man as soon as possible so that we can get on with some movement, insight or fresh approach to this hack work.

Teen Tony: Redeemed !

Early word on this new animated series now airing on cable via the Nicktoons Network had me more than sceptical and in fact filled me with a kind of dread. On the whole Marvel has had some very iffy to down right rubbish goes at the animation interpretations of their characters over the years. This has been both in terms of animation and in the questionable level of content quality across all of their properties which in short can be summed up as bastardizations of the comic that inspired them.  The Iron Man series of the 90’sbeing just one example of the pain inducing TV that Marvel had concocted that grates on a fan of the comics and their exacting details but also insults even a child’s credulity with cheesy plots and dialogue.  Disney XD has been airing that old series and watching it now shows that it isn’t just insensibly bad but also a testament to how desperate fans of the comics can be to having any moving rendition of their beloved characters happen at all.  The dread that I felt though was not inspired by Marvel’s animation history but by Marvel’s own comics history. Avengers:Timeslide #1 and Iron Man #325 introduced to the Marvel Universe in 1996 one teen-aged Anthony Stark of Earth-96020 and Avengers Vol 1 #395 saw the death of the our earth’s Tony Stark.  To many a fan of the character it is considered the low point in the entire history of the character in terms of just about everything about it. Art, writing, convoluted story via multiple titles left readers with a mess to make sense of a character they hardly recognized anymore.  Marvel editorial was in complete meltdown at this time and not just financially.   Rebooting the whole title two years later would be sigh of relief to long time fans.

The Armored Adventures series, which airs it’s new episodes on Friday nights with repeats throughout the week, follows a teenage Tony Stark after the death of his father in a plane crash. Tony attends high school and with the help of his friends Happy Hogan, Jim Rhodes and Pepper Potts, fights as Iron Man against such published villains such as the Mandarin and Crimson Dynamo. Movie and comic bad guy, Obadiah Stane starts off the series two-parter with a familiar position in Tony’s life as second of the Stark empire and plays a similar sinister role as usurper.  I won’t go on here about the plots of that which I did watch except that it also integrates a start to larger story arc involving the Mandarin who is a mysterious unknown figure to Tony and the world at this point in the story seeking the rings of power.  The Mandarin himself as shown to the viewer is actually a character called Zhang Khan and his son Gene Khan extending the father and son theme introduced in the pilot of Tony and his father Howard.

Like so many cartoons the medium is expected to be a first-exposure reworking of the concept that inspired it that can stand on its own.  In that regard it also stands apart from any other media treatment and in this case the recent live action movie and the 2007 DVD animated film in creating its own continuity.  To be sure this is a cartoon with one ongoing story and continuity though much of it can stand on its individual episodes.  Even though only three have aired the Nicktoons website and other TV sites have made available the summaries to all 26 of the season one episodes.  With stories ahead to feature the Hulk, Black Panther and core Iron Man players like Madame Masque and A.I.M. the fans of Iron Man are in for a treat. 

If one has been watching or heard good things about the Nicktoons Wolverine and the X-men then don’t miss either as rather intelligent and fun renditions of what comic readers have already digested in their decades of following the ups and downs of both properties in the Marvel Universe.  Iron Man: The Armored Adventures in particular manages to capture some of the gee whiz aspect that often can get lost even in the comics amid all the intrigue and drama.  It will also have that added feature that DC seems to have mastered in its various animated series to appeal to fans old and new in the making in keeping both guessing about what twists are ahead on the formula and canon.  Christopher Yost now is to the Marvel properties what Paul Dini or Bruce Timm has been to the DC Universe; a comicbook geek first who wants to make great watchable animation for everyone.  The first few episodes have me already convinced that its mostly his steady grip on the show that will not disappoint.  While a part of me will always yearn for an animated version of what I have already read and more about the arms making, russkie butt-kicking womanizier Tony Stark but that just is not going to happen on something backed by the money or network to make it as it is now being made.  The truth be told that’s not the whole of the character either.  As Yost himself recently put it about his forthcoming Avengers animated series “It’s what you know and love put right on the screen.”  I have to agree that’s what he has done with Iron Man for me.