Ivan Vanko is not Whiplash

Needless to say those that see the movie and then read the comic will be confused but I am OK with that.  The movie still looks like it is going to be as fun as the last.   Trailer up fanboys today over at iTunes or click on the picture.

In other news the Free Marvel comic for 2010’s Free Comic Book Day will be a team-up comic featuring our boy Iron Man and…THOR????

 War Machine being far cooler I am thinking the bigger event here will be the movie.   I jest.  Of course the sad truth is that the movie will reach more people and code more minds with it’s conception of superheroes and Iron Man than any comic.  For now though when you Google  ”Ivan Vanko” you still get Crimson Dynamo.  Thank you the internet for some justice.

Legacy in re-write

The plague that is the Iron Man movie effecting the comic goes on.  ING has an announcement and interview up about “As anticipation builds for Iron Man 2, Marvel really is debuting a second ongoing series featuring the Armored Avenger. Iron Man Legacy will be written by Fred Van Lente (Amazing Spider-Man, Incredible Hercules) and drawn by Steve Kurth (Ultimate Armor Wars). The series will feature standalone story arcs that are set at varying points in Iron Man’s career. “

From the critical perspective here this is just the wrong direction that I have been documenting in this blog.   Van Lente is known for his light-hearted and more superficial writing style and can only undermine further that Iron Man is a title for serious readers of the medium.  It also calls into question the financial perspective that Marvel is chasing with this approach.  Is it just skimming off a few dollars from the Movie or is it seeking to build a next generation of comic reader?  Is the next generation of reader someone who finds something adult and compelling in superhero comics or just someone who likes broad heroic action?   Leave a comment on where you fall in this turn in the fandom.

Invincible Iron Man #20 – Stark: Disassembled Part 1 Counting Up From Zero

Howard: “Any luck with anything, Anthony?”

Tony: “Howard, hey, and no–just more and more of… what is this, a tooth? Why are these teeth buried under the dirt?”

Howard: “Hell, if I knew that one, son, I wouldn’t have to dig it up all the live long day, would I? Put ‘em ‘neath your pillow and you’ll be a billionaire by breakfast.”

Tony: “…I’d just lose it all by lunch again anyway…”

Howard: “Maria! C’mon gal, let’s get a move on before nightfall.”

Maria: “Shame we have to stop right now, isn’t it? Every time we get some real work done, the war destroys it again. Everything worthwhile here is buried deep down in the ground.”

So begins the Deconstruction…I mean Disassemble of Tony Stark.  The excerpt takes place in a dreamscape of the now persistent vegetative state of Tony Stark.  If ‘Most Wanted’ introduced anti-narrative within a narrative then writer Matt Fraction steps up that contest “increasing rift between what could broadly be called “phenomenological” and “structural” approaches to understanding individual and collective life.”  It is no accident that dreams would be the entry point of dismantling the logic of existing structures like continuity by exploring their genesis or origin.  When talking about superheroes though what origin are we talking about the Freudian one or the one which gave our hero his or her rebirth?  Are the two really even that distinct from each other?  It could just as well be argued that the rebirth of superhero origins are expressions of the unconscious.  It is in this discourse that the issue starts with Tony in vast wasteland with his father and mother trying to unearth something by literally digging into the ground.  In this manner the reader is positioned as viewer to the clearing away of the dirt that obscures the core truth or truths of the character.

Of course what Fraction is up to isn’t simply ‘clearing away’ but also ‘writing into’ that genesis material that has never existed before.  In the parlance of comic books this addition to the backstory is what is called a ‘Retcon’ or retroactive continuity as the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction.  When it comes to those key Freudian motivators, a mother and father, the story of Tony has been pretty empty except for  what has been shown in:

Iron Man Vol 1, 28
Iron Man Vol 1, 105
Iron Man Vol 1, 284 – 288
Iron Man Vol 1, 300
Iron Man Vol 1, 313
Iron Man: Legacy of Doom Vol 1, 2

What we do know from these past issues is that Howard Stark was a inventor and industrialist and that he and his own father worked on various projects, and later founded Stark Industries. During WWII and after, he worked on various government projects. Howard married a woman named Maria Collins Carbonell and had one child, Tony. He constantly pushed Tony as a disciplinarian, telling him that someone must have ‘iron in their backbone’ to be successful, eventually sending the boy off to boarding school to toughen him up. He also had a severe case of alcoholism which produced outbursts and near abusive behaviors to Tony and his mother. He was a contemporary of many other powerful businessman such as Warren Worthington II and Creighton McCall. It is believed Howard was also a member of the V-Battalion. On the Ides of March of an unspecified year, Howard and Maria were killed in a car accident. It has been hinted that the incident was not random and possibly arranged by the V-Battalion. Tony ran his father’s company, started a charity in his mother’s name, and later became of course — Iron Man.

In the 1960’s Stan Lee gave Tony only the means of wealth and the rest was up to the ’self-made man’ and only much latter in the 1990’s did writer Len Kaminski provide much of this Stark family back history noted above when once before Tony was ‘dead’ and in persistent vegetative state.  The reader was shown memories of a frozen Tony Stark as a child on into his schooling years. Kaminski even paid homage to Stan Lee’s conception of the character when Tony is rebooted in #288 and his unconscious writes his own computer code and leaves word “sorry to yank the job out of your hands – but I always did like the idea of being a self-made man” on a computer screen.  For Kaminski this psychological background did what a lot of modern fiction does in that it provides motive as a cause and effect relationship in the realm of time. 

Fraction however departs from the conventions of modernity here and enters into the neo-Freudian understanding of the unconscious which abandoned the linear structures of development which owes much to French psychoanalyst Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan.  Lacan’s lectures would hold great influence on not just psychoanalysis but literary theory as well over the decades following on the post-structuralism movement’s distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading as laid out by Ferdinand de Saussure. The mind of anyone, be it in reality or a fictive construct, was no longer thought be an objective collection but rather as a dynamic text to be describing or described.  Tony Stark’s unconscious therefore is represented as not as pure memory in the diachronic sense but as place seeking and making meaning itself as a process.

Which is not to say that Matt Fraction is some sort of post-structual theorist himself but as another Frenchman, Jean-François Lyotard, situates it. It expresses itself in popular culture as something which has bubbled up through the culture as “an extreme simplification of the “postmodern” as an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’. These meta-narratives – sometimes ‘grand narratives’ – are 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.” The artist that is Fraction responds to the sense that MORE is going on in a human brain than replaying a recording of memories and is trying to express it through description. Artists and all sorts of creative projects of our era do this perhaps far more extensively than we realize and far more than this humble blog can enumerate.

The writer of this comic book also has a more conventionally modern story to tell us about what passes for objective reality.  Conventional in so far as the larger story as Fraction still plays on the subjective Point of View and gives no establishing reality scenes to the next sequence after the dream and proceeds for the next six pages. In the waking world of Tony Stark’s body are gathered around him his friends to view a video recording of Tony last thoughts and requests intended to be shown as a culmination of his efforts to safeguard the identities of the superheroes gathered though the Superhuman Registration Act (SHRA).  It is good technique, if long-winded sequence,  to provide the reader with an extended monologue by the title character to address the grievances of those gathered like Thor as Dr. Blake and Bucky now as Captain America who were on the receiving end off many extreme actions of Tony in the past few years.  Actions like creating a clone of Thor and the capture of Steve Rodgers.  The others gathered around the hospital bed include ex-SHIELD director Maria Hill , the Black Widow and former personal secretary Pepper Potts.  We are introduced to established reality after the recording sequence through their reactions to both the situation and the recording.  Its emotional and practical according to the range of characters gathered but reviving Tony is the agreed upon course of action.  

Breaking with the coming events of Tony’s revival procedure, the issue reaches out to more fallout of Tony’s condition among his enemies and their plans.   This sequence begins and ends with two more returns to Tony’s dreamscape but the pertinent information that the reader is to come away with from the issue is that while Norman Osborn considers the problem of Tony Stark resolved and orders off his cohorts in crime, Madame Masque is plotting anew with assistance of Iron Man adversary the Ghost to kill Tony Stark.

It is better kick-off than Most Wanted and this promises to be only a five issue arc so it could be enjoyable but buying this issue might be ruined by the price tag as this is one of those extra-stuf issues which costs $3.99 but has only a 22 page story.  Pity on those completists who have to have both covers of the issue as well.  That extra stuff turns out to not even be a reprint or preview of a forthcoming comic but a truncated summary the Iron Man story thus far.  Marvel gives away such recaps of superhero careers in comic stores as freebies and calls them Sagas.  This Iron Man  ’saga’ however does not reach very far back in Iron Man’s career only picking up events at the start of Civil War to the present.  Perhaps this more a function the limited number of trade paperbacks available for fans to buy from the Iron man publication history since this is part of the marketing of the character.

Invincible Iron Man #19 World’s Most Wanted Conclusion: Into the White (Einstein on the Beach)

Iron Patriot

The Tour is over and the bad guy gets his. The question that hangs over this whole storyline has been just who is the “Bad Guy”?

It can be said that a punishment should fit the crime and for that ‘crime’ writer Matt Fraction has taken from the hero of the story, Iron Man, the one thing which led him to partake in the Civil War storyline as an agent of the government; his ability to reason. In the case of the nominative villain of the story, Norman Osborn, he too is turned back on his own sword as this story has reached its long awaited conclusion.  As a master of media manipulation and PR legerdemain, Osborn fails to crush Tony despite finally finding and actually  physically defeating the Iron Man in combat.  The story unfolds here by bringing together the situation at H.A.M.M.E.R. HQ involving the escape of captives Maria Hill and The Black Widow with the help of Pepper Potts posing as Madame Masque that had begun last issue. The HQ is on alert and abuzz with the ongoing operation of Norman wearing the Iron Patriot armor in pursuit of Tony across Afghanistan.

Here the writer takes up a point and character that he introduced in issue #17 of H.A.M.M.E.R. technician Christopher M. Walsh.  In a tradition of Iron Man comics, the employee of an organization comes to play a role in the grand events unfolding before the reader. In the case of Walsh he is introduced as reluctant cog in the organizational machine that had detected the location of the Iron Man armor through his proficiency if not his drive to capture his former boss. In the prior issue he simply did his job despite his misgivings of right and wrong and is lauded by Osborn as someone who can progress up the promotion ladder and wants working for him.  In this issue, the discomfort of Walsh advancing Osborn’s objectives becomes too much for his conscience and he subverts the power he has been handed and sends Osborn in the wrong direction in the chase toward Pakistan.  This subterfuge however only lasts for a time allowing Tony to fly and jump on toward Dubai through Iran.  Walsh is discovered and busted by his supervisor and Osborn is redirected but that margin of time allows for the other supporting characters to have an impact on Osborn’s victory. It becomes a Pyrrhic victory due to the consciences of the little guys of the world taking a stand.

Osborn does catch up to Tony wearing the original armor and proceeds to pound the heck out it with his own armor. Tony’s self-mind-wipe reaches its end as the fight become nothing more than a rout for Osborn leaving Stark at death’s door awaiting execution. The capture of Tony Stark, however, is carried live on world wide broadcast thanks to Pepper Potts and the J.A.R.V.I.S. interface rather than as Osborn would have had it as an on off-camera causality dying in a foreign land. Pepper is able to neuter Osborn’s coup de grace thanks to her own escape from H.A.M.M.E.R. and evoking the consciences of the former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who had her cornered. Even aboard the H.A.M.M.E.R. Hellicarrier Osborn is denied the termination of Tony by the on looking world of legality and decency by being informed that the ‘persistent vegetative state’ of Tony is to be turned over to his appointed doctor rather than disposed of as he sees fit. The writer’s final message here falls squarely on the side of justice lying in the hands of the smallest of details and the smallest of people gathering together.

Most Wanted ends on the gathering of Tony’s friends in a hotel room as Pepper, Maria, Black Widow, Captain America and Dr. Donald Blake get a phone call.  As an issue it shows remarkable craft of the writer to deliver detail and dialogue that is cumulative to a point or theme that he is out to deliver to the reader. There are many touches that I can’t include in summation simply because that is the way the work is put together as successive detail after detail.  It has a very humanizing effect on the narrative and if restoring affection for the character has been the prime goal of the story arc this aspect has gone a long way toward helping that aim. This blur of detail, however, is also a kind of dodge to addressing head-on the notion of what Tony has been running from and what crime he is guilty of.  No doubt that we have seen a character full of recrimination about failure of duty to persons in these many issues but just what that failure is that logically constitutes a crime is slid-past as if it doesn’t really exist; though it does in the hearts many a Marvel comic reader.  Fraction himself alerts us of his intent via his subtitle of this concluding part as Einstein on the Beach.  Nodding toward the opera he has brought the reader a portrait of ” men whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.[2]” but more than that he also gives us the matching anti-narrative technique of that opera.

Propelling idea of “non-plot” within Einstein on the Beach, its libretto employs solfege syllables, numbers, and short sections of poetry. In an interview, Glass comments that he originally intended for his audience to construct personal connections with both Einstein as a character and also with the music with that he assigns to the icon.^[1] For example, the music within the first of the opera’s “Knee Plays” features repeated numbers accompanied by an electric organ. Glass states that these numbers and solfege syllables were used as placeholders for texts by the singers to memorize their parts, and were kept instead of replacing them with texts.^[1]

Like its very long operatic inspiration Fraction’s linear story has been an illusion and the reader has been taken along on an invocation of that which moves the person that is Tony Stark. In this mode Fraction has been free to resituate the character as a moral being among the players in his life. It also has allowed him a number of conveniences like shifting questions of criminality and even consistency out away from the conjuring the spirit of Tony Stark or the Iron Man comic as a whole. If one goes back to the opera by Glass, key is the placeholder concept and a syllable is not a word. To that end to invoke is not the same as replicate nor is the spirit of something a culmination. Fraction’s method then denies continuity as a logically additive process of facts and developments in themselves but places a higher value on the spirit that moves them all.  He can therefore be as loose as he needs to be as when he has been by taking us on this twelve issue tour of Iron Man, even if many of the characters have seemed inconsistent to what has been shown over the years of publication. The spirit is his justification and as method all at once.

That too has become true for the un-named crime of Civil War which the man of the mind, Tony Stark as Iron Man, has now paid for with the loss of his mind.  I will state it explicitly, since Fraction can’t and won’t, that it is because Tony reasoned that he was doing the greater good working for the government and law than against it.  In the hearts of some Marvel readers Tony commited a crime against the spirit, if not the law, operating within a superhero universe of turning against some superheroes.  As such he came to be the opponent of Captain America, considered by some to be the true hero of Civil War, and eventually led to the page below. For some comic readers it was an indictment of America itself that the public servants and heroes of 9/11 were used to bring down someone who stood for its values and Iron Man was complicit in that sin.  For readers such as me who saw it fitting that 9/11 was a roadblock to an idealism gone amok then perhaps there was no crime at all.  Next issue promises to move on.

Captain America defeated by Americans

Note to CW -

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.   
————————————————
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.