Invincible Iron Man #6 – The Five Nightmares Part 6: Irrational Actors

“When Marvel announced a second ongoing series featuring Iron Man, fans were somewhat skeptical. As a lead character, Iron Man’s always been something of a second banana behind Spider-Man, the X-Men and even Captain America.”- Newarama by Matt Brady posted: 2008-10-08 14:03:00 ET

Indeed – a good word choice by Mr. Brady. I am skeptical about this this writer and the course of this title character of being hijacked to service a larger medium namely the movies.

Part six of this Stane vs. Stark story reaches its conclusion this month which has been framed by Ezekiel Stane coming to embody the technological Nightmares of the title which have gotten a bit lost here.  I can’t seem to remember what the five are* as I think they were tossed off in the first issue but this issue does its darnedest to enshrine Stane as number six.  Considering that last issue left off with bad guy jr. appearing to have blown off the head of Tony Stark along with the helmet of Iron Man it would seem that he has some merit.  Unfortunately regular readers may well have figured that Tony was simply using a remote armor interface as has been seen in the past two years at least twice in the Avengers and Iron Man to control an army of Iron Men consisting of old Iron Man models.   Stane is caught off guard by this false victory while Tony deploys the Iron Men to stop the suicide bombers that have infiltrated  Stark Industries in L.A. and Tokyo and contain the damage in Valencia.  These measures are only positioning moves in Tony’s metaphorical chess game with Ezekiel to deliver the final checkmate in a gambit that neutralizes all technology with a electromagnetic pulse. 

This technological blackout allows Tony to face Ezekiel mano-a-mano and conversly as according to comic convention engage in a verbal ideological battle.

Let’s look at something dear reader, if I can take us to an extratextual source, from the venerable Newsarama interview with Matt Fraction the writer of this issue: (I will swap out for you some key words here in red for effect and one can go to the Newsarama link for the unedited.)

Matt Fraction: NeoCons — even billionaire cool execs with hearts of steel– are powerless to inflict their will upon the future. They’re oracles at best. And no matter how much the U.S. doesn’t want the toothpaste to get out of the tube, it’s gonna. They say in the campaign that the first step to Recovery from the Bush years is to admit to powerlessness and to accept that one’s world has become unmanageable. My take on the US as a nation is that he’s an alcoholic that’s not been treating his disease– a dry drunk, as they say, trying to run the world. He refuses to think of himself as powerless. He’s a Neocon and a control freak, and sometimes things don’t quite break in his favor, no matter how pure his motive, how bad he wants it, or how hard he tries to make it happen. U.S. core to me is that the smartest guy in the world can’t figure out why the goddamn thing doesn’t spin around him and obey his whims.

He goes on with his point in his exact words – “Tony sees Ezekiel the way any establishment sees an insurgent. And tragically he reacted to him the same way. “  Chezz Mr. Fraction are YOU with us or against us?

The issue itself concludes the fight with a battered and beaten Ezekiel in Tony’s grip as Stark denounces killing in the name of ideology and in a sense concludes Fraction’s purging Iron Man of the political referent by reducing all of it to necessity.  The necessity here being ‘lives’ as he reflects in his SHIELD office in the closing panels on the lives lost in Stane’s mad assault on him and what he represented to Stane.  It is a tragic ending which is not unusual for an Iron Man issue but of a kind that suggests more about directing the character away from circumstance rather than embracing it as part of the character.

My point here isn’t that that one need agree or disagree with the political content or even gripe that a writer has a point of view about world power politics and the future. What I am skeptical about is the manner in which lays out a springboard to re-invent the character.  That would be as a character isolated from the material realism that informs the character of his moral decisions and renders them as just compromises. By material realism I mean a kind of fiction that is informed by, what Matt Fraction well points out in the interview as well, Science and worldly limits that has come to be understood as Science Fiction.

Ever since Pamela Sargent dubbed Science Fiction “the literature of ideas” though this has been a problematic formulation about understanding the intersect between the material condition of lives led in the real world that is now mostly informed by science and the ideational, abstracting, categorizing and valuational mission of much of fiction.

A “literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” as Issac Asimov said in 1953 rides the surface of this intersect and allows for a dichotomy of value in conflict with the impact of technological change and this is the retreat to which Matt Fraction has taken the Iron Man character away from the political solutions to such changes.

*Btw- I went back to issue one to find those “Nightmares”

1- I get drunk tonight
2- The Iron Man becomes cheap and affordably replicable
3- Someone other than Rhodey or Tony pilots the Iron Man
4- That Iron Man becomes disposable – unremarkable in every way
5- That the person who makes the Iron Man cheap, easy to use and disposable isn’t Tony Stark