This next installment in the Marvel Tie-In issue to the publishing house event, Secret Invasion, would otherwise be a smack load of big action as James “Jim” Rupert Rhodes aka Rhodey takes up the challenge that the Missing in Action Iron Man can not in fighting the alien Skrull armada from outer space. The writer, Christos Gage, however has a few more ‘irons’ in the fire than just delivering a summer blockbuster to the comics pages. 
Beginning with Rhodey’s memory flashbacks to his youth in Greys Ferry, Philadelphia, while fighting in space as a giant Mecha anime version of War Machine, has Gage writing in a history that reader’s will be able to take with them forward about the character. As far as I have gone in my reading of the entire of Iron Man comics, this is new material about the character before he ever met Tony Stark in the jungles of Southeast Asia. What we are to learn from the panels and pages is that Rhodey has struggled all throughout his life with people repressing, pressuring and discriminating against him and his self-determination. It can’t go unremarked that Gage does this with some weighted code words like ‘brother’, ‘educate’ and ‘with us or against us’ to stress race, class and conformity.
As War Machine is now giant robot suit blows up Skrull ships right and left, after taking them out, he goes back to earth in his normal suit to fight the Skrulls, but decending from space lands in Russia. Learning that Skrulls are a attacking a nuclear weapons depot with the Winter Guard defending it, he chooses to go there and help them. As he helps them out, the Skrulls overwhelm him while the Guard choose not to aid him having warned him not to interfere in sovereign matters. Rhodey goes down fighting and passes out only to waken to find that the Skrulls have taken prisoner to one of their ships for dissection. The issue ends with an overhead shot of stripped of armor Rhodes on an operating table.
Two items stand out from these events that delineate new things that we are to learn about Rhodey. The first comes as Rhodes has crisis of faith in being more than self-determined and take on larger responsibilities like intervening in Russia and is shaken out of it by his Jiminy Cricket of the hour Suzi ‘Cybermancer’ Endo talking to him from the satellite via his comm. The next item is far more disturbing as it come to the reader in that final panel as it is revealed that the full extent of Rhodey’s cybernetics and injuries that had been hinted at in prior issue and in The Avengers: The Initiative encompass about half of his body with his lower half being completely robotic.
The revelation and reorientation of this major character in the Iron Man story is striking to this reader in that one it removes the character from being a fully normal human foil in the Life of Tony Stark and two what it suggests about the treatment of African-American characters in comics. Some years ago I had a interesting discussion with a college classmate about his unease about a DC comics character called Cyborg and it made me aware of of gathering evidence of how African-American characters are depicted in American media. My friend related to me his sense of how Cyborg was yet another instance of the emasculated Black Male in pop culture through robotics. The computer age make a study of cyborgs quantitatively fairly simple to see that there is not a preponderance of African-Americans turned into cyborgs but it is suggestive that within Marvel Comics history victimization is far more frequent. Starting with the first cyborg, Deathlok, which ran in the Astonishing Tales #25-36(1974 – 1976), featuring the character, Colonel Luther Manning, a Detroit born African-American soldier turned not of his own volition into a sexless machine for killing, one finds a consistence of theme in what is now War Machine.
What is perhaps most impactful in the Iron Man story is the alteration of Rhodey’s relation to Tony Stark as another superbeing away from the humanizing element of a man of walking life mediating reality with the fantastical. Clearly on the one hand this is a editorial commitment toward creating a new character of sorts away from Tony Stark’s Iron Man by damning a being with problems and concerns of his own entirely as a different entity yet on the other removes forever the sounding board that was put in place for Tony many years ago with the introduction of the character. It saddens this reader somewhat as another instance of the serial medium being, it seems, unable to resist overturning normalcy for the gilding of superpowers as time passes. Change it seems is the only constant that comics respects and in giving newlife to an already well thought of character that can’t be all bad either. I am actually interested as to where this story will go from here on top of the breath holding issue’s end.
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