The title pretty much says it all about what happens but that’s not why you and I are here. What we have is more of Matt Fraction’s Tony Stark doing an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting presentation which serves up his reflections on his past. Considering the point one (.1) mission across Marvel of introducing the new reader to a series and being a jumping on point the issue functions more as a character recap and situator rather than plot set-up for coming stories. (Although I have no intention of jumping back on Captain America I did buy and read # 615.1 and feel far more drawn into a story start) It fails to kick-off a plot or idea and creates a tone for the entirety of the past of the title for the purposes of acting as a template for the way forward. In that regard it is a major revision but only in so for as to create a unity of character and composition that 40+ years of various creators have put together under a character’s name. On its own the issue is a tour de force of dialogue as narrative combining the cinematic technique of the voice over with the literary perspective of the mind’s eye of reality. We as readers see what Tony recalls amid the words he is speaking and unlike in certain films, where the action takes over from the narration, the narrative is sustained throughout the issue as Tony’s voice telling us and the audience his life struggle with himself. It is powerful and effective use of the reflective focus while sustaining the uniqueness of a voice of a character. I’ll credit both writer and artist here with doing an amazing job of producing a palpable sense of person and a past with this issue. My objection however begins on what that personage is and the drivers of his personality are.
As the issue begins with Tony celebrating his anniversary of his sobriety at the AA meeting he starts his address by pointing to his being his uncomfortable in his own skin, of pretending to be someone else from an early age to escape that discomfort. He also points out that in certain ways he was rewarded for being that “other” person by persons and social acceptance. Sex and drinking were just the means of escaping and being someone else until drinking overtook his life and even the said purpose to his life that he had found. Unspoken to the audience is that his purpose is being Iron Man but we see it on panel depicting the origin story, although the voice over describes it as a period in his life when he was sober and working in the family business and came under attack and faced the first real test of his life as his own person, we know the reality. Or do we?
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What makes this issue powerful and disturbing is the tension that it sets up between the overt and the subconscious worlds of Tony Stark neither of which are more real or more virtuous than the other. Is it Tony’s sobriety that is his greatest victory rather than beating the Mandarin and saving the world more than a few times? One begins to wonder. The issue carries both the reader and the viewer on through his life in this textual/visual parallel and chronologically through the highs and the lows of his career. Through the lens of his personality and affliction the events are perhaps a lesser ordeal than the crash of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom and trying to find his way back up and out from under it. It certainly minimizes things like becoming an Avenger, losing a couple of companies and friends and loved ones who he has “let down” with his retreat into his shell. The issue is hardly a tale of triumphalism of that inner struggle either as Tony’s meeting is not the entire issue and its epilogue of sorts is a phone call to Pepper and tripping all over himself in his honesty to be with Pepper and learning that he already has been but he just forgot because of his self-induced blackout to wipe his memory.
In one sense it is the seed for forthcoming stories as Marvel.com noted “Memory gaps will plague our hero, according to the writer, a scenario that may remind Tony-and readers-of his days as an alcoholic.” And we saw in #500 itself a memory gap is part of the reason he enlists Peter Parker to help find a device he created.
“I suspect it’s a largely similar phenomenon to drinking in a blackout,” says Fraction of Iron Man’s amnesia. “You wake up one morning and discover you’ve laid your life waste in ways great and small but have no recollection of it and have to move forward and figure it out while everyone else around you is all too painfully aware.”
This issue rounds that idea out with Tony slipping into another one of his addictions after the crash of his relationship with Pepper and sets to seducing yet another nameless woman. It suggests that the final feeling that we the reader are to take away from the story here and from the story of Tony’s life is one of pity for a man undone by his patterns as his real self than anything he has achieved. In itself that’s a pretty horrid take away and it hardly fits with the many people’s idea of a hero because the pity is not epic to mark a tragedy or even the melodrama of the older issues but let’s also consider that from a publishing history perspective it upends a good deal of the confident and successful Tony that we saw as nothing more than a façade. As seminal a work as Demon in A Bottle was it is doubtful that it was ever intended to explain Tony Stark or undercut his sense of self. If anything it is the Denny O’Neil stewardship of the title that comes into play the strongest here and now with this return to alkie Tony as the central element of Tony’s quest to define himself with certainty.
On that note it’s not very encouraging that the year ahead will wade into a Tony that sees more of his failings than overcoming. The issue as a whole has to get a grade lower simply for taking so much for granted as a matter of introduction to new readers that the point one issues are supposed to be about. Madame Masque, the Teen Tony, Rhodey and even the Mandarin all appear but get not one mention of who they are except through the elided connection to the text. That’s a fail for the writer of an otherwise penetrating exhumation of a character trait that might well have stayed buried with either the extremis virus or the decisions during Civil War. Given that we were just recently taken on a tour of Tony’s unconscious mind and motives in the Most Wanted story its overkill.
I agree with much of what you’ve written. While the issue was indeed well written, it seemed to be for the benefit of Iron Man readers more than anyone else. Otherwise the history of the character, as shown in the art, would feel fairly unexplained. It’s true that by focusing on his entire history from the perspective of an alcoholic, it diminishes all of his triumphs and victories (especially those that occurred before Tony was written to have a problem with alcohol).
thanks banon and that means a lot from someone who has a clear handle on the depth of popular art. Just looking at the last three films on your site is a triumph of diversity.
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