Invincible Iron Man #501 – Fix Me – Part 1

From Peter Parker and Spider-man in #500 to the appearance of Doctor Ock, Sandman and Electro in this issue one has to wonder just how much over-think is going on with putting the relationship between Peter and Tony back together after Civil War. I mean it is all still about Civil War isn’t it?

As I argued recently at a message board, the relationship just before and during Civil War was a father and son sort of relationship beyond just a superhero team-up. Also the falling out went both ways as far as betrayal goes and the hurt.  As Peter was the mentee to Tony the mentor so we have Tony lording over the student’s punching bag.

Well, we do have some continuity background on Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius a.k.a. Doctor Octopus being a brilliant scientist in his own right beyond the Spider-man comics but not much. Reed Richards, Marvel’s uber-genius even consulted with him at one time in Fantastic Four #267. It is enough to insert a bit of  retro-continuty of having met before as scientific engineers. What seems to be the main thrust here is the role of technology in the world and where ideas come from as opposed to what use they are put to.

Central to this issue is not really the plot of holding New York and Tony’s architect of New Asgard, Timothy Cababa, hostage but the debate about technology. To what ends and whose ends are inventions, ideas and technology to be used goes back and forth as Tony holds an idealistic line to Octavius’s assent to those in power and the power granted in return in both the past and in the present. Much of the present day action and discussion turns on a recounted encounter that Tony had with Otto years before either of them had the superpowers they are known for today. The issue itself opens with the page captioned ‘Back Then’ as Tony fiddles with a Rubik’s cube in a hotel lobby and establishes both setting and a contempt that goes back for both characters.

As we have now come to expect from a Fraction/Larroca issue the mastery of the scene and functional frameworks that work really well. Fraction packs his panels with Tony talking a mile a minute while the scenes move us from the past Arlington, present Seattle, New York, New York tape delayed television and back to fight off a missile before getting back to past Arlington, the present and present Broxton. One might think all these scene changes are meant to make up for action and they wouldn’t be half wrong.

What happens in these is that Tony is taken in by Doctor Octopus’s threat to blow-up an atomic device flying above New York City in what looks like one the tentacled machines that we have seen in Iron Man issues depicting both Tony’s unconscious mind and the far future where the Mandarin has taken control of earth. What Doctor Octopus wants from Tony along with humiliating him in return for the humiliation he bore years ago from Tony is to be fixed of his deteriorating nuro-physical condition. Octavius is dying and if he can’t be saved then he wants Tony to admit that he don’t have the smarts to do it. Holding NY hostage is of course not enough of a threat to fill the page count or action quotient and so the added threat to Timothy Cababa also adds to issue and the larger story as we suspect it will also see Pepper Potts having it out with Sandman and Electro in the next issue.

Pepper, near issue’s end, comes to the motel room where Timothy is staying in Broxton, to check on Stark employee Cababa, and finds that he is mysteriously not responding to his door. The issue closes on the literal schematic of a coming confrontation between the villains and Pepper from the layout of the situation.

It is what happens in between the that makes this issue stand out as what Fraction is doing is laying another brick in the wall of Tony’s personality before he became Iron Man and we see him drinking and at least inwardly rejecting the “samo-samo rah-rah military-industrial complex crap” in an open debate about new ideas. Apart from setting a clear line of ‘hippies’ versus the ‘sad fat puppet whore’ the debate doesn’t get much further than that and descends into a personal animosity that plays itself out in the present no-win situation that Tony finds himself in. For what it is worth Tony bides his time trying to find way out of the situation and terms that Doctor Octopus has set for him.

So much of this issue is clearly set-up for the next few with its terms as well themes that it would be better to see this as act one in the play.

#’s 22 and 23 have an Iron Man/Ock meeting in 1985 done by Roger McKenzie and Ken Steacy that employs some airbrush techniques. Doc Ock upsets Stark’s plans for keeping a high security tank for supervillains and in a matter of one page, Stark International stocks “nosedive” and Tony sinks into semi-depression (not alcoholism as the next issue reveals that green bottle he was pouring from was really Canada Dry).

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