Iron Man 2.0 #5 – Fear Itself Part 1

With nearly half the issue being the introduction of the character Sun Wukong in the “eighth city” from the Iron Fist comics those coming to this issue for either the event or what has become of War Machine are going to be a bit puzzled by the casting.  Simply why a new title like this needs to be distracted with a collection of characters from another series is the real mystery here.  

Yet for our titular character to participate in this event one has to expect some amount of crossover with the rest of the Marvel universe to argue for relevance. During the main part of the Fear Itself storyline (in Secret Avengers also by Nick Spencer), War Machine is seen in Washington D.C. helping Ant-Man and Beast. War Machine learns from the Prince of Orphans that the “Eighth City” has been opened.  And it is isn’t going to be a good thing for anybody. 

In case anyone was wondering what happened to the other story  with Palmer what’shisface it turns out that James Rhodes is as shocked as anyone, looking out over the attack on D.C. by Nazi mechs how quickly things can turn. Last issue fighting someone else, who Jim can’t seem to recall by name either, and doing something completely different, and then a crossover happens, and Bam! some other guys who’ve never appeared in his comic before are doing something completely out of character with the tone of the book.  So once again the steady developments of my own personage, he must be thinking, have been lumped into a team effort and a mega-event. It’s like Secret Wars all over again but a least I can have snappy patter  again.

Yes, this is an Iron Man blog but I also read and enjoyed Iron Fist’s return to glory in the Marvel Universe in 2006 under Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction’s The Immortal Iron Fist as not as a buddy comic but as a real martial arts genre comic.  I have a real soft spot for martial arts in comics of the 70′s as extension of the whole genre defining period (and what kind of Iron Man fan doesn’t dig Fu Manchu). That said I have gone cold over the inflation of the immortal weapons concept beyond Iron Fist. Not that they haven’t tried but I really don’t want to see these characters anywhere else but in an Iron Fist comic and even there they ran their course of sorts; as did sadly the comic.

If a surprisingly large percentage of pages of the issue was expository set-up for a larger purpose of original characters and concepts to be added to the Universe for later writers and artists to play with why must Iron Man 2.0 bear the load?

The only reason I could come up with was that as part of Matt Fraction’s legacy over all the three concepts and getting the Immortal Weapons involved in the hunt for one of the Serpent’s giant hammers; which almost as an aside  involves Titania and the Absorbing Man; is just a matter of there not being enough super teams in the Marvel universe to fill the worldly quota of threats that his over-plot demands.  That’s pretty sad to me and says a lot about how bad things have gotten over at Marvel.  Over at the Hurting,  Tim O’Neil sums up the event so well that I am not sure I will have much more to add to it.

(The problem with Fear Itself seems to be that the story itself really is nowhere near as involved as people were led to believe, hence a lot of people continually complaining that they don’t “get” what it’s really “about.” For months we were “treated” to teaser images of all our heroes being faced with images of their greatest, most profound fears. It is reasonable that most people expected that the story would involve many of these heroes being brought face to face with their greatest, most profound fears in some fashion. But no, really, it’s just about a bunch of bad shit happening all at once that the heroes are too busy to clean up in an organized fashion. A bunch of really strong people get giant magic hammers that make them even strongerer. So yeah. That’s it: they’re afraid because shit just got real. Which, eh, isn’t really the story they advertised, but whatevs. How this is any real-er than Secret Invasion or Secret Wars II or Maximum fucking Security is not really clear. Giant hammers and Nazi robot? Oh my, the pulse, it throbs with suspense.)

So am I looking forward to the next issue with MORE Sun Wukong and the Seven Weapons with a bit of James Rhodes to keep it real for me ?  I don’t think so but I be there.