San Diego Comic Con starts in two days, and the entire cast of Avengers: Age of Ultron will be there. To get us in the mood, lets review an Iron Man graphic novel, shall we?
At the start of Iron Man Volume 2, Tony Stark is literally flying high: saving an alien world from space pirates and being fawned over by beautiful alien women. By the end of the first issue, he’s rejected, arrested, and presumed guilty of deicide. By the end of the book he’s an accessory to genocide, in league with the person who put the genocide into motion, and most of what he knows about his origin may be a lie. It’s been a bad few days for Stark, and it looks like things are just getting started.
Kieron Gillen has written for dozens of Marvel titles (one of my favorites being the Journey Into Mystery storyline featuring Kid Loki). His Tony Stark is just as confident-bordering-on-arrogant as ever. Charming, quick on his feet, able to recover from a temporary setback (and a really harsh rejection), he’s ready to adapt to whatever new situation he’s dropped into. But he’s met a master manipulator with the character 451. Bad enough to find out someone would take advantage of his arrest and escape, but then to find out that the arrest itself, even his presence on that world in the first place, was all planned from the start? That obviously throws Stark for a loop.
And then 451 shows him a recorded message from his father.
We don’t get to see exactly what the message says, but after Tony’s shocked reaction we go to a flashback involving his parents. And a medical tragedy in the works. And then, oddly enough, a 1960’s caper where Howard Stark and various shady friends pull a heist on a Las Vegas casino run by aliens. And surprise surprise, 451 is involved in all of it.
Greg Land does the artwork for the first few issues, and the art is certainly…eye-catching. The two-page spread with Tony sitting in a bar surrounded by an assortment of alien women was full of lovely jewel-toned colors and feathers for hair. Unfortunately Land doesn’t seem to know how to draw Stark’s face; as several other reviewers have pointed out, he looks just wrong for Tony. Land doesn’t have the same problem with any other character, but it made me glad that Stark spent most of the first issue in the armor. Tony’s more recognizable in the second half of the book when Dale Eaglesham takes over the artwork. Eaglesham’s art flows a little better, and the characters look less like posed centerfolds.
I really hope the next few graphic novels take more time with the story, because everything here happened so fast. Trial on an alien world, genocide, double-cross by a bounty hunter, and a high-stakes robbery in Vegas, I think Gillen devoted half a chapter to each. Maybe. It would have been nice to linger over some of it; Howard Stark’s little band of misfits could have filled up at least two whole issues. In contrast, Gillen’s doling out the revelations about Stark’s parents very sparingly. It should be interesting to see how it all unfolds, especially with a sympathetic (sort of) villain (…maybe?) like 451 in charge. We’ve already seen the lengths he’s willing to go and who he’s willing to sacrifice just to obtain one element of his master plan, and we don’t even know what that plan is. As for Stark’s origin, Tony thinks he knows how far back all of this goes, but I get the idea that 451 being around at just the right time to “help” Stark’s parents wasn’t much of a coincidence at all.