CBI Archive
The Invincible Iron Man #1 Review
- by Brian Cronin
- in Comic Reviews
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 3:38 AM EST
Updated: Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 3:38 AM EST
The first issue of Matt Fraction’s new Iron Man series came out today, with artwork by Salvador Larocca (colors by the late Stephane Peru, with Frank D’Armata finishing up what Peru did not manage to handle before his tragic death), and it is excellent.
Like his work on The Order, Fraction makes The Invincible Iron Man a densely packed book - you are getting a lot of story featuring a lot of different characters in each issue, which is quite impressive.
The main plot of the issue is that a new bad guy named Ezekiel Stane is turning people into suicide bombers, using Iron Man technology, that Stane figured out on his own! In one single issue, Fraction has already successfully saved the name Ezekiel from JMS’ Spider-Man run. Stane is a charismatic villain, and funny, too. Check out his intro, where he is hired to invent cigarettes that can cause people to lose weight…
Salvador Larocca’s artwork is the strongest I have seen it look in quite awhile. He maintains his realistic looks without sacrificing storytelling, which is hard to do, so I was pleased that Larocca was able to pull it off.
Fraction even throws in some continuity mentions, like having Tony and Rhodey converse like they used to, and in this nice double-page splash, where the Armor Wars are addressed…
In one issue, Fraction has introduced an intriguing new villain (plus the villain’s girlfriend, who is also interesting), set up some plots for problems with Iron Man’s armor, got in some action scenes, set up later plots, work in a number of nice character moments (including early on, with some minor characters who are there just to die) - although the whole “showing him her thong” scene seemed a bit off to me, I liked the idea, but the execution seemed off, mostly because Fraction didn’t have Tony react - it robs Pepper’s actions of some of the power if we don’t see Tony acknowledge it, plus a cliffhanger ending that is completely set up by the story - a nice, FAIR cliffhanger.
Great first issue.
Definitely recommended.
10 Comments
Filrouge
May 7, 2008 at 5:57 am
I’m sorry Mr Cronin, but Ezekiel Stane was introduced in The Order.
DanLarkin
May 7, 2008 at 7:43 am
So Iron Man’s new arch enemy is Mark Cuban?
John Chidley-Hill
May 7, 2008 at 9:18 am
I think Mark Cuban would make an excellent supervillain.
Arnie C
May 7, 2008 at 10:08 am
Corgi International (formerly Master Replicas) CEO Michael Cookson doesn’t wear socks also…so perhaps HE’S the villain in all this…
BDaly
May 7, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Must fight temptation… pull list too big…
sononsj
May 7, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I’m sorry, but that is some truly awful artwork.
Lucion
May 7, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Why does everybody in this comic look so strange? The rubbery sheen looks okay on the Iron Man armor but not humans. It’s like bad 90’s CGI work.
wwk5d
May 7, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Is he related to Obadiah Stane? I really need to read the full issue, based on these 2 pages, he seems like an annoying twerp. Not sure about the art either, though I usually like Larocca’s work.
Omar Karindu
May 8, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Cliffhanger? It ends on a logical chapter break, sure, but not a cliffhanger by my lights.
Honestly, this was a bit too much of an infodump for my tastes. Fraction’s dense scripting works when the story also contains enough ongoing action to provide the plot a thru-line, as in Casanova, but here there were simply too many pages in which Fraction has his characters telling us about cool ideas rather than showing us the cool stuff and then sweetening it with the rich, if convoluted, explanation. In fact, oftentimes it seems Fraction is dressing up an alarmingly conventional idea in technobabble. Part of this may be Larroca’s art, which has
For example, the two pages you posted seem to have this problem: we’re meant to see that Stane is unpredictable, brilliant, and deadly in those pages, but something’s going wrong for me with the storytelling. Half a page is wasted on the DVDs, which just don’ pay off this issue; the reader never gets an inkling of what’s on them. Stane’s unpredictability amounts to his killing background ciphers when he has no more use for them, the same sort of thing pretty much every supervillain does, and…uh…not wearing socks. And his nifty little speech about altering his metabolism, while an original concept, comes over in the art and/or script as your standard energy-blasting cyborg sort of stuff. Either Fraction didn’t script more than this, or Larroca can’t make it look bizarre or exotic enough.
The plot is really good, however, and the basic idea — someone as good as Stark with none of his morals and half his age — is excellent. And yes, the opening sequence and its plot setup works wonderfully, in no small part because it relies on the reader to recognize the technology involved and do the math themselves. Would that the rest of the comic were so trusting or so visual.
This has enormous potential, which is probably as much as a first issue can do. It also has a few alarming stylistic features that I’ll be watching for lest they annoy me too much to keep going through the opening arc.
Stefan
May 9, 2008 at 7:03 am
This is only the second time we’ve seen Zeke Stane and he’s the best new Marvel villain we’ve seen in years. I loved pretty much every aspect of this issue, and that’s quite rare for me when it comes to Iron Man.
BDaly - I’ve forfeited almost my entire pull list to be replaced by Matt Fraction’s titles. I buy Carey’s X-Men, and I’ll buy Final Crisis… Anything else I’m really interested in, I can read in the store or wait for the trade. And I can’t do that with Fraction. His stories are too dense and they pull me right in. He’s simply the cutting edge of comics writing today.
Omar - My reading is he didn’t just kill them because he had no use for them. He killed them because he’d used all of their money for his own upgrades rather than on their project; and they couldn’t make him accountable for it if they were dead.