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.

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.