Tpull's Weekly Marvel Comics Review
Invincible Iron Man 23
by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca
This is at least the third cover we’ve had with Shellhead’s armored skull, and a mental Tony Stark to symbolize his internal struggle, and it’s a little boring. But that matches the inside. See, Stephen Strange is now inside Tony’s head too, but it’s not like he can really do anything to help with his magic. Evidently, he can use his magic to get in there and jog Tony’s memory, but everything else is up to Tony. Just another case of Marvel shoving their new sorcerer supreme aside (sorry, Doctor Voodoo, but you didn’t think you’d actually be allowed to interact with other heroes, did you?), but all Stephen does is explain the old canard: if Tony dies in his brain, he’ll die in real life. Thus, they eat up the first three pages with so-so art, mostly a background color lightshow, and a laboriously extended explanation of what we already know.
Wait, it gets worse. Fraction decides to go cinematic and decompressed on us, and spend four pages with drab, unadorned backgrounds so Pepper and Maria Hill can figure out that Tony slept with both of them. Duh. What was his reputation? How many years has Pepper known him? What did Maria think of him most of the time she knew him? Six entire panels spent with no words, just them silently looking at each other and Tony’s body. Freaking waste of my time is what this is.
Now we’re back in Tony’s head, and the illusion of Stephen inside Tony’s head is… drinking a cup of tea! That’s a wise expenditure of your resources! The Ghost shows up in the "real" world, and for some reason, Maria immediately rules out trying to raise Cap or Black Widow for help. No, they’re on their own, for reasons that are not explained to the reader.
We end on a sorry note, with Tony repeating a hard rock song: “I… am… Iron Man." Aww, isn’t that cute? No. No, it’s not. You’re taking two years to tell a four-issue story, and I am bored out of my skull, and evidently Larroca is too, because there just isn’t much effort in the art anymore, either.
Nova 34
by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mahmud A. Asrar
The older Sphinx and the younger Sphinx set their champions against each other, with the temporal settings of their battle sometimes having an effect on the outcome. Since I like this comic a lot, I’ll make a long story short and say that the individual fights are interesting; they remind me of the contests that beings of great power set for super-heroes in the old days. The creative team is firing on all cylinders, and I think Scott Hanna is a very talented inker. He changes his method of filling in the inks depending on the artist he’s with, and you can tell. Asrar has a mildly “looser” style of drawing, and Hanna lets the inks be relatively minimalist to complement them, instead of making everything as tight as we see when he’s paired with other artists.
Darkhawk is something of an anomaly to the elder Sphinx, but he manages to use him to stop the younger Sphinx from getting his hands on the second Ka Stone. But wait! The older Sphinx uses Darkhawk to take the second Ka Stone instead, so even though the younger’s plans have been defeated, Nova and company just helped the elder to power-up. Smooth move, guys! A nice little twist that keeps the story interesting.
Siege 2
by Brian Bendis and Olivier Coipel
The simple truth, spoken by Asgardians that Ares trusts, is all that is needed to help Ares realize he has been played. No sooner does he attack Osborn, though, than the Sentry takes him out and rips him in half in a gruesome display of raw strength.
We get the obligatory pin-up of the good guys that Steve Rogers has assembled to fight the good fight, but I find the format decompressed still. When you think of a classic series like the original Secret Wars, there was a lot more plot and action both, but the insistence on always using two-page spreads for nothing more than a roll call and for cinematic effect is getting a little old. They take up so much time to show you poses for the characters that there’s not room for much else. Someone needs to find a better balance so the pictures can still tell a lot of the story, but without so many dramatic pauses, and add a little more meat to the story itself.
The bonus material is Nick Fury telling his Secret Warriors what the plan is, and to behave. It reads well, even if a line or two seems duplicative of stuff you might read in another comic, or even another part of Siege itself. They also print correctly the text page that was mistakenly left out of the first issue. The fanboys are having fun, with Bendis making this a big smackdown fight, and Coipel can stage the characters as good as any other person, but the mini-series has been stripped down to a simple fight for the most part, leaving no room for anything even hinting at something more interesting or thought-provoking.
The Torch 5
by Alex Ross, Mike Carey, and Patrick Berkenkotter
The Fantastic Four arrive to help out while Hammond fights an infected Namor, and we end up with Toro, Hammond, and Johnny Storm all roasting Namor at the same time. Mike Carey has put his thinking cap on, and he crafts a scenario where Johnny gets momentarily disabled by some missile defenses, while Hammond understands enough of basic physics to figure out how the missiles work, and use his powers in a way specifically to defeat them. It’s clever, and a good way to establish that for all of Johnny Storm’s experience, he’s still brash, while Hammond uses his intelligence. It also reflects the earlier attempt in he Avengers/Invaders mini-series to establish that Hammond is an expert in the use of his powers, and his experience allows him to do more, and do better, than most other characters with the same essential fire powers can manage. The more you know, kids…
Hammond confronts the Mad Thinker and uses his current, more robotic personality to convince the Thinker he will destroy the world rather than let the thinker have his legacy of making his mark upon the world. The Thinker gives up the way to cure everyone and does a quick teleport out, leaving a warning that there will be consequences. We soon learn that the enzyme used to break down the Horton-cell infection works on every Horton cell, which means that Hammond will be melting like the Wicked Witch of the West in about three days.
The art style seems to fit well with the older-era Hammond, and great care is taken to craft his face to seem reminiscent of the way many Americans looked back during World War II. The light sources and inking of the faces are well done, although they do have just one or two too many blank backgrounds for me in the panels. The story is holding up well, transitioning from one type of crisis to another, and holding my interest.
Tpull is Travis Pullen. He started reading comics at 5 years old, and he can't seem to stop.
