Tony Stark’s Iron Man is easily one the most popular character in the Marvel movie-verse. Once the Secret Wars smoke clears, Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez are tasked with making him just as popular on the comic page. It’s not going to be easy.
Before Secret Wars mixed up the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark’s Superior Iron Man was the world’s most sinister in-app purchase salesman. While most of Marvel’s heroes recovered from having their personalities inverted during the AXIS storyline, Tony Stark, super-genius managed to shield himself from the re-reversal, remaining the same self-centred arsehole he always has been, only with a side of evil.
When last I read, he’d infected all of San Francisco with Extremis technology that would keep them healthy and beautiful as long as they paid $US99.99 a day via in-app purchase.
I enjoyed reading Superior Iron Man. I loved the all-white armour he was rocking. However, I hated Tony Stark. He was not a hero. He wasn’t much of a human being. He was totally a dick.
Revealed today at Marvel’s “NextBig Thing” panel at Special Edition: NYC and detailed in an article at USA Today, Marvel’s bringing in the big guns for the return of Invincible Iron Man.
The new book will be picking up eight months following the end of Secret Wars, with Tony Stark wanting to be a better man. He’ll make new friends. He’ll explore a new relationship with a woman markedly more intelligent than he is. He’ll don a new suit of armour. He’ll begin building a new rogues gallery of villains. He’ll even find out who his real parents are, following up on the revelation that he was adopted famously penned by Keiron Gillen.
Brian Michael Bendis will be writing the series, and for once the popular scribe’s penchant for heavy dialogue might have found the perfect mouth to match. Bendis has written Iron Man in several books, but this is the first time he’s tackling Stark’s solo book. Expect technobabble and snark to flow.
Artist David Marquez has collaborated with Bendis in the past, most famously on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. His crisp lines look lovely on the new Iron Man suit, featuring a new technology that allows it to transform into different configurations — “It’s like a brand-new kind of technology but it still brings out the classic Iron Man. You just get all the Iron Mans at once, plus some new ones,” Bendis told USA Today.
I’ve loved Iron Man since the early ’80s. It was one of the first comic books I subscribed to. My high school notebooks were littered with armour sketches. I loved the idea that anyone could be inside that metal shell.
Marvel just needs to figure out how not to make the man inside the armour a complete arsehole. Tony’s been through a lot, much of it making him come off as a jerk. He’s been an abusive drunk. His crusade to recover his stolen technology in the “Armour Wars” arcs did more harm than good. It got so bad that he was killed and replaced with a teenage version of himself.
Once that nonsense was retconned, Tony spent years and years picking the wrong side of fights, taking on responsibilities he couldn’t handle and just basically making himself into a giant arsehole all over again.
Hopefully Bendis can pull it off.
Invincible Iron Man ultimately is “this adopted child’s journey of finding out who they really are,” (Bendis) concludes. “When you find out what happens at the end of the first issue, he has to make a choice on what he’s willing to do as a superhero to fix things for real.”
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3 responses to “When Secret Wars Ends A New Era Of Iron Man Begins”
Tony stark has had it so rough in the comics lately, look at the incursions and the fact that they pretty much made him to be a mad man. Would be nice if he went back to being an actual hero.
This is why I don’t like Marvel. You watch a Marvel film, think that it presents interesting characters and scenarios, and decide that maybe their comics might be half as good as their films.
DC comics is held up as having too much back story, but in reality with the resetting they do with their multiverse set up, the storylines are often fresh, and focus more on archetypes and familiarity rather than knowing precisely what happened 58 comics ago, and how that relates to a plot line that has been off an on for the last 5 years.
With DC, if you know the characters, their powers, and a rough idea of how they relate to each other, it becomes easy to pick them up at any point in time.
Compare this to Marvel’s Civil War. I know it was a few years ago now, but it was coming out around the time the first Avengers film was screening.
So all the heroes come together for a biff up, as they often do in comics. It was a pretty good and challenging context too, the notions of identity and the separation between public and private life is always a good one to have.
But then…
Thor turns out to have been dead for a while, and no one knew about it. He was cloned into a cyborg when Iron Man got a lock of his hair covertly from a random comic scene several years ago. Cyborg Thor then proceeds to kill people before people realise what is going on. O_o;I wish I was making this up. If Marvel could just get off their “we need to reference everything all the time to annoy anyone who has not read everything” high horse, they would be a much better publisher for it.
except that there was 6 years between civil war and the avengers movie..
also you didnt ‘need’ to read the comic where the thor genetic material was acquired – its adequately explained in 4 or so panels on a single page. story line it was a bit of a stretch, but the reason for it was also explained in 2 separate issues.