Iron Man #1
So, after waiting for years and years for Fraction IIM run to finally end so I can maybe start reading Iron Man again, I picked up Gillen's first issue of the Marvel Now relaunch. So far, my reaction is "Mmmmmm..... wait and see."
The set-up for the Extremis storyline does look interesting, though I'm peeved about Maya. It could be really interesting to see how Tony deals with Extremis-enhanced bad guys given that he himself doesn't have it anymore. And hey, Tony actually came off as smart and competent in the scenes where he crashes the AIM gathering. (How sad is it, that Tony Stark appearing competent in his own book has become so rare that I find myself celbrating it?) So I'm going to at least keep reading until the end of this arc.
OTOH, that opening scene with Tony and Pepper and the blonde was seriously off-putting, and not just because of Land's art. (Land is... Land, but still manages to be marginally less hideous than Larroca.) We get a beautiful, intelligent woman pretending to be a bimbo for reasons that make sense to no one except to a dude who imagines he understands how women think. We get Pepper being catty and bizarrely priggish. "Tony, that woman is deceitful!" Who the fuck talks like that? Outraged matrons in Victorian novels talk like that, not Pepper Potts. And then we get this interview with Gillen where he talks about how he wants to explore Tony's relationships with women. If this scene is any indication, I'm not encouraged. Good things rarely happen when a dude writer decides he wants to make meaningful statements about women, and I'm thinking a superhero comic isn't going to break the mold.
So in conclusion, Extremis storyline -- yes, pretend bimbos -- no. We'll see how it goes.
This entry was originally posted at http://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/561173.html. You may comment there using OpenID.
The set-up for the Extremis storyline does look interesting, though I'm peeved about Maya. It could be really interesting to see how Tony deals with Extremis-enhanced bad guys given that he himself doesn't have it anymore. And hey, Tony actually came off as smart and competent in the scenes where he crashes the AIM gathering. (How sad is it, that Tony Stark appearing competent in his own book has become so rare that I find myself celbrating it?) So I'm going to at least keep reading until the end of this arc.
OTOH, that opening scene with Tony and Pepper and the blonde was seriously off-putting, and not just because of Land's art. (Land is... Land, but still manages to be marginally less hideous than Larroca.) We get a beautiful, intelligent woman pretending to be a bimbo for reasons that make sense to no one except to a dude who imagines he understands how women think. We get Pepper being catty and bizarrely priggish. "Tony, that woman is deceitful!" Who the fuck talks like that? Outraged matrons in Victorian novels talk like that, not Pepper Potts. And then we get this interview with Gillen where he talks about how he wants to explore Tony's relationships with women. If this scene is any indication, I'm not encouraged. Good things rarely happen when a dude writer decides he wants to make meaningful statements about women, and I'm thinking a superhero comic isn't going to break the mold.
So in conclusion, Extremis storyline -- yes, pretend bimbos -- no. We'll see how it goes.
This entry was originally posted at http://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/561173.html. You may comment there using OpenID.