Iron Man books reviewed
The US: among other things, country where you can get American comics way cheaper than a month late and very expensive in Germany. Hence my aquisition of three trade volumes.
So, Warren Ellis' Extremis. Which is one of those tales that can be very useful for newbies as point of entry, as it sort of reboots the franchise. That, and Ellis is good with the dialogue. Tony Stark's morning routine with his secretary (who's middle-aged and decidedly not a Bondian glamour girl masking as a secretary) is priceless. Have a sample, when she wakes him up via telephone:
Tony: Eight. Eight in the morning. You sadist.
Secretary: Terrible things happen to those who don't respect their elders, Mr. Stark.
Tony: But... I didn't say anything until you called. You called first.
Secretary: I knew you were going to disrespect me. I have the wisdom of age, Mr. Stark.
Tony: I hate you so much I can taste it in my... okay. Have fresh clothes and coffee sent down to the garage. The gallon drum of coffee. And possibly some kind of intravenous drip.
Ellis brings in the politics, too, as this (pre-Civil War) Tony Stark is in a "how do I justify my life?" mood even before the story's crisis shows up. As an old friend of his remarks: "you have intellect and power, but it's not enough. It's like there is a dam across your life. (...) What does (Iron Man) do aside from beating up Fin Fang Foom? Would the Iron Man end war? What's the Iron Man for, Tony?" Quite a lot of this volume - and something the Knaufs picked up in their later run - deals with the fact that Tony Stark, being a genius level inventor, made his fortune as a young man by designing weapons, and of course still designs them (for himself, for the Avengers, for other superheroes, even if he does no longer take military contracts, S.H.I.E.L.D aside. Early on in the story, he gets interviewed by a reporter who asks all the tough question we wish reporters would ask either millionaires who sell weapons or inventors of same or both, but rarely do in real life. It's to Ellis' credit as a writer that he doesn't make either the reporter or Tony Stark use "fake" arguments, i.e. stupid ones you know are just there to be shot down by the character we're supposed to agree with. (For an example of the this in recent comics, see Reed Richards on a "Yay MacCarthy" trip in Civil War when talking to Peter Parker.) After the interview, the reporter, Pillinger, asks Tony why he agreed to the interview at all, given that Tony knew ahead of time that Pillinger loathes him and all he stands for. Quoth Mr. Stark: "I wanted to meet you. You've been making your investigative films for what, twenty years now? I wanted to ask: have you changed anything? You've been uncovering disturbing things all over the world for twenty years now. Have you changed anything? You've worked very hard. Most people have no idea of the kind of work you've done. Intellectuals, critics and activists follow your films closely, but culturally you're almost invisible. Have you changed anything?" The reporter responds: "I don't know," and Tony says "Me neither". That conversation goes to the core of Tony's self justification and self doubt both, and it's amazing how well it works in lights of later events. The urge to change the world, not just to defeat the occasional bad guy but actually affect monumental change in the status quo, is such a tricky thing between idealism and hubris, and yet the only thing enormous enough to justify to our main character the means he used to get where he is. It's a circle: he used the means to make a difference; if he doesn't make a difference, a genuine difference, there is no justification for the means. But what does it take to make a difference?
Extremis, as such stories are wont to do, comes up with not one but two shadow selves. One is Maya Hansen, a scientist on a similar genius level to Tony but specializing in bio genetics, an old pal from their university days, and the other is the villain of the hour who has been fed the experimental drug Extremis, developed by Maya, the Marvelverse's newest version of the superserum-to-create-supersoldiers motif who the story makes a point of telling us kills exactly as many people as Tony killed when originally becoming Iron Man. "You're my nightmare: the version of me that couldn't see the future", says Tony in their climactic showdown. That parallel feels actually a bit artificial - the guy isn't very interesting, just your random villain on a rampage - but the other parallel, with Maya who can see the future, feels the same need for self justification as Tony does and turns out to have set up the villain-of-the-hour's getting the drug as a test scenario so she'd get a goverment contract, because she can't research more without that kind of money, works all the better. "There is no difference between us, Tony," Maya says at the end of the story. "You're no better than me." To which he replies: "But I'm trying to be."
Maya - and her and Tony's former professor, an old hippie named Sal who has a mixture of cynicism and deep affection for both of his ex students who sold out to improve the world - continue to be important characters in Iron Man; they're introduced in Extremis, and immediately interesting. The other big change Ellis makes to the status quo is letting Tony use the Extremis drug on himself in order to defeat the villain (and because he can't resist an upgrade); instead of going for superstrength etc., however, he makes Maya program it so it allows him to access satellites, the internet, and of course the hard- and software he designed for his Iron Man armour with his mind. It's still, at its core, the belief in technology and the ability to make a difference via engineering. The consequences aren't something for this volume; they're still being dealt with in the ongoing current storylines.
Execute Program was the Knauf's debut storyline in Iron Man, which started (and was planned) pre-Civil War but ended when the big Marvel event was already taking place, and in Civil War, of course, Tony Stark plays a major role, which meant the Knaufs had to include some foreshadowing at the end of Execute Program. I'm not sure it works, but it does pick up something important that Christos Gage used for Casualties of War: Rubicon (or vice versa - I'm not sure whether Execute Program finished before or after Rubicon). In any case, the actual plot is a tad mundane, the usual "new abilities give hero a case of hubris, terrible stuff happens, hero, humiliated, has received lesson of caution" thing, and the villain of the hour is if anything even more bland than the one from Extremis, but it's chock-full of good character stuff in a rather large ensemble. There are Nick Fury (still head of S.H.I.E.L.D) and Tony Stark ("Are you saying you have me under surveillance?" asks Tony, and Nick replies "C'mon, Tony, don't be ridiculous; I have everyone under surveillaince"), there are the New Avengers (I wonder whether there is a scan of that Spider-man/Captain America moment wherein Peter tells Steve he's cute?), there is brief Tony angst about Peter taking a hit, there's Jessica Drew aka Spider-woman pwning Tony and Logan (aka Wolverine) both, and for the Tony/Steve'shippers among us, there is Captain America being Tony's voice of conscience twice, and the damsel in distress in the climactic scene, wherein Tony solves the problem of his high tech about to kill Steve by electrolocuting himself (since said high tech is depending on him being alive post-Extremis). (Naturally, he gets revived afterwards.) "The only thing I can't believe is that a guy as narcissictic as Tony Stark would kill himself to save someone else," comments Secretary Kooning to Nick Fury afterwards. He clearly has missed that the implication of Tony's idea of undercover disguise being shaving his moustache and beard, dye his hair blond and look like Steve Rogers. Okay, on a more serious level, this isn't the only quasi-suicidal gesture Tony S. makes to clean up his messes, and this is pre-Civil War, barely; post-Civil War, the tendency will only be amplified.
Back to the good character stuff: more Maya and Sal, as the later convinces Tony that the way to save his reputation is to break Maya out of jail and mediates between the bickering kids morally ambiguous inventors with a penchant for world improvement. In the light of what is to come in the Marvelverse, Sal's easy affection for Tony and Tony's increasing need for and reliance on it is especially poignant. The relationship with Maya is interesting because it's not the usual love interest thing; they do have sex at some point (though not in this volume), but they're never lovers. Instead, they're written as competing siblings, and still as shadow doubles of each other. Given that Tony's increasing isolation from his fellow superheroes is a theme here and, for different reasons, a big one in Civil War, the simultanous increasing closeness to someone who is him with a little less luck and a little less scruples in female form, and to a mutual father figure who doesn't want anything from him even while he himself is playing father figure for someone else (Peter Parker) with an eye to the future is a character gold mine.
As I said, I'm not sure that the last obvious bit of foreshadowing at the end of Execute Program works, simply because Tony being used by the villain of the hour isn't something that could have been prevented by the Superhuman Registration Act, so for him to go from "I've been used as a weapon, which by the way showed my hubris as a weapons designer yet again" to "I should be accountable for what I do, and so should every other superhero" is a bit far-fetched. But it ties with the way Gage has him argue with Steve in Rubicon about his motivations re his support of the SHRA, so I suspend my disbelief.
And we've arrived in the post-Civil War era. (The Knaufs wrote two CW-tie ins between this and the earlier storyline, but those are in Civil War volumes.) There is a good interview with the Knaufs at the end of Director of S.H.I.E.L.D in which they are asked about how they felt having to deal with the whole CW-fallout, the characterisation of Tony Stark by other writers in the CW titles and fannish hostility towards their guy. My favourite reply, treading the line between diplomacy and tongue-in-cheekness, is "If he (Tony Stark) is a bit underwritten or weak in another title - even if he is a bit of a jerk - it's not the end of the world. They don't check with us. Nor should they. We didn't call JMS to aks permission to have Iron Man clean up Yankee Stadium wiht Spidey." On a more serious note, terms like "Shakespearean", "redemption" and Tony walking "a fine line between progression and denial" in the way he emotionally deals are used.
Now for the actual story. Tony Stark as written here is definitely the tragic variation of himself (while, I'm told, he's being the Machiavellian version over at She-Hulk), very much using workoholism as the way to deal with grief and guilt. Which isn't to say the story is a continuous angst fest. One of the emotional red threads is Dugan, Fury's loyal sidekick, starting the tale by resenting all things Tony Stark and wanting to resign and finishing it by threatening to resign if Tony is fired as director of S.H.I.E.L.D, the two very different men establishing a cautiously respectful rapport through the story. The Knaufs have found their voice for Iron Man by now, because the plot or rather plots this time are interesting, not "just" the character moments, and the carefully re-introduced villain isn't random bad guy MacBland but the Mandarin, who I'm informed is the big arch nemesis of the past, while the politics remain complicated as Kooning is wooing Maya away by offering her the funded research job she always wanted, which she accepts after Sal gets killed right in front of her. Tony's reaction to this latest loss (as Happy, one of the few friends who sided with him in Civil War, died there, and of course Steve Rogers is dead, and the rest of his former superhero friends are all alienated, Sal and Maya arel literaly the only friends he has left) is a great example of how the comics medium can be used: a page with five different panels, Sal's savaged body as Tony discovers it, three flashback images, close-up on faces - Sal as he says, earlier in this volume, "I don't like what this job is doing to me, Tone" (meaning the job at S.H.I.E.L.D. he took at Tony's request, Happy as he says, during Civil War, "you, my friend, are the only cape in the bunch that's both: one of us and one of them. Who else can see both sides?", Captain America saying "And if I'm wrong, I'll deal with it", and an extreme close-up to Tony's eye in the last panel, with the text through all five panels saying "this nightmare... this nightmare is my father...my friend... my brother". The effect is devastating, especially since Sal has been such an endearing character throughout the last three volumes.
The question Ellis kicked off - the morality of weapons engineering and research - are still being dealt with without easy answers being provided; Tony's conviction Extremis shouldn't be used again, based on events both in Execute Program and Civil War being followed by the slaughter that kills Sal (and several other S.H.I.E.L.D. employees), and it's probably not a coincidence that the last conversation he has in this volume, with Maria Hill who used to lead S.H.I.E.L.D. during Civil War, is taking place on Japan, with its association of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is really no "right" decision someone can make in this scenario, and that makes this ongoing storyline one of the most interesting in the current Marvelverse I'm reading. I just hope they can keep it up...
So, Warren Ellis' Extremis. Which is one of those tales that can be very useful for newbies as point of entry, as it sort of reboots the franchise. That, and Ellis is good with the dialogue. Tony Stark's morning routine with his secretary (who's middle-aged and decidedly not a Bondian glamour girl masking as a secretary) is priceless. Have a sample, when she wakes him up via telephone:
Tony: Eight. Eight in the morning. You sadist.
Secretary: Terrible things happen to those who don't respect their elders, Mr. Stark.
Tony: But... I didn't say anything until you called. You called first.
Secretary: I knew you were going to disrespect me. I have the wisdom of age, Mr. Stark.
Tony: I hate you so much I can taste it in my... okay. Have fresh clothes and coffee sent down to the garage. The gallon drum of coffee. And possibly some kind of intravenous drip.
Ellis brings in the politics, too, as this (pre-Civil War) Tony Stark is in a "how do I justify my life?" mood even before the story's crisis shows up. As an old friend of his remarks: "you have intellect and power, but it's not enough. It's like there is a dam across your life. (...) What does (Iron Man) do aside from beating up Fin Fang Foom? Would the Iron Man end war? What's the Iron Man for, Tony?" Quite a lot of this volume - and something the Knaufs picked up in their later run - deals with the fact that Tony Stark, being a genius level inventor, made his fortune as a young man by designing weapons, and of course still designs them (for himself, for the Avengers, for other superheroes, even if he does no longer take military contracts, S.H.I.E.L.D aside. Early on in the story, he gets interviewed by a reporter who asks all the tough question we wish reporters would ask either millionaires who sell weapons or inventors of same or both, but rarely do in real life. It's to Ellis' credit as a writer that he doesn't make either the reporter or Tony Stark use "fake" arguments, i.e. stupid ones you know are just there to be shot down by the character we're supposed to agree with. (For an example of the this in recent comics, see Reed Richards on a "Yay MacCarthy" trip in Civil War when talking to Peter Parker.) After the interview, the reporter, Pillinger, asks Tony why he agreed to the interview at all, given that Tony knew ahead of time that Pillinger loathes him and all he stands for. Quoth Mr. Stark: "I wanted to meet you. You've been making your investigative films for what, twenty years now? I wanted to ask: have you changed anything? You've been uncovering disturbing things all over the world for twenty years now. Have you changed anything? You've worked very hard. Most people have no idea of the kind of work you've done. Intellectuals, critics and activists follow your films closely, but culturally you're almost invisible. Have you changed anything?" The reporter responds: "I don't know," and Tony says "Me neither". That conversation goes to the core of Tony's self justification and self doubt both, and it's amazing how well it works in lights of later events. The urge to change the world, not just to defeat the occasional bad guy but actually affect monumental change in the status quo, is such a tricky thing between idealism and hubris, and yet the only thing enormous enough to justify to our main character the means he used to get where he is. It's a circle: he used the means to make a difference; if he doesn't make a difference, a genuine difference, there is no justification for the means. But what does it take to make a difference?
Extremis, as such stories are wont to do, comes up with not one but two shadow selves. One is Maya Hansen, a scientist on a similar genius level to Tony but specializing in bio genetics, an old pal from their university days, and the other is the villain of the hour who has been fed the experimental drug Extremis, developed by Maya, the Marvelverse's newest version of the superserum-to-create-supersoldiers motif who the story makes a point of telling us kills exactly as many people as Tony killed when originally becoming Iron Man. "You're my nightmare: the version of me that couldn't see the future", says Tony in their climactic showdown. That parallel feels actually a bit artificial - the guy isn't very interesting, just your random villain on a rampage - but the other parallel, with Maya who can see the future, feels the same need for self justification as Tony does and turns out to have set up the villain-of-the-hour's getting the drug as a test scenario so she'd get a goverment contract, because she can't research more without that kind of money, works all the better. "There is no difference between us, Tony," Maya says at the end of the story. "You're no better than me." To which he replies: "But I'm trying to be."
Maya - and her and Tony's former professor, an old hippie named Sal who has a mixture of cynicism and deep affection for both of his ex students who sold out to improve the world - continue to be important characters in Iron Man; they're introduced in Extremis, and immediately interesting. The other big change Ellis makes to the status quo is letting Tony use the Extremis drug on himself in order to defeat the villain (and because he can't resist an upgrade); instead of going for superstrength etc., however, he makes Maya program it so it allows him to access satellites, the internet, and of course the hard- and software he designed for his Iron Man armour with his mind. It's still, at its core, the belief in technology and the ability to make a difference via engineering. The consequences aren't something for this volume; they're still being dealt with in the ongoing current storylines.
Execute Program was the Knauf's debut storyline in Iron Man, which started (and was planned) pre-Civil War but ended when the big Marvel event was already taking place, and in Civil War, of course, Tony Stark plays a major role, which meant the Knaufs had to include some foreshadowing at the end of Execute Program. I'm not sure it works, but it does pick up something important that Christos Gage used for Casualties of War: Rubicon (or vice versa - I'm not sure whether Execute Program finished before or after Rubicon). In any case, the actual plot is a tad mundane, the usual "new abilities give hero a case of hubris, terrible stuff happens, hero, humiliated, has received lesson of caution" thing, and the villain of the hour is if anything even more bland than the one from Extremis, but it's chock-full of good character stuff in a rather large ensemble. There are Nick Fury (still head of S.H.I.E.L.D) and Tony Stark ("Are you saying you have me under surveillance?" asks Tony, and Nick replies "C'mon, Tony, don't be ridiculous; I have everyone under surveillaince"), there are the New Avengers (I wonder whether there is a scan of that Spider-man/Captain America moment wherein Peter tells Steve he's cute?), there is brief Tony angst about Peter taking a hit, there's Jessica Drew aka Spider-woman pwning Tony and Logan (aka Wolverine) both, and for the Tony/Steve'shippers among us, there is Captain America being Tony's voice of conscience twice, and the damsel in distress in the climactic scene, wherein Tony solves the problem of his high tech about to kill Steve by electrolocuting himself (since said high tech is depending on him being alive post-Extremis). (Naturally, he gets revived afterwards.) "The only thing I can't believe is that a guy as narcissictic as Tony Stark would kill himself to save someone else," comments Secretary Kooning to Nick Fury afterwards. He clearly has missed that the implication of Tony's idea of undercover disguise being shaving his moustache and beard, dye his hair blond and look like Steve Rogers. Okay, on a more serious level, this isn't the only quasi-suicidal gesture Tony S. makes to clean up his messes, and this is pre-Civil War, barely; post-Civil War, the tendency will only be amplified.
Back to the good character stuff: more Maya and Sal, as the later convinces Tony that the way to save his reputation is to break Maya out of jail and mediates between the bickering kids morally ambiguous inventors with a penchant for world improvement. In the light of what is to come in the Marvelverse, Sal's easy affection for Tony and Tony's increasing need for and reliance on it is especially poignant. The relationship with Maya is interesting because it's not the usual love interest thing; they do have sex at some point (though not in this volume), but they're never lovers. Instead, they're written as competing siblings, and still as shadow doubles of each other. Given that Tony's increasing isolation from his fellow superheroes is a theme here and, for different reasons, a big one in Civil War, the simultanous increasing closeness to someone who is him with a little less luck and a little less scruples in female form, and to a mutual father figure who doesn't want anything from him even while he himself is playing father figure for someone else (Peter Parker) with an eye to the future is a character gold mine.
As I said, I'm not sure that the last obvious bit of foreshadowing at the end of Execute Program works, simply because Tony being used by the villain of the hour isn't something that could have been prevented by the Superhuman Registration Act, so for him to go from "I've been used as a weapon, which by the way showed my hubris as a weapons designer yet again" to "I should be accountable for what I do, and so should every other superhero" is a bit far-fetched. But it ties with the way Gage has him argue with Steve in Rubicon about his motivations re his support of the SHRA, so I suspend my disbelief.
And we've arrived in the post-Civil War era. (The Knaufs wrote two CW-tie ins between this and the earlier storyline, but those are in Civil War volumes.) There is a good interview with the Knaufs at the end of Director of S.H.I.E.L.D in which they are asked about how they felt having to deal with the whole CW-fallout, the characterisation of Tony Stark by other writers in the CW titles and fannish hostility towards their guy. My favourite reply, treading the line between diplomacy and tongue-in-cheekness, is "If he (Tony Stark) is a bit underwritten or weak in another title - even if he is a bit of a jerk - it's not the end of the world. They don't check with us. Nor should they. We didn't call JMS to aks permission to have Iron Man clean up Yankee Stadium wiht Spidey." On a more serious note, terms like "Shakespearean", "redemption" and Tony walking "a fine line between progression and denial" in the way he emotionally deals are used.
Now for the actual story. Tony Stark as written here is definitely the tragic variation of himself (while, I'm told, he's being the Machiavellian version over at She-Hulk), very much using workoholism as the way to deal with grief and guilt. Which isn't to say the story is a continuous angst fest. One of the emotional red threads is Dugan, Fury's loyal sidekick, starting the tale by resenting all things Tony Stark and wanting to resign and finishing it by threatening to resign if Tony is fired as director of S.H.I.E.L.D, the two very different men establishing a cautiously respectful rapport through the story. The Knaufs have found their voice for Iron Man by now, because the plot or rather plots this time are interesting, not "just" the character moments, and the carefully re-introduced villain isn't random bad guy MacBland but the Mandarin, who I'm informed is the big arch nemesis of the past, while the politics remain complicated as Kooning is wooing Maya away by offering her the funded research job she always wanted, which she accepts after Sal gets killed right in front of her. Tony's reaction to this latest loss (as Happy, one of the few friends who sided with him in Civil War, died there, and of course Steve Rogers is dead, and the rest of his former superhero friends are all alienated, Sal and Maya arel literaly the only friends he has left) is a great example of how the comics medium can be used: a page with five different panels, Sal's savaged body as Tony discovers it, three flashback images, close-up on faces - Sal as he says, earlier in this volume, "I don't like what this job is doing to me, Tone" (meaning the job at S.H.I.E.L.D. he took at Tony's request, Happy as he says, during Civil War, "you, my friend, are the only cape in the bunch that's both: one of us and one of them. Who else can see both sides?", Captain America saying "And if I'm wrong, I'll deal with it", and an extreme close-up to Tony's eye in the last panel, with the text through all five panels saying "this nightmare... this nightmare is my father...my friend... my brother". The effect is devastating, especially since Sal has been such an endearing character throughout the last three volumes.
The question Ellis kicked off - the morality of weapons engineering and research - are still being dealt with without easy answers being provided; Tony's conviction Extremis shouldn't be used again, based on events both in Execute Program and Civil War being followed by the slaughter that kills Sal (and several other S.H.I.E.L.D. employees), and it's probably not a coincidence that the last conversation he has in this volume, with Maria Hill who used to lead S.H.I.E.L.D. during Civil War, is taking place on Japan, with its association of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is really no "right" decision someone can make in this scenario, and that makes this ongoing storyline one of the most interesting in the current Marvelverse I'm reading. I just hope they can keep it up...