Iron Man #10, by Marc Alan Fishman – Snarky Synopsis | @MDWorld
May 26, 2013 Marc Fishman 0 Comments
Written by Kieron Gillen, Art by Dale Eaglesham and Guru
I may never have been so conflicted on a book in my life. Kieron Gillen’s Iron Man is easily the oddest duck I’ve had the pleasure (or contempt?) to read of the Marvel Now line. It’s fitting that the first of the ‘The Secret Origin of Tony Stark” suffers from a case of multiple personality disorder. It’s a comedy! It’s Ocean’s Eleven! It’s a serious space opera! And all of it comes with that beautiful badge of ‘everything you know is wrong!’. A cliché wrapped in an adventure, rolled up in a well drawn blanket of potential predictability. And the most frustrating part? It’s actually well made and potentially intelligent. I love it. I loathe it. I must dissect it.
The story so far: the evil or good or possibly evil or maybe a little good but probably evil unless he’s actually good Robot Recorder 451has taken Tony Stark into his custody for a yet-unnamed mission. Tony isn’t exactly his number one fan. Why? Because a few issues ago, 451 stole a maguffin that led to the mass murder of an entire planet/space station. Because there’s time to kill, and 451 wants to prove that he’s a “for the greater good” kinda A.I., he provides our titular man of iron with a bit of incentive as to why he shouldn’t be so angry: It would seem that Tony isn’t the self-made man he’d thought he was.
Gillen’s angle (to the best of our knowledge based on what is featured in this issue) is that 451 assisted Tony’s parents keep their embryonic Avenger-spawn, who was diagnosed with something that would make his parents happy to not bring him to term. Hmm, super sickly baby, or deal with the electronic devil! One can of ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ later, and we’re ready to move on. The issue itself deals with the long journey Howard Stark took in order to save his son. I’ll spare you the complete rehashing. Suffice to say it involves a montage that ends up with alien mobsters, the Las Vegas strip, and a ‘planned heist’ that tries so hard to ape Soderbergh, it might as well have stared George Clooney instead of psuedo-drawn-Downey-Jr.
The key here is that Gillen is so deft in his pastiche that it’s hard to assume he’s being completely serious, if at all. And while I’ll be the first to admit that “Tony in space” started out terribly in my opinion, Kieron is potentially playing for a longer game than I originally figured he would. And those in the know, know I love me some long game, when it comes to Iron Man. As Matt Fraction showed off in his 5 year stint in the armor… the best way to play with this action figure is to do it slowly. Removing Iron Man from Earth was a novel concept. Here, we’re starting to see how Gillen may be afraid from ditching the third rock from the sun altogether. Is it a bad move? Depends largely on how much you like people messing with backstory.
Akin to Geoff Johns’ MO, here we’re getting the “oh, you didn’t know?” rehashing of an origin for a character we thought we knew. By adding level after level of depth to Tony’s birth and ‘purpose of life’, we’re treading on very thin ice. What makes Tony Stark an amazing character is his resilience, his intellect, and his humanity. For all intents and purposes he is to Marvel what Bruce Wayne is to DC. An attainable hero, save perhaps for a nobel-prize noggin. If Gillen somehow finagles a retrofitted origina hack wherein Robot 451 did something to make Tony more than human (or some form of perfected human) then he will successful imply all the rest of the story we knew is now for naught. We’re very early into this ‘secret origin’ though, and there is perhaps a few more twists and turns. I’ll spare my final word on the matter after the arc itself is completed. I merely pray towards whatever comic gods exist that when we reach the conclusion, Gillen deftly chooses to not appropriate all the other tropes of the modern era of comic books and end on a grey note.
Artistically, Dale Eaglesham fills in for Greg Land. His style is an older, more refined ‘house style’ versus Land’s hyper-realism. He excels at faces, and throughout the issue delivers the soap-opera with the skills of an artistic surgeon. Guru eFX’s coloring helps keep the books multiple time-periods in check as well. When we’re in the ‘now’ things are bold and dark. When we move back towards the ‘secret past’, things become slightly more sepia. It’s subtle. It’s smart. It’s all well-rendered. If I were to throw a few daggers though, it’d be strictly in the details. I beg any of you out there in cyberspace to tell me how you’d get corgis to wear blueblockers. And for what its worth, the tongue-in-cheek aliens of Las Vegas are too predictability terrible to believe. I don’t necessarily blame Eaglesham for it (it’s obvious that Gillen is calling for the stereotypical grey big-headed alien), but even just a few minute changes might have added a personal stamp that was otherwise muted out on the page.
Ultimately Iron Man #10 was just good enough, just odd enough to make me stop and appreciate it. After a few Star Trek-esque jaunts to start things off, Gillen is settling into Tony Stark’s skin. Robot 451 is nothing if not a knowing wink and nod to Ray Bradbury’s creations… and I’m willing to take the ride through Kieron’s junior high school sci-fi fad. There’s still an end-game to be laid out. We are, in fact, only at the end of chapter one. So long as the balance between slightly tweaked tropes, comedic zingers, heartfelt moments, and ‘gotcha’ plot twists remain in tact? Consider my seatbelt off on this spaceship ride through Tony Stark’s backstory.