Stark Decisions: Iron Man #4 Review

Editor’s Note: You want my property? You can’t have it. But I did you a big favor: I’ve successfully privatized world spoilers! What more do you want?

Jesus, there’s a lot of Lovecraft to go around in this week’s comics.

Iron Man #4, written by Kieron Gillen with art by Greg Land, is ostensibly part four of a five part opening arc by the new creative team, but in reality is a crackling, easy-to-follow one-and-done featuring everyone’s favorite hard-headed, pragmatic engineer against the thirteen brides of who is clearly Cthuhlu, The Elder God and Black Infinite.

Ah, I’m just kidding. Of course it’s not clearly Cthuhlu. It’s possible that it’s Dagon or Zoth-Ommog.

Actually, since this is a Marvel comic, and therefore the only masters of the sea that any writer can guarantee the reader has heard of either have pointy ears and wings for feet, or else an orange shirt and unlawful carnal knowledge of sea horses, it’s probably Cthuhlu.

Iron Man #4 continues the greater story of Tony Stark hunting down the people around the globe who have obtained and misused the Extremis technology that is the basis of Stark’s own tech. Stark has identified a pack of 13 enhansiles hiding in the catacombs of Paris, so he suits up with his Hulkbuster armor and heads to Gay Paree (Rob: Prior to publication, I took the liberty of changing your original phrase, “Homo Paris.” You’re welcome. – Amanda), to find a bunch of jacked-up, mindless blondes who attack on sight… provided the victim crosses a circle of arcane symbols. Stark meets the mastermind behind the plot, who admits to enhancing the women in the interest of creating a vessel for “the Great Black Infinite,” and that they have been programmed to follow many of the rules of the old Lovecraft stories. Iron Man uses that knowledge to corral the women, and he must decide how to handle thirteen mind-wiped women, programmed to attack on sight and who have the power of The Hulk…

There’s a lot of good stuff going on in this issue, the first of which being that it is a true one-and-done, despite being part of a greater five-part arc. Gillen does a good job giving the reader exactly as much information as needed to understand that Tony’s larger mission to hunt down Extremis, and then jumps into, shows and concludes this entire sub-part in one issue. It’s refreshing, in the face of what feels like a million Marvel Now renumbers (but not reboots! Marvel doesn’t reboot! And they also don’t allow their most anticipated issues – like an issue about a new guy as one of their A-List characters – to be spoiled on 4Chan!) that lead into big, decompressed storylines, to find a writer who understands that maybe it’s a good idea to give readers more than a single chance to leap into the new book. So if you’re looking for a lot of story for your dollar, Iron Man #4 delivers.

GIllen also does something interesting in this issue, in that it ostensibly is about Iron Man versus a supernatural power – the only way you get more supernatural than Lovecraftian Elder Gods is if Iron Man fights Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy and Jesus. This seems like a sketchy matchup for Tony Stark, the Marvel Universe’s consummate rationalist man of science (putting aside his little pseudo-dalliance with the concept of blind faith toward the end of Avengers Vs. X-Men), but Gillen plays it smart. These monsters follow all the rules of magical, otherworldly creatures: they show no human emotion, they have superhuman strength, and they are bound based on magical symbols and circles. But Gillen provides an explanation that makes all these rules follow a scientific explanation (granted, a Marvel Comics superhero “scientific” explanation, but that’s good enough for me), so we get the taste of a supernatural battle, but with enough grounding for it to make sense in an Iron Man story. It’s smart writing that helps the heft of suspension of disbelief… and still, Gillen ends the story with enough ambiguity to make is possible that there really was something supernatural going on underneath the Extremis tech. And I sincerely hope that’s the case, because if it is, this could be the first hint of a big crossover that could sate my continuing disappointment that we never got a good DC Aquaman versus Cthuhlu story like I’d hoped.

The trickiest part of the story is how Stark chooses to resolve the threats these monsters pose: he flat-out murders them. He immobilizes them, renders them temporarily helpless, and then decapitates them with his chest cannon. On one hand, this is a weighty, heavy scene: we see Stark struggling with the decision, rationalizing it by deciding that these monsters – hot blondes with big tits all, since this is a comic book drawn by Greg Land – are impossible to cure or stop, and then passing the task off to the armor’s AI as if to justify that he didn’t pull the trigger himself. But on the other hand, this is a sequence where Stark, on the sovereign soil of a foreign nation, makes the unilateral decision to execute the victims of a technologically-created medical condition with symptoms that we see can be contained (Stark doesn’t get them to stand still for the execution by offering them Cadillacs, after all). And it’s not like he did this in secret; Stark allows one of the monster blondes to be taken into custody on The Raft, so at least S.H.I.E.L.D. knows that Tony just wiped out a dozen missing women. It’s… strange. It doesn’t feel particularly heroic, and it seems rushed – Tony has a method to contain these people. He uses it to contain the one person he refuses to kill… and yet he stone cold smokes the rest as quickly as possible, like he realized that Breaking Bad was on and he didn’t want to miss it. The sequence works… but I strongly advise that you don’t think about it too closely.

Greg Land’s art in this issue is better than it usually is (and let’s stipulate up front that here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, we art not fans of Land’s art), and a lot of that is based on the story, which allow Land to draw a shit-ton of hot blonde chicks with big boobs and perfect asses in partially-torn clothing. So Land becomes the first artist to draw an extinction-level threat from the Elder Gods that would make 49 percent of the population face impending doom with a smile and a mashed zipper. So the women are hot, as always when Land’s at the drafting table, but his general storytelling is pretty clear and the action strong (if you can ignore the constant cleavage, side-boob and butt shots, which detract a bit from the feeling of danger), with one exception: the panels where Stark destroys the Extremis machine aren’t clear on their own as to what Stark is trying to do without the dialogue and captions to explain it. And while Land has yet to draw a woman who isn’t the epitome of beauty (at least in a porn star kinda way), he should never draw Tony Stark outside of the Iron Man armor. We only get a handful of panels showing Stark’s full face, and his eyes are asymmetric in nearly half of them. And there are a couple of panels where Stark looks less like he’s smirking cockily and more like he’s experiencing a prostate exam in real time. Look: your reaction to Land’s art here is going to depend on whether or not you like it in the first place. If you do, fortunately this issue plays to his strengths. If you don’t, unfortunately this issue plays to his strengths.

All in all, Iron Man #4 is a solidly written issue playing with supernatural themes in a way that makes total sense in a science-leaning book, with a complete story, and I likes me a one-and-done. Yeah, the conclusion is exceedingly dark and somewhat out of character if you think about it too much, but Gillen handles it in a way that at least shows some internal conflict over what otherwise feels like a snap decision made more for expediency than as a real last resort. But generally, this is a strong issue that is a great way to drop into the newly-rebooted Iron Man if you haven’t checked it out already.

And hey – if you’re the kind of guy who gets off on seeing blondes with big tits summarily decapitated? You owe it to yourself to check this issue out. Just please leave your name and photo in the comments so that I know to give you a wide fucking berth if I see you on the street.