Invincible Iron Man 500.1

This is the first of Marvel’s .1 sequence of issues over the next couple of months, intended to provide jumping-on points for new readers. I plan on trying most of them, as they will be new to me. I’ll be interested to see if they really are comprehensible for someone who has been out of touch for ages on most of the Marvel Universe, and interested to see how many keep me coming back for the subsequent issues.

I was interested in trying this anyway, as I mentioned in a recent review of Fraction’s new Casanova series, and also I have always kind of liked Iron Man, and seen a lot of potential in him.

The narrative device here is a pretty smart one: Tony at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, telling his story without letting on that he’s Iron Man (isn’t that public knowledge? Isn’t he one of the world’s most famous faces, even before his secret identity stopped being secret? Isn’t that like the President thinking he might not be recognised? But no one shows any indication that they do, and he clearly believes they haven’t), so the images fill us in on extra meaning behind his words. Some of these links are too heavyhanded, such as when he says “When the hammer came down…” and we see old enemy Justin Hammer, but mostly it’s handled pretty deftly.

Except I am not entirely persuaded by this vision of Tony’s history: it claims he was a drunk all through his career, indeed from the age of 14 or 15. That’s not how the stories went for his first 10 years or more, and it’s very hard to freshly see those earlier stories through this lens. Also, he says he was, underneath it all, trying to get himself killed throughout that period – that again just won’t fit with those old tales.

Other sequences are presumably from the years when I wasn’t following the character at all – broke, down and out, sleeping on the streets. This is where the comeback starts, getting it all back, stopping drinking, though there is acknowledgement of lapses since.

Larroca does what he can with this: Tony talking, plus individual images of key moments mostly without much narrative. He handles the latter well, but I’m not so sure about the former. At times I thought the rather lifeless, inexpressive face was Tony restraining his feelings while addressing the AA audience, but there are a couple of moments where he covers his eyes as if breaking down, so I think a little more emotion was needed – it looks as if the hand to the face move is substituting for greater expression.

I don’t know. This was okay, written with some genuine cleverness and skill, and illustrated well enough, but while a retelling of a largely familiar story may be useful background for readers brand new to the character (and after a couple of big hit movies and a few cartoon series, not to mention around 1000 comic appearances, are there very many such potential readers?), it gives me literally nothing I can detect in the way of a preview of what is coming, or an enticement to be there for it. There is an ad-style spread after the story saying ‘coming this year’, but it’s just a set of vaguely abstract and generic images – you mean Tony will be doing some science, and some fighting? Surely not! I guess while the character stuff is all very well, and good personal content is always desirable in superhero comics, if that is a reader’s main requirement from a story, what the hell are they doing reading a Marvel superhero comic, of all things? We want some adventure and excitement from the genre, and in a super-science title let’s have some mind-blowing SF inventiveness too (which Fraction certainly does display in his Casanova), so I’m not persuaded this was a good approach for a jumping-on point. This reads more like one of those quiet issues between epic adventures, which I generally like, but in isolation the contrast and change of pace obviously vanishes. I am left without noticeably more idea as to whether I will like Fraction’s Iron Man than before I read this, which I guess makes this .1 issue a flop, for me at least.