The Invincible Iron Man #8 // Review
As Tony’s lawyer, Jennifer Walters has to be honest with him. Her best advice is to obey the cease and desist unless he can find some sort of workaround...perhaps on foreign soil or international waters. As Tony’s Hulk? Jen can’t exactly advise him. He’s going to need to make a tough decision on his own in The Invincible Iron Man #8. Writer Gerry Duggan brings Tony Stark into position to deal with the types of problems he’s been facing for decades--with a twist. Artist Juan Frigeri brings the action and drama to the page with colorist Bryan Valenza.
Feilong owns Stark’s tech. He’s fusing it with Sentinel technology in a way that looks really bad for PR and even worse for general human safety. Tony’s ready to surrender the Mark 70 armor. Really. You know how it is, though: you’re about ready to surrender some of the most powerful weapons tech on the planet to a guy who bought it from you, and there’s always that one last message that you have to answer. And if there are people in danger (and there ARE), then there’s going to have to be one last illegal, unlicensed trip with the weapon in question.
Duggan is working with the same parts that have been in use for a good portion of Iron Man’s 50 years in existence. It’s difficult to innovate in a field where the central design of the thing works so well. Stark’s lost his company again and again. He has to use clever ingenuity to work his way through the threat...but first, he has to deal with a threat of an entirely different kind using the superhero skills that he’s become so accustomed to. It’s a fun traditional Stark set-up that doesn’t allow for a whole lot of action on the major subplots, but it does the trick. Duggan adds a bit of a twist on the traditional with Iron Man-Style Sentinels and the big switch at the end, but even THAT has a hell of a lot of precedent.
Frigeri gives Stark some real humanity. All of the extended cast have a great deal of complexity written into their faces. This can be really, really difficult for any artist to do without exaggerating the emotion, but Frigeri makes it look easy...aided as he is by a colorist who understands the intricacies of the subtlety that the artist is trying to bring to the page. It all feels remarkably well put together. It’s just too bad that Frigeri and Valenza aren’t given something a bit more innovative to work with in the way of the story.
It’s fun to watch Stark launch himself selflessly into a situation in hopes of saving the day while making things that much more difficult for himself. Stark hasn’t always come across in such a heroic light. Duggan and company give Stark some altruistic weight to fling around the page, and he does so in a suitably heroic fashion with moments of genuinely fun action and some very cleverly-rendered emotional complexity.
