IGX

All right, I realize that it's silly for a man my age to read comic books (or, begging your pardon, "graphic novels'), but as the man said about owning a Volkswagon, "It's like eating pussy - I really enjoy it, but I'm not exactly proud of it.".

And it's not as if I take them seriously, or am any kind of a fan boy who worries about continuity and cosplay and all that crap - I just enjoy them for the brain buzz.

Anyway, I've always liked the Iron Man character, but none of the series' writers have ever lived up to the high tech adventure potential of the idea, either because they just wanted to write another "superhero" comic or because they didn't have the imagination to pull it off.

Adam Warren (previously known for his work on the American version of "Dirty Pair", where he routinely and gleefully trashed entire solar systems as a matter of course), along with a pretty good studio artist, pulls it off. He basically throws aside all the horse-hockey that's accumulated about the character over the years and really cuts loose.

A short precis as of issue #3: Tony Stark (or "Genius Mustache Guy"), creator of the IM armor, has upgraded his suit (and it looks awesome), but before he can really try it out, he is ambushed by hyper-advanced mecha and mortally wounded by a rail-gun hyperpenetrator round fired from a mile away. The armor tries to continue the fight on its own, but is taking a hammering that further imperils the wounded, unconscious man inside. So it uploads his conciousness into its processors and ejects his body and flees the vicinity to draw the attack away from him (the military finds his comatose body and puts it on life support). However, the bad guys, whoever they are, have doctored the video footage of the event and sent it to the military, making it appear that the armor has "gone rogue" and tried to kill its creator. But it's "Tony Stark version 2.0" in the armor, trying to find out who is trying to frame him and kill off both versions of him, fleshy shell and software "ghost". And who is the self-mutilating goth girl who keeps imposing herself over his memories and threatening to "erase" him from even the armor's processors once and for all?

This results in pages and pages and pages of hyperactive madness that only good comics can pull off; Mach 3 dogfights with F-16 fighter jets; missile strikes from orbiting platforms; "auto-jihad" suicide pilots, the armor doing the "J-Kwon" dance from "Napolean Dynamite"; rail guns, city sized "helicarriers" and "repulsor rays"; $500 billion dollars worth of lovingly detailed military hardware pursuing $150 million dollars worth of lovingly detailed Stark industires hardware fleeing the scene in an $18,000 Honda import tuner ("No one ever said 'post human' conflict would be cost effective.") ; mecha dance parties held underwater in sunken warships...you name it, Warren has thrown it into the mix. And this is only issue #3 of 6.

You couldn't pull this story off in a movie (and I think there is an IM movie in the works, hence this series, which is probably a marketing tie-in) if you took 5 years to film it and spent $250 million in special effects.

Don't go into the comic stores to get these...your self-image will never survive the shame. Wait for another 4 months and find the collected 6 issue run in the "graphic novels" section of your local Borders or B&N.

Abandoned by Wolves wrote:All right, I realize that it's silly for a man my age to read comic books (or, begging your pardon, "graphic novels')

No, you had it right the first time. They're comic books.

I was never really a fan of Iron Man until Civil War. He's a much more interesting character than I thought. I'll definitely check it out.