Review: Invincible Iron Man Vol. 2: The War Machines

I really liked the first volume of Brian Michael Bendis' new Iron Man title, much to my own surprise. But few of the nice things I said about that first collection can be transferred to this second collection, which is, admittedly, a little weird, but it seems to be a pattern with some of Marvel's post-Secret Wars relaunches. For example, I also really enjoyed the first volume of the new Daredevil, and the second volume? Not so much.

Here the major problem is that artist David Marquez is gone, replaced by frequent Bendis collaborator Michael Deodato. I'm not a fan of Deodato's style for several reasons. The most immediate in this particular instance, however, is that it looks absolutely nothing like that of Marquez, so there's a real sense of aesthetic whiplash between the two Invincible Iron Man collections Bendis has written so far, despite the fact that the characterization, the plotting and the sense of humor remain unchanged. Simply put, as all of you and Bendis himself and surely the people at charge at Marvel know, comics is a visual medium, and it hardly matters if the writer stays the same but the artist changes–and changes so drastically–because the scripting may be the same underneath, but this looks, reads and feels like an entirely different book.

The single most distracting thing about Deodato's artwork here, aside from the fact that Deodato is suddenly drawing the book in a completely different style, is his reliance on celebrity likenesses throughout. His Tony Stark, his Mary Jane Watson, his James Rhodes and his Amara Perera may all very well be based on actual actors, but, if so, I couldn't place them; Stark doesn't look like he's being "played" by Robert Downey Jr. in Deodato's artwork, which is actually kind of unusual, given that Bendis is so clearly inspired by RDJ's performance of the character.

Doctor Victor Von Doom, however, is given such a particular, even peculiar face (remember, he's got his face back and is no longer rocking the metal mask, thanks to the events of Secret Wars) as opposed to the sort of generically handsome one Marquez drew that it was driving me crazy trying to place him while I was reading this volume. I eventually Googled the guy from the last Fantastic Four movie and, it turns out, Deodato is in fact drawing Von Doom as the actor who played him in it, Toby Kebbell (UPDATE: Or is he? Please see Lee Carey's comment below, which suggests that Deodato is actually drawing Doom as Vincent Cassel, which looks right to me now that it's been pointed out to me. Feel free to ignore the rest of this paragraph then!). This is so weird on so many levels; if you were for whatever reason determined to base all of your drawings of a fictional character on a particular actor instead of just drawing him in whatever way you think might be most fun to draw, or might best convey the spirit of the character or might best tell that story, and you could fan-cast anyone as Doctor Doom, why on earth would you choose the guy who played him poorly in the worst Fantastic Four movie ever made (yes, I did see the Roger Corman one), or that could conceivably have been made?

Worse still, in the second half of the volume, Tony Stark adopts a high-tech disguise that gives him a different head while he's going deep undercover, and Deodato chooses to draw him as Luke Perry, circa Beverly Hills, 90210. I don't know if that was meant to be a joke on Deodato's part (there are no moments where any of Tony's American friends say he looks vaguely familiar, or ask why he chose that particular face), but it sure is weird and frustrating to see Luke Perry's face traced into various panels.

(And I say that as maybe the biggest Luke Perry fan in what remains of the comics blogosphere; there is no one who would rather read a comic book about Luke Perry fighting ninjas with laser swords than I would.)

It boggles my mind that this stuff still happens, and that it happens in one of the major comic book publisher's premier books with its premier writers attached. I'm not a lawyer, but can Kebbel or Perry sue for having their likenesses appropriated like that? They should. Even if they don't personally care, even if they don't need or want the money, they should do so if only to discourage artist like Deodato and Greg Land (does he still do that? I gave up on him a long time ago) borrowing their likenesses to draw into comics.

(While we're on the subject, I have a question. Is it really easier to trace or draw particular actors from particular frames of particular TV shows or films into a comic book panel? To do it right, it seems like you would have to spend a hell of a lot of time searching for the right images to parrot for a particular panel. Even if you keep pretty extensive files of reference material, down to "Toby Kebbel smiling" or "Luke Perry raising his eyebrows quizzically," I can't imagine the amount of work saved by not just drawing characters' freehand to suit the panel is worth what goes into the research. Now, to do it wrong, as Land used to do, you don't even bother with a consistent source of inspiration, but draw characters as different actors, professional wrestlers or models from panel to panel. I haven't seen his work in a long time, so I don't know if he still does that or not, but he didn't even bother "casting" real people into his art as particular characters, but seemed to simply change the reference material from panel to panel based on the pose he wanted.)

As for the story of the six issues collected herein, Tony Stark is still interested in figuring out what the hell Madame Masque was up to in the previous volume, and just what is up with those ninjas with the laser katanas. Rather than investigating a break-in that occurred at a Stark facility in Japan personally, he sends his pal Rhodey to scope it out for him for...reasons. There's no real logical reason to delegate the task provided in the book, but I suspect I know the real rationale, which is to remind readers that Rhodey exists and that he is pals with Tony Stark, given that they and their relationship apparently play a role in Civil War II (the text on the back of the collection makes repeated references to Civil War, alluding to the fact that this somehow sets the stage for the series, although it's not terribly clear how any of this plotting will lead to that conflict).

When Rhodey gets in trouble, Iron Man and Spider-Man Peter Parker investigate, and also get in trouble. Stark's answer is to fake his own death, disguise himself as an ex-SHIELD agent that looks exactly like a young Luke Perry and then try to infiltrate the ninjas-with-laser-swords organization. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence girl friday Friday and his reluctant recruit Mary Jane Watson try to keep his company afloat while his board of directors thinks he's dead. Finally  Rhodey has enough of Tony's spy game, and he  brings the All-New, All-Different Avengers and SHIELD in to help extract Tony...against his will.

I liked this panel:

I guess Bendis doesn't get the glowing spider-symbol, either. So we totally agree on that.

But Bendis, man, quit running around with this Deodato character, and maybe give a little thought to how the comics you write look, issue to issue and collection to collection, huh?

This collection is also notable for introducing Riri Williams, the 15-year-old girl who is going to become the new "Iron Man"...under a less male codename, of course.  She only gets three scenes spanning about seven pages, and so far hasn't connected to Tony or the wider plot at all yet. She's just a young girl who builds a flying suit of super-armor that looks a bit like a homemade Optimus Prime and decides to try her hand at being a superhero, since she's about to get kicked out of M.I.T. anyway.

I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more of her in the near future.

Review: Iron Man 2.0 Vol. 2: Asymmetry

"It didn't have to be like this."

That's the thought that kept running through my head as I made my way through Iron Man 2.0: Asymmetry, the trade paperback collection of the last five issues of the short-lived 2011 series Iron Man 2.0 (plus the oddly-numbered, special "jumping-on point" issue #7.1 grafted on to the beginning of the story arc).

While the title obscures the fact, as does the logo and, to a certain extent, the cover of this trade collection, the book didn't star Iron Man Tony Stark (although he appears prominently in this particular chunk of it), but James "Rhodey" Rhodes, whose superhero codename is War Marchine (and who was played in the the Iron Man films by first Terrence Howard and then Don Cheadle). Launched in the spring of that year, it followed the cancellation of the twelve-issue War Machine by just a few months. Apparently Marvel thought the problem with the book was simply that "War Machine" lacked the q-rating of "Iron Man," and by putting Iron Man's name on the marquee, more fans might show up, a little like re-titling Nightwing as Batman 2.0, with the fact that the iron guys' super-powers being derived from technology kinda sorta justifying the "2.0".

I agree with whoever at Marvel thought to green-light a Rhodey book, whatever they decided to call it, so soon after the last one was canceled (in Marvel Universe terms, the character had a book that was cancelled with a "Dark Reign" tie-in, sat out Siege, but was back in time for Fear Itself). The character suffers the same fate as a lot of the lieutenant versions of the established characters, be they female, or in Rhodey's case, black. Like Steel or The Falcon, War Machine is almost always in Iron Man's shadow, and it's difficult to find the proper proportion of original hero to put in the spin-off title.

Iron Man, like Superman or Captain America, inevitably suck up all the oxygen in their lieutenants' stories, and when they are present, they inevitably become the star; even when writers take great pains not to portray the spin-off heroes as subordinate, if not done deftly, it can come off as patronizing and artificial. (Batman and Wolverine seem immune to this phenomenon; I don't think I've ever seen too much Batman or Wolverine in a Robin or Nightwing or Batgirl or X-22 or Daken or solo X-person title).

That certainly happens here. Although Iron Man becomes something of an antagonist at the end of the book when he becomes possessed by the agency of the true villain, and he is the end-level boss that Rhodey must fight and ultimately best, he still seems like the star, perhaps because his armor's shinier or that it's his name on Rhodey's book. But James Rhodes is a guest-star in his own book, much less interesting than Stark, the various smart-mouthed non-super supporting characters or the evil genius whose plan is the most inspired part of the story.

It's a little surprising that a character with as much transmedia exposure as War Machine isn't popular enough to support his own monthly Marvel comic (and by "popular enough" I simply mean able to), especially when one considers his traditional portrayal as the tougher, meaner, more hardcore version of Iron Man. Marvel's had pretty great success with "black-ops" versions of their popular teams (Secret Avengers, Uncanny X-Force), so one might expect the black-ops Iron Man to do okay.

I suppose the fact that the comic book is pretty terrible-looking, but, before we discuss the specific contents of the book, let's examine a few obvious factors as to why Iron Man 2.0 only lasted 13 issues (Or 12.1...or 13.1...I'm fuzzy on how we're supposed to treat ".1" issues when it comes to adding up issue numbers).

Hot up-and-coming writer Nick Spencer was the only mainstay on the creative team, although he received help from co-writer Joshua Fialkov on one issue in this book, and help from co-writer Will Pfeifer on two more issues. There was no artist associated with the book long enough to give it a unique look. The first three issues had three different pencilers: Kano, Barry Kitson and Carmine Di Giandomenico. Ariel Olivetti, whose work looks nothing like that of those guys (who don't have all that much in common when it comes to their respective styles, either), came on with #4, which he drew solo, and he drew the next two issues with Di Giandomenico (those three issues, by the way, were a Fear Itself tie-in; about one-third of this book's run was a tie-in to the not-well-liked event series), and then, after sitting out #7.1, during which Kano returned, he drew #8-#11, and part of the four-artist final issue.

The fact that the first issue of this clearly thrown-together endeavor cost $4 probably didn't help any either; the price dropped down to $2.99 for the second issue, but if you weren't interested enough to buy the first, would you even pay attention to the cover price of the second? And this was being published during a time that Marvel was suffering from brand over-extension, so maybe so blatantly signaling that this book was not only a second Iron Man one, but the un-important one wasn't the smartest idea in the world.

Readers of this particular trade collection, marked with a "Vol. 2" on the spine and title-page fine print, if not the title itself, will join a story already in-progress. An extremely gifted young scientist named Palmer Addley was once kidnapped by the U.S. government and forced to spend his life inventing dangerous weapons for them. Then one day, he kills himself. Shortly thereafter, a great deal of his terrifyingly destructive technology begins activating itself all over the world, and it's up to War Machine and a small group of witty supporting characters to figure out how exactly Addley pulled this off and put the kibosh on what becomes an increasingly apocalyptic scenario; by the book's climax, Addley has managed to turn most of the world's population into a violent, mindless mob bent on destroying everything in their path, with Iron Man being among the infected and War Machine being among the un-infencted.

Spencer and company write nice, snappy dialogue, and the do a fine job of coming up with a fairly suspenseful, occasionally even thrilling, ever-escalating conflict, a well-conceived unbeatable threat that the superhero must then beat. I giggled at the audacity of that plot, and the way it was occasionally spoken of, and was impressed with the way Spencer managed to write a Marvel Universe story but focus only on the corners of the Marvel Universe relevant to the Iron Man/War Machine corner (That is, there are scores of ways a "villain" could bedevil the hero after dying, but the way Spencer goes is an Iron Man-flavored way).

Weirdly, Rhodey doesn't really save the day. Stark does, at first, and, when Stark succumbs to kill-Rhodey programming, it's Rhodey's friend and The Fantastic Four's Mr. Fantastic who save the day, while Rhodey mainly just stalls the temporarily Evil Iron Man. He lacks agency, which wouldn't be so bad in an ensemble book, but his is already a book in which he's essentially an off-brand Iron Man, and another superhero has his name on the book.

The artwork is, naturally, a mess. Olivetti draws most of it, and, to put it mildly, I'm not a fan of his current style, which looks like computer coloring-applied to sketchy pencils, giving most of his figures the look of rubber, human-shaped balloons decorated to look like human being with air-brushed paint, and then inflated and left to float on photos of sets. I've seen his work a lot in the past at Marvel, and sometimes it works fairly well, but I don't think it does here. The dramatic, out-of-armor stuff looks soft and slightly blurry, like a Vaseline-lens drama, and when War Machine is in his War Machine costume, he barely looks mechanical; there's no sharp edges or heavy lines, no weight to the metal. It looks to be made of the same soft, fuzzy stuff that everything else Olivetti draws is made out of.

The book opens with the Kano-illustrated .1 issue, in which the artist engages in copious photo-referencing, but it's a tolerable sort of photo-referencing, as it nevertheless looks as if it was drawn, the photos being referenced rather than stolen, consumed and integrated.

For the book's final issues, Olivetti becomes increasingly scarce, so that the climax of the book is drawn by another artist entirely. I actually prefer the style of the guy who does most of the book to that of Olivetti's, but it's still weird, akin to recasting the star of a movie to shoot the footage that will make up the last 20 minutes of a blockbuster.

After reading this, it's not hard to see why the book didn't last longer than 12 or 13 issues. In fact, it's harder to see why it wasn't canceled even sooner.