IRON MAN #59 (404)

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Sunday, September 15, 2002

Mike Grell may have breathed new life into a character who symbolizes, arguably more than any other Marvel figure, the wonders of technology, but the world of today isn't his first love, as this month's issue of IRON MAN should prove. In the first part of "In Shining 'Iron'", which he writes and draws himself, Grell seems more comfortable recreating the sort of intricate swordplay that was the only bearable part of DC's WARLORD than he ever has capturing the armored world of Tony Stark. It's an issue that looks somewhat backwards even as it moves Iron Man himself...um, backwards. (Traveling backward in time can hardly be called moving forward, now, can it?)

A team of British archaeologists make an extraordinary find in a stone circle: the helmet of Iron Man's armor, buried beneath one of the stones since the first millennium A.D. Tony takes this as a sure sign that his new time machine will work and immediately sends himself back through the ages, traveling to the very spot where his helmet will be found. But what he doesn't know is that the archaeologists found more than just his helmet there in the cold, cold ground...

Grell continues to do well by a book which has suffered over the years from a long string of writers who simply couldn't figure out what the hell to do with Tony Stark and his shiny alter ego. The armor's undergone endless and needless revisions; the man behind it has been dropped into the bottom of the bottle and drank from the fountain of youth; and yet somehow his best appearances were always in other books, like AVENGERS, where he was handled adequately if not well. With a Tony Stark who's come out of the iron closet and revealed his double life to the public, though, Grell's managing to make both the armor and the man interesting again.

Granted, there are a few hideous missteps in this script. It's a bit hard to buy the idea that Tony has enough time to have watched XENA, let alone to make snappy (if slightly outdated) references to it, for example, and he's never been the sort for the kind of quips that he makes to the medieval woman he rescues about her status as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter making her "two short of the first all-girl baseball team." Such banter is hardly worthy of Spider-Man, let alone the most serious Marvel character to walk around in iron underpants. He's also a bit too loose-lipped about the future for someone worried about changing the time stream, and the idea of taking over a horse from a knight to pass himself off as one is a bit far-fetched. Of course, when you consider that the last place you'd want to visit if someone found part of your head buried in the past is the exact time and place it went into the soil, the whole story sounds far-fetched. Perhaps Grell has watched one too many reruns of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

And yet the story still holds your attention, if only because of the painstaking care Grell takes with the artwork. True, it's not Grell at his best, but it's not Grell at his worst, either - and remember, Grell's worst work is often better than the best of some of those currently working in comics (names withheld to protect the shameless). The opening scenes in Stark's lab are first-rate already, but the real fun begins when Tony goes back to the days of yore and we start having some surprisingly enjoyable flashbacks to Skartaris.

But you don't have to be the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter to work out what else has been found with Iron Man's helmet, nor does it take a sorceress to divine how Grell will probably write himself out of this particular corner. We can only hope he didn't watch that episode of ST:TNG too closely - and that his inventiveness in saving this book from cancellation extends to saving him from death in an equally original way.

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