IRON MAN #79

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Thursday, April 22, 2004

Out in the Iraqi desert near the ruins of an ancient Mesopotamian temple devoted to Ishtar, a fire team and an American archaeologist vanish. Ten days later, as Tony Stark is settling into his new job of U.S. Secretary of Defense, reports come in of convoys being attacked by something that ages the vehicles and does even worse to the people. Tony may have left the superhero world behind, but the superhero world hasn't forgotten him...

I imagine I can't have been the only one with misgivings upon hearing the direction that John J. Miller had decided to take IRON MAN. On the one hand, this is a book that's been at loose ends for years now, and any radical change, such as making Tony the Secretary of Defense during the Iraqi War, was bound to be a good one. On the other hand, the mixture of real world events and superhero world characters could have been deadly, especially when one considers that some of the more powerful heroes in the Marvel Universe could have found Saddam in his spider hole pretty easily - provided they could get the clearance to go into foreign airspace, of course. (Good thing it isn't the DCU, or else Superman might have found him and ended the search ages ago.)

To his credit, Miller allays most of my fears about the seeming ill fit between Tony Stark's world and that of a political world much like our own. When Tony first meets President Bush in this issue, for instance, he actually characterizes the attacks as "something from my world," making it clear that the separation does exist and that Miller is not going to ignore it. And though given my own political proclivities I would not have minded a bit of Bush-bashing, I feared that the book would turn into nothing but that. Luckily, Miller's not going that route - but while he may not make us feel any less happy about the President we've got, he's probably going to make us wish we had a different Secretary of Defense.

Unfortunately, I already wish we had a different artist on this book. In long shots, Philip Tan's images are just about tolerable, and he's got a good eye for detail when it comes to landscapes, rooms, machinery. When it comes to people, especially in close-up, the artwork makes you wonder if everyone is suffering from some horrible skin disease. It doesn't strike me as a particularly good thing, for example, when there's a splash page of a character we know and love being watched by friends we've followed for years as he's sworn into office across from the Washington Monument, and all we can bear to look at is the monument. I'm sure Tan's artwork is to someone's tastes, but it doesn't suit mine - and speaking of "suits," we don't get to see Tony in the armor this issue, but I can only hope Tan does the suit more justice than he does the man inside it. Despite that, Miller's scripting should make the book worth picking up - for perhaps the first time in years.

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