I Got Issues Comic Reviews Week of 1/8/2014: Sex Criminals, Kamala Khan, Sad Wolverine, and the Colonial Iron Man

Trying a new format for reviewing comics, so these aren't going to go over two paragraphs each; I'm going for expedience as well as quality critique. So here's what I read this week...

Sex Criminals #4: Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's painfully realistic story about people who stop time when they fuck continues. In this issue, Jon and Suzie meet even more people with their "condition", albeit a peacekeeping force who apprehend the Quiet's so-called "Sex Criminals"(TITLE DROP!). While I'm not entirely sold on the world-building of the Sex Police, that's not really the point; this is still Suzie's story, and about how her condition adds even greater complexity to the already nigh-incomprehensible territory of human intimacy. The best parts are still Suzie's narration, as she talks about her past and what sorts of things she did during the Quiet (including her first illegal activity, using the time freeze to frame her friend's rapist college boyfriend for marijuana possession-- a morally ambiguous approach with a similarly ambiguous outcome).

With Fraction's script and Chip Zdarsky's expressive art and detailed backgrounds (including some of the greatest ambient detail ever depicted for a store called "Cumworld", Sex Criminals continues to be the frank, mature sex talk the medium so badly needs. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Wolverine #13; The finale of Killable, setting up the new direction for the supervillainous relaunch. As expected, Wolverine has no chance against Sabretooth without his healing factor. Sabretooth doesn't kill Logan, but instead takes the opportunity to rub Logan's mortality in his face, lecturing him on how they're not so different and how Logan's moral hypocrisies are unavoidable without his regenerative crutch. It's a brutal scene, and one of the few effective uses of the Origin continuity that I've seen, since Sabretooth calls attention to the fact that underneath his stereotypical man's man demeanor, Logan was still born as sissy nobleman's son James Howlett, and his attempt to be the blue collar hero falls apart given his privilege (both the initial wealth and the later, now absent mutant indestructibility). I hope that Sabretooth gets his not-so-inevitable comeuppance from Logan, though; similar to the Joker or the Green Goblin, Sabretooth is the kind of Complete Monster arch-villain who enjoys the kind of invincibility only a shared universe allows, and the fact that such rotten characters haven't been killed (in a permanent manner, at least) demonstrates an inherent futility to the nature of the shared universe superhero. At least Logan's killed Sabretooth before (though it obviously didn't stick), but the guy is one of the most successful characters in the Marvel Universe, and he owes it largely to his complete lack of moral restraint. "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate certainty", as Yeats would put it.

Perhaps once Logan becomes a super-villain himself, he'll learn that being a bad guy is the way to go in a world where nobody important to Marvel's bottom line really dies, healing factor or not. Until then, it's a powerful story, made all the more powerful by the choice the badly injured Logan is given towards the end. It's another moment that's simultaneously easy to predict in terms of logic but difficult to prepare for as an emotional response. Another great issue from Paul Cornell, and sadly the final issue with Alan Davis drawing-- there's a reason he's a legend in comics, and that reason is seen in effortless nature of this issue's storytelling. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

IRON MAN #20: Easily the weakest book I read this week, though that's partly because everything else was so great. Still, the Kieron Gillen run on Iron Man continues to underperform, competent but not at the level I'd expect from the one writer to make modern Cyclops into a sympathetic character.  There have been many extenuating factors, most notably the immediate shadow of Matt Fraction's brilliant run, the wretched Greg Land art plaguing the first year or so, but also the fact that most of it was stuck out in space due to the Guardians of the Galaxy status quo, and the fact that the Secret Origin story was resultantly told light years away from Tony's home planet. Not to mention thirtysomething years away from a point where the events within the origin story might have actually been relevant, as Tony had plenty of nurture to overcome whatever hypothetical genetic tampering would've been done to him in vitro, but I digress.

This current storyline is a mixed bag. On the one hand, there's the strong central idea of Tony building his own city over the ruins of the Mandarin's old regime, trying to create a test-bed for modern living. But it's told in such a way that it's hard to sympathize with Tony's goals. It's clear that Tony's overcompensating with this project to avoid dealing with the news that he was adopted, but we haven't really seen anything to indicate why the city is so great, other than Tony telling us that it is The City of the Future and not just a way for him to hide from his real problems within his toybox. There's the obviously problematic symbolism of Tony building a city over foreign soil without foreign consent, and the story itself acknowledges this-- but through the mouthpiece of Abigail "Red Peril" Burns, a one-dimensional anarchist strawman villain, devoid of anything but buzzwords and firepower. There's an impressive fight scene with Tony facing her using a battery of remote units (with the help of his new "brother" Arno Stark), as well as Tony cleverly wearing an invisible Iron Man suit over his street clothes. The art by Joe Bennett helps as well, and not just because it's not Greg Land. Bennett offers a strong cinematic flair reminiscent of Bryan Hitch.

I think my central problem with the current Iron Man volume is that it's obviously using a movie-style take on the character, where we're supposed to interpret the protagonist's complete disinterest in the consequences of his actions as roguishly charming. I'm much more interested in Arno's story, and the implication that he chooses not to rebuild his Iron Lung into something capable of mobility. Perhaps he's reticent to go out into the world after spending his entire life hiding, due to his comment earlier on how people tend to see people like him (i.e. handicapped geniuses) as villainous. Then again, that may be in part an excuse for the fact that such a transition would be frightening. It's a believable and sympathetic approach to a character potentially "overcoming" a disability, even if it's in going from an Iron Lung to an Iron Exoskeleton. Too bad it's not the main story. Overall, MILDLY RECOMMENDED.

ALL-NEW MARVEL NOW POINT ONE: Now this was a pleasant surprise. Six strips, and not a stinker in the bunch. I'm not going to buy all of these books, but all of the prologue stories were strong examples of craft. I'm probably not going to get the Invaders series by James Robinson and Steve Pugh, given my lack of interest in the Invaders, but it did look like a good hook for a traditional super-team comic. The Black Widow story by Nathan Edmonson and Phil Noto was also pretty good, especially the art, even if the script was a bit predictable in its portrayal of Natasha as a conflicted assassin. I'm more interested in the Loki series by Al Ewing and Lee Garbett, which has a strong grasp of the character (at least the Tom Hiddleston version that will likely be the default take from here on out). And the Avengers World strip by Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer, and Rags Morales could lead to something really great, provided that the writing is influenced more by Spencer than Hickman. Spencer has a strong flair for character work, which can be true for Jonathan Hickman but usually isn't, due to his greater interest in writing stories as meticulous chess games with complex plotting and strategizing taking precedence over a dramatic hook. (His Avengers is especially guilty of this, but it was foreshadowed in his Ultimates series, which started strong but quickly regressed into a demonstration of how awesome the villainous Reed Richards could be).

The two books I will definitely be buying after reading this comic are Silver Surfer by Dan Slott and Michael Allred, and especially Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona. I enjoy Dan Slott's writing quite a bit, and I like the idea of Silver Surfer getting a Doctor Who-style companion so he has someone to talk to besides his crippling sense of self-pity (and Slott uses it to his advantage by playing the Surfer's seriousness as comical in contrast to everything around him). The art by Michael Allred is beautiful as always, and the pop art charms are most important when we see the Surfer fighting a bunch of anthropomorphic sea-predator pirates. The Ms. Marvel story deserves special praise, and not just because it pisses off the right kinds of people. New 16-year-old Muslim superheroine Kamala Khan immediately shows the kind of conceptual strength right off the bat that most teenage heroes only dream of acquiring. She's a shape-shifter as a metaphor for a child of multiple cultures and demands, growing up in New Jersey under Pakistani-American parents, with both mother and father having their own sets of well-intentioned demand (the mother for the right marriage, the father for the right career). She's definitely an eccentric young woman who's immediately figured out creative uses for her powers, but there's not much room for her to express her abilities; her first superfight is limited to a monster in a junkyard, and even that's interrupted by a call from her mother. The art by Adrian Alphona is perfect, as I would expect from the artist of Runaways; he's especially good at showing Kamala's powers in action, and how awesome being able to stretch one's body and limbs can be. Too bad it doesn't help her larger identity issues, or in Kamala's words; "I can change my face, but I wear a mask instead. There are LAYERS of unpackable crazy up in here."

Based on the overall quality but also the strength of the Ms. Marvel story, STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Matt Fraction Iron Man Retrospective: That's It? Hell Yeah It Is

Genre fiction tends not to be the place for subtle, complex emotions. With names like comedy, suspense, drama, and horror, genres in their purest form tend to cater to simpler desires, evoking simple yet visceral emotions if done well. This isn't a bad thing, as that's hard to do in practice and should be lauded when done successfully. However, the best works are the ones that augur more complex feelings, put you in emotional places that are all too real but rarely discussed in our fictional fantasies. This is the difference between, say, anger at a designated foe, and pervasive frustration over a lack of personal progress. A dramatic collapse into addiction followed by a heroic triumph of willpower, versus a realization that those compulsions have just been sublimated into other areas. Or even the difference between a triumphantly happy ending, and an ending where the hero left the world slightly better than he found it-- but only slightly.

Matt Fraction has been doing this with artist Salvador Larroca* on the Invincible Iron Man for four and a half years, taking the character into emotional territories seemingly beyond the scope of the superhero genre. As of October 2012, Fraction finished his tenure on the book with a surprisingly downbeat epilogue. After a penultimate issue of all action, where Iron Man teamed up with pretty much every non-Avenger ally available (and even some enemies) to stop the Mandarin, Tony returned to America after months in his arch-enemy's captivity. What Tony concludes, to his dismay, is that the world hasn't changed much in his absence, still stuck in the past.

Actually, that's not quite true; Tony's friends and colleagues were doing okay without him. Resilient, previously Stark Resilient, became fairly successful without its mega-celebrity founder, using the repuslor technology to make superior consumer goods without a single cent of military funding.Pepper Potts moved on with her life, eventually hooking up with dowdy but reliable Carson Wyche (one of Resilient's star inventors, whose career had previously been ruined by Tony during his decadent and petty pre-Iron Man days) and learning to live without the Rescue armor. The civilian works of Tony Stark continued without him or Iron Man-- his real legacy. But that's not something that Tony can really appreciate, so the only person really stuck in the past is him. Tony's company escaped the Marvel Universe's Nietzche-esque eternal recurrence, and are off doing good if rather dull work by making better, cleaned products that are presumably cheaper. But Tony is stuck in the same cycles of heroes and villains and will never escape them, thanks to the fact that his existence as a Marvel comic character is meant to sell merchandise first.**

The main theme of Fraction's run on Iron Man is the explicit question of wether or not the Iron Man is a good thing. Sure, Tony saves the world as Iron Man, but there are plenty of other superheroes who do that without all of Tony's baggage; who don't sponsor their super-powers with military-industrial blood money, who aren't responsible for thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of Stark weapons, and who aren't so wealthy that they can retreat into their addictions while shirking their responsibilities. Some might even say that Tony's decision to atone for his arms dealing sins as Iron Man served him far more than anyone else, giving him the visceral thrill of being a superhero and catering to his death drive impulses, instead of really cleaning up the Stark-branded messes left on battlefields across the world.

This theme was much easier for Fraction to express at the start of his run, when Tony was the Orwellian ruler of the world as Director of SHIELD. When Tony relapsed into the military-industrial complex full force after the events of Civil War, it was much easier to critique the problems in his imperialistic approach. The first twenty-four issues of the Fraction/Larroca Iron Man fired upon all cylinders, especially during Tony's atonement in World's Most Wanted (which kick-started the Handi-Capable blogging, as some of you may remember). After that it was more uneven, since the Heroic Age led to Tony Stark trying for a more pacifistic approach, which really wasn't condusive to serial superhero comics. (The Stark Resilient arc was particularly egregious, with its first half being entirely set-up for Tony's new company.)

Of course, that may have been the point, because a lot of life-- particularly recovery from addiction-- isn't earth-shattering drama. It's living day-by-day, paying your bills, managing your relationships, and trying to do a little better than you did the previous day. And this doesn't really work for Tony Stark, who risks his life on a daily basis and goes through more women than James Bond. In many ways, Tony still lives an addict's life, even if he's kept himself clean of alcohol; he lives a life of consumption, keeps others at arm's length, is frozen at the emotional maturity of a teenager, and doesn't place any value on his personal safety.*** This isn't really the kind of person you want as a responsible leader for a trusted brand, and when Tony fails, his companies tend to fail with him.

The final chapters, however, did have Tony save the day when nobody else could, by ultimately defeating the Mandarin-- who was quite cleverly played as a twisted mirror of Tony's own conspicuous consumption, a Kim Jong Il-style**** hedonist so obsessed with his self-mythology that he became enslaved by it (what with the rings actually controlling him). Just like in real life, weapons are a necessary evil some times, when you need to defend the just and the innocent. But Iron Man is still a weapon, and tying worship of weapons into the public sphere has grave moral consequences, as Eisenhower (correctly) warned. So this makes the ending, with Tony leaving his company and going off to find new adventures in space, an appropriate if bittersweet conclusion.

One of Tony's final lines to his former employees is "I'll do better next time". So much of fiction deals with character development in very broad strokes, either ignoring it or having characters Learn Lessons and Grow Stronger. Tony isn't a completely different person after all of his experiences in Fraction's stories, nor can one expect him to be. Nor is Resilient poised to dramatically change the world, in the broad "curing cancer and making cars fly" strokes too often shown in science fiction "utopias". They make cleaner cars and cleaner phone batteries. They're helping people live life a little better, and they're offering it to the public in a completely voluntary fashion; you don't choose a Stark phone because of a Dr. Doom-like edict sweeping society, you presumably choose it because it's just a better phone. The world is thus a little better, from this small bit of progress-- which is ultimately the best we can hope for in terms of lasting good. Humans and their societies can't change overnight, nor can they become perfect-- they can just move in the right direction, and that's what Tony's done.

It's a complicated message for a superhero comic, but a very powerful one when fully understood. I'm really going to miss Matt Fraction on Iron Man, and despite some misgivings about certain parts of this story, I have nothing but praise for the sum of those parts.

* Larroca's art deserves special mention, as he became better and better with each issue. His tech is always beautiful and inventive, but his characterizations are also superb; though he's often critiqued for relying too much on photo reference, his art uses such economy of line that those faces get life beyond their original inspiration. I'm going to buy the new Cable and X-Force comic just for his art. And Colossus, of course.
** Which isn't really a bad thing, it just is. This is also why creators who do such brilliant things with the franchise characters deserve special applause.
*** Illustrated beautifully in the .1 issue, where Tony recounts his entire history in the context of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. If you buy a single issue of Fraction's run, buy Invincible Iron Man 500.1
**** Which is why for a moment I was disappointed that Ben Kingsley was cast as the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, because I would've gone with the Kim Jong Il puppet from Team America World Police :P

Matt Fraction And Nathan Fox Give Bin Laden A Taste Of Fear Itself

Go Here For The Story

Yesterday gave comics a surprising boost of notoriety when GQ published a comic strip version of Bin Laden's final moments. The comic was written by Matt Fraction, one of my favorite comic writers, while the art is by comic artist Nathan Fox. The two previously collaborated on Invincible Iron Man 500, where Fox illustrated the parts of Fraction's dystopian future where we saw Tony's son turned into a literal War Machine, under the control of the Mandarin.

This story is an extremely intense piece of comic storytelling, and effectively chronicles the Seals' raid on Bin Laden's final hiding place. What's most interesting about it isn't the portrayal of the Seals, but of Bin Laden himself. Here, the mastermind behind Al Qaeda is almost a sympathetic figure. He's the most infamous mass-murderer of the current century, his organization responsible for the deaths of thousands including both American and European citizens as well as his "fellow" Muslims. But in his final moments, he's just a sick, scared old man who's been hiding in the dark for years, thinking in clipped, frantic captions as he awaits the inevitable.

In the annotations, Fraction denies that he wanted to get into Bin Laden's head, for obvious reasons; what person, of any respectable political affiliation, would try to excuse this monster's actions? But Fraction isn't excusing anything Bin Laden did. If anything, he and Nathan Fox are using their chosen medium to make Bin Laden the concept see the errors of his ways. In the end, Bin Laden only brought misery to the world, and that includes his own kin. The look Fox put on Osama's face as one of his grown sons runs out to protect him and ends up dead says a lot; is Osama simply scared, or is there a hint of remorse for the fact that his child died for his own sins?

Some may interpret this as propaganda for the US, but it's really a great piece of storytelling that combats the ideals for which Bin Laden caused so many deaths. Bin Laden may have wanted to be a martyr who inspired an even greater wave of suicide bombings. But if Fraction and Fox's comic is his legacy, then everything Bin Laden did just led him to an undignified, pathetic end.

Fear Itself #4: Taking a (Cold) One for the Team

While I've been entirely neutral about the main Fear Itself book, Marvel's once-again-obligatory crossover event gave us a great Iron Man scene yesterday. This is no surprise, as Fear Itself is written by Matt Fraction. However, Fraction gives Tony the opportunity to shine by having him stand up both to Odin the All-Father and his own alcohol addiction.

The scene is particularly bizarre, as it's technically Tony petitioning Odin for help saving the world. Since Odin is much more powerful than any of Earth's heroes (even Thor, the Odinson himself), this is a wise decision. But since Odin is so arrogant and has so little regard for humans, it was unlikely he would risk his own hide to help mortals, and might only do so if they showed complete submission.

So what does Tony do? Grabs a bottle of booze, sacrifices the sobriety he's kept for years in a single swig, and demands Odin help them now that he's shown the requisite loss of dignity.

Of course, Tony isn't actually submitting to the All-Father. He's making it clear that he has no respect for Odin and is only asking out of utter necessity. Instead, he's prodding at Odin's pride, even calling him a bully. The sacrifice of dignity is Tony jumping through the kinds of hoops Odin expects of everyone else, all the while satirizing Odin's need to bring others to his knees.

Tony also isn't sacrificing much by taking a drink. If anything, he's confronting what's been one of his worst Achilles' heels. There are many alcoholics that are able to overcome their problem to the point of being able to drink again in moderation. Tony isn't one of those, and even though he's been willfully* sober since his 1980s uber-binge. Yet the policy of complete and utter abstinence hasn't worked too well for him, as writers have taken every opportunity to show how he still thirsts. Fraction himself addressed this in the .1 issue, showing how Tony compensates for his alcohol addiction by indulging in his sex addiction. At least Tony can't crash his Iron Man suit into a bus load of school children under the influence of having blown his wad, but he's still maintaining an addictive personality and feeding his alcoholism through total abstinence.

it was only a matter of time before Tony relapsed, given his thirst; Obadiah Stane ruined Tony by prodding at this weakness, and Justine Hammer sent Tony a bottle through mail in the hopes of repeating this plan. But though Tony may be drunk now, this doesn't mean he's off the wagon. In fact, it may mean that he'll be able to control his addiction, rather than simply deny it. Just because he's not submitting before a higher power (Literally!) doesn't mean he'll once again be a hopeless drunk.

Well played, Mr. Fraction.

* Excluding instances where he was supernaturally forced to drink, such as when the AI VOR/TEX stole his body

Why Iron Man Represents Civilization's Worst

(Reposted from the Iron Man Message Board, in response to the usual bitching about Matt Fraction's run)

Science isn't bad, but weapons are. And the problems with Tony's character are thus;

A.) He started out making weapons. He wasn't a civilian scientist who helped the war effort against a common enemy, he was an arms manufacturer from the start.

B.) He made billions off of the weapons he designed, and was very conspicuous about the way he used that money. Wearing suits that cost more money than an Afghani family makes in a year, paid for off of land mines that maim and kill those families, isn't in good taste.

C.) Tony's wars have never been the wars for which America is proud. In the past, in-comics jingoism aside, he was associated with Vietnam. In recent years, he's been associated with Afghanistan and the War on Terror. Regardless of your personal position on either of those wars, neither has been a particularly good mark on America's reputation.

D.) Up until that one fateful trip, Tony was never a soldier. He didn't see combat himself, and left his devices in the hands of the actual fighting men and women risking their lives. Even as Iron Man, he goes into combat insulated in a metal prosthesis that does all the fighting for him. At least in the past he entered combat with a heart injury and was truly putting himself at risk each time, but once his ticker was fixed, he was hardly facing opponents stronger than himself most of the time.

E.) Tony didn't even make his money himself. He made Stark Industries more successful than during his father's tenure, but he already had millions upon millions with which to start. The hardships he knew were from his father's disdain, but to most people, that just comes across as "poor little rich boy" syndrome.

F.) Even once he became Iron Man and stopped making weapons for others, he still made himself a symbol of imperialism. A billionaire playboy, putting on an ostentatious gold-and-red war suit, entering combat with a weapon that may avoid accidentally launching missiles at wedding parties, but has no problem shooting brown people with guns. That line is paraphrased from a particularly insightful (if harsh) assessment of the movies...

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/current-movie-reviews/iron-man-drivel.php?page=3

Basically, the problem isn't that Tony's a nerd and not a jock, or even that he's about science and not procreation. Even if he wasn't deliberately evil before he became Iron Man, even afterwards he represents a global system of profound inequality and constant struggle. The ending to issue 500 was the worst-case scenario of Tony's fears-- that he'd never do enough good to make up for his sins. The ending, however, had his daughter live in a society starting from zero, so at least Tony's sacrifice earned humanity a second chance, with a new generation that can at least make their own mistakes instead of having to struggle with their parents and grandparents' sins.

With Iron Man, you can either try to ignore these concerns and play the character as a straight superhero genre story, or you can deal with them. If you choose the latter, as Matt Fraction has done, you're dealing with an extremely tragic narrative.

The Allie Awards: Best Comics Of 2010

I wouldn't feel right doing a list of negatives without a list of positives, so even though my interest in following monthly comics has diminished, I still read plenty of good stuff this year. Named for the world's greatest cat, here are the awards for the best of the best, the comics that had me genuinely excited.

BEST NEW SUPERHERO SERIES: Avengers Academy by Christos Gage and Mike McKone. Yeah, it sounded like just another teen team book...until the end of the first issue, when it was revealed that all the teens are at-risk superhumans with troubled pasts, and the adults are only training them to keep them from becoming villains. Then it was clear that Avengers Academy would be an excellent new book with a complex cast of characters. The fact that they're younger doesn't mean they're treated condescendingly by the creative team-- in fact, these kids are just as competent as the adults (though when the adults are all failed Avengers, it might not be saying too much).

BEST ONGOING SUPERHERO SERIES: Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca. Last year's World's Most Wanted story was, and still is, my all-time favorite Iron Man saga. This year didn't quite measure up to that, as a lot of it was set-up needed to rebuild everything Tony had lost. But even when the story was going too slow, I didn't find it less interesting. Last year had Tony going on what appeared to be his final mission, sacrificing his entire legacy down to the last brain cell so it would stay out of Norman's hands. This year had Tony wake up with an incomplete memory, learning about the horrible mistakes he'd made without having any attachment to having made them, and trying to redefine who he is. Making a new company out of a small group of trusted partners, ditching the military entirely to just focus on his clean energy, and using Pepper's Rescue identity as a symbol for the ideal future of Iron Man were moves that indicated that Tony was A.) determined to make the world a better place, and B.) desperate to move forward to the point of not thinking the implications of his moves through.

In the process, we got a lot of great stuff, including the Iron Man Requiem back-up strip (that, in a move of metatextual tragicomedy, has the brain-damaged Tony hallucinate that his origin was AGAIN in Vietnam), a rather creepy look into Tony's sub-conscious, a brilliant reinventing of the Mandarin as egotistical despot a la Kim Jong Il or Christian Weston Chandler, an excellent-looking new armor, and the villains forming into a family act. Like the Aristocrats, except...well, given how it's the granddaughter of Justin Hammer/daughter of the Mandarin and the son of Obadiah Stane, it's pretty much the Aristocrats.

MOST SATISFYING SUPERHERO MOMENT: Siege #3 by Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipel. After letting the world fall apart in the midst of their petty in-fighting, the Avengers get their shit together and take back their country. Captain America leads the charge against Norman Osborn, Iron Man shuts down the Iron Patriot tech with a condescending push of a button, and Spider-Man punches the bastard in the face. It wasn't brilliant, but damn did it feel good to see.

BEST SERIES CONCLUSION: Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6 by Bryan Lee O'Malley. This series has become popular not just for its video game references mixed with twentysomething angst, but the fact that it's actually quite well-done. After having broken up with Ramona in the previous volume, Scott regresses to his irresponsible man-child ways, only to find that it's no longer even remotely endearing. Embarassed, he has to pull himself together and fight Ramona's final evil Ex, Gideon Graves. But it's not Scott who gets the spotlight, but Ramona, who finally realizes that she can move past her baggage, and joins in the magically realistic fight. The ending doesn't go directly for happily ever after, but for the idea that Scott and Ramona now have the chance to movee on, and it doesn't treat Ramona as a prize to be won or lost, but a capable agent in the story.

Oh, and Gideon is finished off with a move from Chrono Trigger. Can't forget that.

BEST WEBCOMIC: The City of Reality by Ian Samson This series about a cartoony, hyper-idealistic city representing an isolationist paradise in a really horrible cosmos is one of my favorite webcomics ever. Unfortunately it went on hiatus this year, but it had some utterly great stories, most particularly the utter collapse of Reality's attempt to open its borders. This series made optimism cool, and hopefully Ian Samson will get back to it sooner rather than later. But don't take my word for it.... you can see the whole site Here.

BEST TEAR JERKER: The Boys #47, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The gratuitous violence and debauchery in this series obscures the brilliant storytelling and character depth. For years we've seen Wee Hughie, the only member of the Boys who is actually a nice person, dating Annie January, who (unbeknownst to him) is a member of the decadent military-industrial super-team known as the Seven. When he finds out not only this fact, but sees footage of her giving a group blow-job to get on the team. Given how a member of the Seven carelessly got his last girlfriend killed, Hughie is furious with Annie and throws ever horrible insult he can make at her. Annie, who has been feeling horrible and traumatized about what she had done, doesn't defend herself and begs for forgiveness. Hughie knows she's right, but leaves her anyway. It was an extremely tragic moment for the characters whose relationship was the heart of the series, and it was done perfectly.

Invincible Iron Man 30; Nice Job Breaking The Space-Time Continuum, Tony

After a bit of a lag since Stark Disassembled, the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca Iron Man book has started to pick up the pace. The latest issue had more plot, as Tony Stark and Sasha Hammer ( Ezekiel Stane's cybernetic girlfriend and part of the mother-daughter team behind the current Hammer Industries ) finally meet, and inevitably come to blows. Before that, they have a surprisingly civil conversation about Tony's new armor, a liquid metal thing powered by his repulsor heart, stored in the hollows of his skeleton, and shaped by his brain. Tony reveals that he got the idea from Iron Lad of the Young Avengers, who came from the future with a similar design. Which led Tony to invent the neuro-kinetic armor technology, which would later be adopted by Iron Lad, who came back in time and inspired Tony to create the neuro-kinetic armor technology, which would later be adopted by Iron Lad...

I appreciate the nod to the Young Avengers ( and Fraction has mentioned in his interviews that the new armor was inspired by both the Iron Lad suit and the movie suit ), but time-travel stories are ridiculous enough as is, and this story had absolutely no need of a continuum-thrashing paradox. Some futurist you are, Tony...

Compensating With Repulsor Power: Iron Man and Disability Politics

Veteran Iron Man fans currently reading his comic strip, written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Salvador Larroca, have been put in a very uncomfortable position. Their knight-in-mechanical-armor, the inventive genius and veteran superhero Tony Stark, is quickly losing the intellectual abilities that empower him in the first place. Using his nanomachines to systematically delete his brain to keep its secrets out of the hands of those too powerful for him to fight directly, Tony’s mind has severely deteriorated; he’s not just an average mind, but quite obviously impaired. Large portions of his long-term memory are gone, he’s finding lapses in his short-term memory and difficulty pronouncing multi-syllabic words, and his reduced manual dexterity has forced him to downgrade to older and cruder Iron Man suits. Even more surprising is that Tony does not seem as upset about his decline as one might expect, instead finding peace in this reprieve from a constantly active mind. Reviews of the current strip by critics have been excellent ( as well they should be ), and the creators won a coveted Eisner award, yet vocal segments of fandom are angry. You’ll see complaints that they have ( R-word I will not use )-ed Tony Stark, the very idea of seeing their hero mentally disabled troubling them beyond the normal topics of online fan whining.

The stereotypical online superhero fan can have a sometimes fetishistic preoccupation with character power, and Iron Man’s fans seem particularly egregious. Like Batman, Tony Stark is a genius who can invent a solution to any problem. His origin had him build the original Iron Man out of scraps in an Afghani cave, which speaks to the incredible power of later models funded by a multi-billion dollar personal fortune. If Tony has time to prepare, he can defeat any enemy; all he needs to do is tinker with his suit. His power is predominantly intellectual, allowing him to overcome limitations.

Yet overcoming limitations is only part of Iron Man’s character arc; the other part is the hatred Tony feels towards the very notion of his limits. Ever since it debuted in the 60’s, the strip has explicitly dealt with themes of disability. The particular afflictions Tony has faced have varied by era and writer, and he’s not tied to one particular visual marker, as opposed to a character like the blind hero Daredevil or the wheelchair-bound Professor Xavier of the X-Men. But the emotions behind the character deal constantly with feelings of impairment. Physically, intellectually, and morally, Tony Stark comes from a place where he feels he is inadequate, and must constantly improve himself. The fact that his power is a prosthetic metal skin is very telling in and of itself.

What makes Tony’s identity as a disabled character so unique is that he works to either completely fix his perceived defects, or hide them and pass for normal. The hook that Stan Lee and Don Heck envisioned for Tony was that he looked like he had everything a red-blooded American man could want, money and brains and good looks as well as adoration as a hero, but was secretly a tragic figure due to his metal heart. The sixties stories tended to use Tony’s heart problems for convenient dramatic tension, more often as a physical weakness in the vein of Superman’s kryptonite. But even then there was evidence that the defect had impaired his personal life; obviously he could not be sexually active with a large metal plate constantly attached to his chest, and the potential strain on a damaged heart kept him from recreational physical activities ( except for Iron Man, but in that case it was the prosthetic metal skin doing all the work ). Factoring in the need to constantly recharge his heart, and Tony strongly perceived himself as a cripple, and kept himself from making any romantic connections because he felt it would be cruel to attach a woman to an invalid man. Once Marvel’s writers got tired of doing stories around the pacemaker, Tony hurried to get a heart transplant and never looked back.

But the hook of the character as a handicapped hero remained so strong that it resurfaced in multiple forms. In the 1980’s, Tony Stark battled with alcoholism, often finding the liquid that dulled his mind more palatable than his responsibilities, and paying dearly as a result. In the early 1990’s, the problems were moved to Tony’s nervous system, starting with being paralyzed due to a stalker’s gunshot and unable to walk without the Iron Man’s assistance; Tony hastily volunteered for an experimental treatment that fixed his spine, unaware that it would later eat away at his central nervous system and cause even more debilitating pain. In the mid-2000’s Tony made a gesture to overcome his physical frailties once and for all, by using nanotechnology to upgrade his physical body and wire the Iron Man directly into his central nervous system. At first this made him far faster and stronger than ever before, but the difficulty he had coping with his enhanced thought speed resulted in paranoid episodes and fugue states, moving his handicap from the physical space to the psychological.

The pattern here seems to be that Tony cannot stand the notion that he is somehow disabled, and will do whatever he can to improve despite the long-term consequences. Other superheroes with physical differences make peace with them; Daredevil has learned to accept his blindness ( though since the radioactive waste that damaged his eyes also turbo-charged his other senses, he’s hardly impaired ), and Professor Xavier has more pressing concerns than bemoaning the loss of his legs. Tony Stark tries to excise them like a tumor. His talent as an engineer makes him look for practical solutions to his problems, but it’s always been clear that Tony has a very low opinion of himself.

A 1990’s story about Tony’s childhood by the vastly underrated Iron Man writer Len Kaminski gives quite a bit of insight into this, even more than the common explanation of Iron Man being Tony’s attempt to atone for years of munitions manufacture. Young Tony was a shy, bookish child who preferred dealing with machines over people, finding life easier to cope with in technological terms. His father was a cold-hearted tycoon, a distant patriarch and an abusive drunk; he saw Tony’s intellectual pursuits as soft and weak, and eventually sent the boy to boarding school. Howard Stark’s plans worked to make Tony a success in the world, and Tony became respected in the social world and the business world as well as the technological. At the same time, Tony’s attempts to please his father left him even more emotionally distanced.

In many ways, the Kaminski origin casts Tony as a potentially autistic protagonist, albeit a very high-functioning one; he was born with superior talents in a singular area, but his abilities were seen as a sign of difference and weakness. In his young adulthood, Tony attempts to fit by following his father’s path, becoming a philandering socialite and successful munitions manufacturer. When he is knocked off the path by his trauma in Afghanistan, he reinvents himself once more-- but this time the self he makes is Iron Man, a superheroic machine suit in line with who Tony wanted to be as a boy. Iron Man becomes the hero who Tony always wanted to be, while the man inside retains the feelings of weakness and difference that his father inculcated, even if he’s not consciously aware of it. This informs all his decisions, for good or ill; Tony wants not to be infirm, be it inside his body or outside in his world. Hence the superhero tasks of saving lives and stopping super-threats, creating pacifistic technology to lead the world away from war, and even ( in the Civil War storyline ) trying to take over the government to impose his own order on the world.

But in the current strip, Tony-- that is, Tony at a small fraction of his mental capacity-- is as heroic as ever. He’s disabled in the most profound way Tony Stark could be disabled, where he can’t just build a specialized Iron Man unit to compensate; the symbolic meaning of his downgraded armor is profound, giving up sophistication and versatility simply to accommodate his limited cognitive abilities. Tony’s successes in his addled state are based on his human decency and courage; even when he loses sight of where he’s going, he keeps moving and pushing forward. And though his mission is one of suicide, it has given him rewards that he might not have claimed at full capacity. His relationship with long-suffering assistant Pepper Potts has finally developed; it is strongly implied that Pepper and Tony consumated, and Pepper did so not when Tony was a suave playboy with a long list of one-night stands, but in an impaired yet completely honest state.

Given the nature of franchise superhero comics, we know Tony will regain his full intellect; I doubt that we will still be reading about a neurologically handicapped hero when the second live action Iron Man movie debuts. But this story represents a profound shift for Tony. Prior to this story, the character’s arc was about overcoming weakness through technological solutions. Now that Tony has lost the ability to do so, there’s a pattern of acceptance of disability and infirmity. When he emerges from his brain damage state, he will be stronger for it, because he will not see his imperfections as signs of failure.