War Machine 1 & 2 Graphic Novel Review: Military-Angst Complex

The Jist: When James " Rhodey " Rhodes was a lower-middle class black boy growing up in South Philidelphia, expectations for what he'd grow up to be were low. But as an adult, Rhodey's been a decorated US Military hero, the private pilot and bestest boyfriend of Tony Stark, a substitute Iron Man for years, and eventually his own armored hero as War Machine. Now, rebuilt with cybernetic parts after being blown up on a mission, he's a literal machine. And as his name suggests, he wants to declare war-- in this case, on every petty warmonger on the planet.

The Crew: Greg Pak ( writer ), Leonardo Manco ( artist Vol. 1 and issue 8 ), Wellington Alves, Mahmud A. Asrar, Allan Jefferson, R.B. Silva, and more( artists vol. 2 )

The Verdict: To start with, I want to say that War Machine's redesign for this series may be the least inspired costume design I've seen yet. Not the worst, mind you, but the least original and unique-- it's basically a greyscale Iron Man with an assload of weapons hanging off his back. Which is the most exact description you can give of War Machine's looks, but I would have liked to see a bit more thought than " Iron Man with attached 90's style armament porn ". He looks like a robotic version of Big Shot, the Punisher spoof from the Tick cartoon who carried a huge box of guns on his back and fired at anything until he ran out of bullets, in which he'd start sobbing about how his mother didn't love him. Re: A SPOOF character, not appropriate for a comic that takes itself seriously.

Of course, there are a lot of things I would have liked to see from this series that I didn't. That description of Leonardo Manco's War Machine design describes how I feel about the book in general-- it's not_that_bad as a whole, but it's definitely an underperformer, especcially given the quality of the creative team.

The central problem with this comic is that it's trying for a balance of real-world commentary and Marvel Universe exploration, and doing it in a very sloppy fashion. This is most obvious in the first trade, where Rhodey takes his cyborganized body to several Marvel Universe third-world military juntas to kill all the " real " bad guys. I'm not terribly opposed to seeing guys who torture and kill innocent civilians getting a bullet in the head, but these are a shamelessly superficial rendition of real-world despots. " Santo Marco " is not Columbia; it's the country Marvel writers use when they want to say something about Columbia ( or other South American nation torn apart by civil war ) but don't want to bother researching the complexities of real-world Columbian politics. So they bring in Santo Marco with its endless supply of two-bit genocidal thugs, and have Rhodey try to solve the country's problems by killing every person with a " kill number " ( something that his cyborg operating system attaches to everyone he sees, based on how many deaths they've willfully caused ).

If you're wondering how flying in to cap warlords in the head is a heroic action ( or even one with any long-term benefit; is the word " power vacuum " even in Rhodey's databanks? ), it's not. Greg Pak has called his approach to this series " Iron Man meets the Punisher ", but he's still playing Rhodey as a sympathetic character, one who is trying to do the right thing, even justifying it by talking about how his cybernetic brain won't let him even temporarily forget every murder and rape he's witnessed. Except that the Punisher isn't a sympathetic character, and especially since Garth Ennis got to him, he's been portrayed as a monster who happens to point his bullets at other monsters. Ennis' stories with the character, especially the ones where he was involved in real-world struggles ( most notably the Irish civil struggles of Ennis' own background ), never suggested that Frank's solution was the right one or even a right one.

Also worth noting about Ennis' real-world commentaries in the Punisher is that he didn't bring in other Marvel characters to make them-- his Frank Castle existed in an independent space, and whenever superheroes wandered in, they were embarrassingly ill-equipped to deal with it. Rhodey, on the other hand, is dealing with military juntas, tribal genocides, and frequent rapes in the Marvel Universe. In Santo Marco, one tribe uses a hacked Sentinel to genetically weed out and kill members of the other tribes. In Aquiria ( a.k.a Marvel's ersatz Middle Eastern theocracy ), he's fighting a private military contractor named " Eaglestar " using appropriated tech from the alien robot Ultimo. And in the opening strip from Marvel's website, Rhodey fights a Roxxon ( a.k.a. Marvel's ersatz corrupt oil conglomerate ) executive trying to eliminate Inuit tribes from ideal drilling space with cyborg bears. Pak wisely knows to have occasional asides from the characters where they recognize how absurd this shit is, but we're still getting world politics shoe-horned into the Marvel Universe in a manner that can't be taken seriously-- and when you have open acknowledgement that one of the female characters was beaten and raped by prison guards, following with a dramatic entrance by Ares, Greek God of War, seems horribly inappropriate.

If I seem overly upset with this comic, I have to admit that part of it is because I really like Jim Rhodes as a character, and think that everything I like about him is absent here. When Rhodey debuted as Tony Stark's best friend, he was a perfect and immediate fit because he offered an intrinsically human counterpart to Tony's ubermensch futurism; he was Wilson to Tony's House, down to the unfortunate enabling of Tony' addiction. As the substitute Iron Man and even as the ( unfortunately named ) War Machine, he was a likable character, because he was a hero as a soldier long before he met Tony, and wearing Iron Man armor was a right that he genuinely earned. His conflicts came from the fact that he was deeply uncomfortable with making the kinds of hard moral decisions that Tony has to make on a regular basis-- but all of that's absent here. He can't appear in regular human settings because he's a disfigured cyborg, but if you're wondering how much his condition lowers his quality of life ( and from the looks of it, his new body has all the " armament " of a Ken Doll ), we don't get any answers. All we know is that he's ugly, he's mad, and he's taking it out on everyone his databanks give a kill number. Quite the character reduction.

To the War Machine creative team's credit, the book improves dramatically with the second and final collection, when Rhodey sets his sights on Norman Osborn and his Dark Reign. It doesn't become great, mind you, but it develops the makings for an enjoyable mid-tier superhero book. The supporting cast is expanded on, bringing a " Team War Machine " together from various Iron Man supporting characters, including Rhodey's mother. The opposition is shifted from one-dimensional takes on real world monsters to Norman, and while it's hard to ever believe that the substitute Iron Man is going to be the one out of all the heroes to take Norman down, the guy's scenery-chewing brand of theatrical villainy is always entertaining. And while the art team shifts from Leonardo Manco to various fill-in pencillers and inkers, that actually works to the book's benefit. Manco's dark, gritty style was great when he was working with Andy Diggle on the urban fantasy Hellblazer, but his more realistic rendering only served to illuminate how ridiculous the stories were. The more conventional superhero art the later teams offered played well to the series' tone.

But as they said about J. Edgar Hoover's attentions to the economy-- too little, too late. The book's first arc was an obnoxious throwback to the worst parts of 1990's comics*, and readers picked up on that. It's luck that let War Machine last a whole year, and even with the character getting a big push thanks to Iron Man 2, it may be a while before Rhodey gets another solo series. On the plus side, Pak started the series by showing that Tony Stark had cloned Rhodey a fresh body, and ends it by transferring Rhodey's mind there. No longer a scowling, trigger-happy eunuch, War Machine is in a position where a new creative team can do something really good with him.

While there are some merits to the series and it picks up in the second half, overall it was a failed experiment that left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'll have to give it a Not Recommended.

Iron Man and the Nature of Power

From a post on the Iron Man Message Board, in response to the removal of Tony Stark's innate bio-abilities

If Iron Man retained the Extremis nanotech capabilities, but kept fighting super-villains, he'd trounce them easily. Not only would the already troubled dramatic tension of franchise superhero comics be further reduced, but Tony would almost come across as a bully for only fighting weaker enemies. Fiction favors the underdog-- another reason Tony is hard to write, because he's a rich genius who built his empire on military-industrial blood money.

This is why once Tony became Extremis enhanced, he stopped fighting villains ( except for cases like the Inevitable, which was meant to prove that he couldn't be bothered with costumed thugs anymore ) and went to bigger challenges; instead of just saving the world, he was trying to fix it. The Project ARGONAUT team of remote-controlled Iron Men was a precursor to this mentality, but the Director of SHIELD role was even more ambitious-- he'd gone from making Iron Man security for Stark International to security for the world. Which made the threats he faced even greater-- Ezekiel Stane being the harbinger of the new era, someone who spread super-terror on a level that not even Tony's awareness could match.

Of course, Tony DID match Zeke, but only by destroying his company and killing several of Zeke's cohorts. Which really unsettled Tony-- that story ended with him realizing that in order to fight that kind of brutality, he'd have to become more brutal himself. It's not about him being a human who uses the best of his species' abilities to compete with gods and monsters, but about a human who excises his species' innate capacity for good to compete. Note how this is the way many of Marvel's great villains started; Doom, Magneto, the Ghost, and others had good intentions, but they perverted themselves to the point where they couldn't even act decent any longer.

The problem with power is that even if you try to amass it for good reasons, somebody else is going to amass more of it in response, and then it becomes a vicious cycle. With Tony, this is mixed in with his self-loathing ablism-- wether he admits it or not, he wants the progressively increased strength of the Iron Man to compensate for his own failings. It's no coincidence that his greatest invention is a human prosthesis, that enhances his capabilities but hides his humanity. With the Iron Man, and especially with the Extremis enhancile that eradicated the barrier between man and armor, Tony used technological power to eliminate weakness, as opposed to accepting it. And hence, greater power leads to greater opposition.

Now, Tony Stark's failures have given us Norman Osborn's empire-- a man who has basically become a homunculus of Tony's sins. The system of SHIELD directors went from Nick Fury, who had to make hard decisions but whose sympathies ultimately lay with his constituents ( especially his troops ), to Tony, who made even more controversial decisions in the name of an ambiguous " better tomorrow ", to Norman, who does horrible things simply to serve his own ego. The Marvel power struggle in which Tony was so instrumental created an environment where a madman could become America's greatest hero through clever PR. Which left Tony a disgraced fugitive, feeling responsible.

This makes Tony's self-destruction in the current storyline an attempt to find a different solution, since gaining power had failed him and endangered others. Tony's new plan inverted his previous methods in an almost religious fashion-- stripping himself of all abilities until he's completely helpless. Not only because he didn't want his nanotech-enhanced brain falling into Norman's clutches, but because he wanted to break the cycle. On an ideological level, it worked very well-- his televised conflict with Norman had him severely handicapped, unable to speak in complete sentences, unable to operate any Iron Man except for the crude Afghanistan prototype, and barely aware of what was going on. By contrast, Norman appeared to the world as the complete monster the heroes and the audience know him to be, and without the Green Goblin persona to deflect his cruelty. When Norman beat the impaired Tony half to death, his power lost much of its meaning-- viscerally, there's no way for him to spin that kind of sheer cruelty.

I expect that once Tony's mind is put back together, he'll go back to being a man in a suit, without all the nanotech enhancements. He won't be as powerful as he used to be, though he won't be intellectually impaired either. But as a symbol, he'll be closer to what he wanted to be-- a man who uses his machines to oppose those who would kill and oppress others, instead of a man who uses machines to make more powerful machines for intangible benefits.

New Avengers: Five Years New Retrospective-- 10 Things that Worked

( Note; this will be the third in a series of five essays, celebrating five years of New Avengers. I presume I could do more, or less for that matter, but I like symmetry. So there.

A friend of mine, in response to the first Five Years New essay, wrote a thoughtful response onhow New Avengers relates to Avengers history, and how it now IS Avengrs history. Realizing that Brian Michael Bendis has been writing the comic for five years leads me to two conclusions;

1.) I'm getting old, since I remember an era when the Avengers was just called the Avengers, Clint Barton called himself Hawkeye, and we were almost going to call John Kerry president, and

2.) New Avengers has been around so long now that even if Bendis leaves the title, it's still become entrenched in the comic's history, and the book is not going to go back to the way it used to be.

In other words, the people still whining about Bendis being the worst Avengers writer ever had the final nail put in the coffin of their hopes for a retro revival. For many readers, New Avengers IS the Avengers. If they started reading with Bendis, their first frame of reference for the comic is a team with Wolverine and Spider-Man. If they were long-time Avengers fans who have been following the book, they've gotten further and further away from a point where bringing back a team of familiar second-stringers would be a viable choice. This isn't a statement about the New Avengers' quality, so much as an assertion of fact; New Avengers isn't going anywhere.

As for assertions about the book's quality; well, I'm going to do this in two parts. The first part here is a discussion, Letterman-style, of the ten things that Bendis has done right with the title. The second part will be the ten things he's done that I didn't think succeeded. Positives first though, since that's an inherently rebellious act on the internet.

The Top 10 Best Contributions Brian Michael Bendis has made to the Avengers

10.) Veranke. From the start of the reboot, new recruit Spider-Woman's loyalties were in question, and readers were asked to wonder wether or not she was really on the Avengers' side. Based on the information given, the answers available were; no, yes, kind of, and No To The Millionth Power. The latter occured when it was revealed that she was not actually Spider-Woman, but Queen Veranke of the Skrull Empire in disguise. Even if you didn't believe that Jessica Drew was doing things for the right reasons, we were given plenty of evidence to believe that at least she wasn't a Skrull impostor. That she was, and that still it made sense in hindsight, was an impressive feat-- and gives re-readings of older New Avengers issues a really creepy undercurrent.

9.) Bendis-speak. Bendis' unique style of dialogue, admitted by the author as influenced by David Mamet, tends to be polarizing-- you either love his back-and-forths or hate it. I'm in the love category, because he pays more attention to conversational rhythm than most comic book scripters. Individual quotes may not be as spectacular, but dialogues flow marvelously-- and while others have criticized the way he writes characters from a non-American-lower-middle class background, I think it's a strength of his-- characters like Namor, Ares, and even Dr. Doom sound like they're actually engaging with the person they're talking to, instead of just going into monologue and tying it into whoever's nearby.

8.) The Cabal.While a secret society of heroic metahuman kings and visionaries proved to be a huge mistake on the part of the characters ( and IMO, a mistake on the part of the writers ), Norman's own group worked much better. Like Jesus if the Son of God were about sinning in every way possible instead of the other way around, Norman has united many different groups for a common cause-- ruling the world. Of course, the various megalomaniacs in Norman's Inner Circle don't like being subordinate to the once and future Green Goblin, so their secret meetings are always an entertaining display of tension and disdain. Thus far two of Norman's Cabal have betrayed him, and there's three more to go-- and from what the solicitations, Victor's the next, leading to a war of the tin tyrants.

7.) The Luke Cage/Jessica Jones marriage. Amidst the overwhelming darkness of the past few years of Marvel, this has been one of the great bright spots. The fact that it's Marvel's first mixed-race marriage isn't important ( well, it's a great thing for representations, but it's just background that doesn't overshadow the characters' individual depths ), here we have two heroic characters who've had hard lives finding solace in each other. Their marriage has been troubled by the shit they've had to deal with as outlaws, especially with their baby involved-- but they've ultimately managed to become closer due to the adversity, not drift apart. If Spider-Man remembered that he was married at one point, he'd regret selling that to the devil after seeing Luke and Jess as a dynamic and likable 'ship.

6.) Avenging Ares. The moral complications of the Marvel Universe have made it so that a public Avengers team can not only have a villainous God of War on the team, but have him in a capacity where he doesn't even need to feign recriminations. Michael Avon Oeming made Ares a complex character, and Bendis gave him the spotlight-- and in a capacity where his love of battle and gratuitous violence always steal the show. Tony Stark called him a mix between Wolverine and Thor, but he's more like the video game character Kratos-- angry and dangerous but more often than not pointed at people who deserve it ( as opposed to that game's Ares, who's more like the old Marvel Ares )At the same time, he does have redeeming qualities beyond pointing his axe at the right targets-- he's trying to be a good single father and do honest work, even if it's for a reprehensible human being like Norman Osborn. Hopefully when Norman falls, Ares won't go with him.

5.) The Iron Patriot. Say, for a moment, that evil is analogous to sugar content, and villains are deserts. Norman Osborn as the costumed maniac Green Goblin is like a good solid milk chocolate bar. Norman as a more realistic corporate shark is like a Nutrageous, loaded with extra peanut butter and caramel. Norman dressed up in a patriot-colored Iron Man suit and swindling the public into thinking that he's America's greatest hero is a Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake. And that Norman combined with the fact that he now believes he's America's greatest hero without acting any less depraved? That's like getting high fructose corn syrup injected directly into your jugular vein.

4.) Iron Man's rise to power. In recent years, Iron Man has gone from a dependable B-Lister to Marvel's A-List. Obviously the excellent movie and RDJ are the main causes, but he's also gotten a lot of great writing in recent years ( even amidst Civil War, when more than half of Marvel's staff felt that he needed a swastika on his armor ). Bendis may not write Tony's solo book, but he always wrote a dynamic Iron Man in the Avengers-- a character whose mistakes come from the fact that he's trying to do good on a much greater scale than any other hero. One of the best scenes in Bendis' run is the moment in New Avengers where he solemnly addresses Luke Cage's team, asking them if they have a better idea how to help the world than him. Unfortunately for him, they don't/can't answer.

It's also worth noting that Bendis' Iron Man scenes are written with a unique display of Tony in the armor-- they show him as a floating VR self in a womb of monitors. Sometimes artists make it look like he's a little fairy floating in a hollow suit, but overall it's a clever way to display the character's abilities.

3.) Luke Cage. It is a great thing that a hero who started out as a Hero For Hire with a tiara, poofy yellow jacket, and endless supply of stereotypical one-liners ( " Where's my money, honey? " ) could eventually take up the reins of Captain America. Luke 's easily the most heroic of the New Avengers, and he often does so simply through stoicism-- refusing to give in, be it to misguided heroes or outright bastards. In the latest issues, he's stood up to Norman while dying of a heart attack.

2.) The Dark Avengers. A perversely entertaining outgrowth of not only Warren Ellis' excellent Thunderbolts, but the direction of the Marvel Universe in general. In Civil War, the super-villains took an unfortunate backseat to the heroes' petty squabbling. Now they've come back at full force, even stealing their enemies' intellectual properties. Not only is Dark Avengers a great series, but it's helped several characters get a new lease-- it's good to see Bullseye moving his agenda beyond killing Daredevil's girlfriends.

And the Number One Good Thing;

1.) Luke Cage in the Elevator, Circa the Ronin Arc. Thrown out a skyscraper window by ninjas, Luke must get back to the upstairs fight-- but first he must take the elevator and listen to a rendition of Matthe wWilder's biggest and debatably only musical hit, Break my Stride. Normally music flops in comics, but this scene used the lyrics to add insult to Cage's injury.

Okay, it's not in a particular order, but these are still the things I liked.

Those Who Use the R-Word: Iron Man and Disability Follow-Up

( CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #19 )

The themes of disability that have always been a thematic in Iron Man have become more prominent than ever in the past year's story, involving Tony Stark systematically lobotomizing himself to keep his mind's brilliance out of the wrong hands. Yesterday's issue saw the climax of the story as Norman Osborn, who I discussed in another previous essay, finally catches Tony. The confrontation is profoundly one sided; Norman is equipped with his cynically marketing-driven Iron Patriot suit, a powerful war machine based on Tony's stolen technology. Tony, on the other hand, has lost so much brain function that he can't even speak in complete sentences, and has only the flimsy protection of the original Iron Man suit he built in an Afghani POW camp ( see the Iron Man movie for more ). Upon seeing how handicapped his foe is, Norman starts beating the hell out of Tony, and screams..

"I don't care how retarded you've gone and gotten yourself-- you're not going to ruin this for me!

Sadly the symbolism here is going to go over many readers' heads, as they probably consider the R-Word a medical term and even an acceptable colloquial insult. To anyone with a developmental disability, or for that matter anyone with a loved one with a developmental disability, the R-Word is hate speech. Many have admirably decided to pledge against its use as disparaging term ( myself included ); many still use it obliviously, especially in pop culture ( where " not being PC " is too often used as an excuse to hurt ). It's very telling that the only time writer Matt Fraction has used the word in this story is coming out of the mouth of Norman, an avatar of everything evil in the human condition.

You could even go so far as to read the confrontation from a disability rights perspective. Tony Stark is a good man who has dealt with several disabilities, but each time has treated himself with self-loathing for it, trying to use his engineering genius to create a " fix " ( and sometimes worsening his well-being as a result ). Norman Osborn is a petty crook with an insatiable hunger for power, first from the super-soldier formulas that made him into the Green Goblin, now with the prosthetic skin that is the Iron Man technology. After Norman's rise to political power ( based on excellent PR and seizing opportunities from Tony's mistakes ), Tony realized he had to destroy his intellectual properties to the point of shutting down his brain so they wouldn't get into those wrong hands; in the process, he discovered a newfound sense of inner peace as he lost his intellect. But Norman could never accept any sign of weakness, and lashes out at Tony with sadistic glee, even attributing his inability to fight back to a lack of masculinity. The common childhood axiom that bullies simply take their insecurities out on those weaker than them is obvious here, except that Norman is a grown man doing this with full knowledge of, and satisfaction with, the consequences of his actions.

Fortunately, Norman's plans do not succeed. Tony's brain deletion sequence concludes, and with a look of emotional clarity and the utterance of " I win ", he falls to the ground comatose. Not only does Norman not get ahold of Tony's secrets, but he is caught on world news beating an invalid man half to death, something even he will have trouble spinning in his next press conference. It's the very definition of phyrric victory for Tony, but it's also a fitting end for the hero; he dies feeling okay with himself, even if in a severely addled state, and keeps his inventions safe from being abused. Not a happy ending, but excellent as the conclusion to a tragedy; Tony's inventions could not be used responsibly by the world, but in death he became a martyr for strength of morals, and did so without any of his intellectual genius.

Of course, the story ends with Tony's friends in the superhero community taking his body and planning to restore his mind; it would be foolish to expect Marvel Comics to put a permanent end to one of their most merchandisable characters. As much as I have loved the character, I find myself almost wishing the series had ended here, to preserve the power of this statement.