ORIGINALLY POSTED ON COMICZONEAZ.com (website no longer active)
“World’s Most Wanted”
When Iron Man hit theatres, last May, Marvel decided to re-launch Iron Man with a new #1 issue. They hoped that the film-generated interest in the character combined with a relaunch would make for a great new series.
And, with up-and-coming writer Matt Fraction on the series, it’s been quite good. Fraction wasn’t given too much inside detail on the movie, and had apparently written the entire first story arc before the film was even released. Fortunately, the story he wrote worked as an indirect sequel to the film and really got things rolling, right out of the gate.
And then Dark Reign happened. Norman Osborn took over everything that Tony Stark was in charge of (SHIELD/HAMMER, the 50-States Initiative, etc.), and Stark decided he needed to protect the identities of his fellow super heroes from a madman like Osborn. So, via a bunch of pseudo-science that only works in SyFy Channel movies and comic books, Tony Stark deleted his brain.
So, as the issues go by, Stark gets progressively more forgetful. By the time issue 15 picks up, he’s already forgotten a lot of the higher functions of his brain, such as anything that rocket scientists would know. He’s forgotten most peoples’ identities, and is slowly beginning to forget more things, like how to spell and use a screwdriver.
But, before his brain’s deletion, Tony left his secretary, Pepper Potts, an Iron Man (Iron Woman?) suit of her own, which Pepper named “Rescue.” Together, along with the Black Widow and former SHIELD director Maria Hill, the trio of ladies made a break for it to try and take Osborn down, once and for all.
In issue 19, Norman Osborn, in his Iron Patriot armor, has found Tony Stark, in a modified version of the Iron Man Mark IV armor (his classic outfit from the late 60s and 70s), and the two engage in a rather one-sided battle. But Tony’s lady-friends manage to get every major news outlet on the scene, and Osborn is forced to simply imprison Tony Stark, rather than outright murder him. But when Osborn wants to pull the plug on Stark’s life support, he’s reminded that Stark’s power of attorney goes to his physician, Dr. Donald Blake.
Salvador Larroca’s pencil work has rarely been better than his run on Iron Man. Every character is easily distinguishable from each other (even the two redheads, Pepper Potts and the Black Widow, who share a lot of panel-time together), and the story is told magnificently. Even without Matt Fraction’s great dialogue, you’d have a really good idea of what was happening, which is exactly how comic art should be done.
The coloring, in my opinion, is a little bit over-rendered. It works, because this is an Iron Man book, but it’s not a style of coloring that I’d like to see Marvel use on a line-wide basis. However, the palette used by colorist Frank D’Armata is certainly always befitting of the mood, and does enhance the atmosphere.
The second half of “World’s Most Wanted,” a year-long run in Invicible Iron Man, sets up for this week’s “Stark: Disassembled” storyline, which will then lead into the series’ SIEGE crossover, Marvel’s next big event, which will see the reuniting of Iron man, Thor, and Steve Rogers as Captain America as The Avengers.
Fraction and Larroca are doing with Iron Man exactly what Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting began doing with Captain America back in 2004; Stripping the character down to the essentials, only to re-build him bigger and better than before. If Stark: Disassembled and the SIEGE tie-in can live up to the excellence of World’s Most Wanted, and the creative team stays on the title afterwards, I predict that this will become one of those legendary runs in comics that people will talk about for years to come. And it may just be the most intriguing run on Iron Man since the mid-80s.