The Invincible Iron Man: Stark Disassembled

I mean this in the best way possible: The Invincible Iron Man: Stark Disassembled is pretty up its own ass. The first issue was pretty much all prologue, pages of pages of Tony Stark just explaining, it's totally wrapped up in continuity type stuff, and it's got those completely insane comic book sequence of events thing where say, Tony Stark's computerized body is jumpstarted by Thor striking the Captain American shield with his hammer creating electricity or something. In the end, it's basically a story arc hurtling towards retconning the character.

But it works. Every goofy Marvel's character entrance or exit was thrilling because at any moment it could've gotten stupid and even when it did get stupid it was the good kind of stupid, where writer Matt Fraction just thought, "fuck it" and went there. There hasn't been this kind of devotion to the Marvel Universe and blatant disregard for it since say, Old Man Logan (or to go back a bit further, Civil War). The difference is, "Stark Disassembled" wobbles but it never falls down and each issue got better, not worse. Still, it shares Mark Millar's understanding that comics always gotta be fun. And emotional.

At the heart of Fraction's Invincible Iron Man twenty-four issues ago, was Tony Stark's painfully sincere--too sincere really--attempt to not be such a douche. Sounds like most aware Iron Man comics since well forever, but a lot of it, this time around, is filtered through a weirder, sympathetic but kinda ambivalent perspective on Stark. He's not the lovable playboy and he's not a jerk readers just kinda roll their eyes at, he's somewhere in between. And he's also a genius. Fraction understands how important that is, the complex, jerky genius part.

We don't like the word "genius" anymore because it's divisive and elitist. A decade or two of little league where everybody gets a trophy has us too comfortable with the idea that everybody's special. Fraction's hip to this but he knows it's a little bullshit and really stifling and so, he makes the comic book less about Tony Stark the genius and more about Tony Stark the genius who is also a prick and maybe more of a prick because he's a genius? The tension of the comic, that sorta palpable discomfort you get reading it, comes not from Stark as conflicted individual, but just how much bullshit he can make his friends and employees fucking deal with before they give up.

The answer is a whole lot. But for good reason--Stark is a genius, remember? In its original context--the first part of a cool-looking Iron Man storyline--Stark's almost issue-long monologue was just obnoxious. But as each issue came along, I realized, that's the point. It's made clear in Pepper's angry, scribbled, half-finished note to Tony in issue #21: "When is it my time? When do I stop living to support your life and start living mine?" Again, this isn't all that different from other comics, but Pepper is less a weak female or whatever, and more a self-aware person, who can't help but be pissed. "I'm throwing a tantrum and I know it." she writes a few lines before the "Why me?" portion of her letter.

Notice there's not a lot of comment on action or plot here because there actually isn't that much in "Stark: Disassembled". A lot of stuff happens, but violence and fighting are kinda besides the point. The exciting stuff is seeing how all the pieces are put together: Thor and Captain American showing up, Doctor Strange showing up, not the threat of The Ghost but how he'll be defeated. It's a comic book, Fraction seems to quietly remind readers, nothing's really at stake here. So you get your perfunctory violence and thrills and nick-of-time saves and it's fun, but there's also plenty of raw, complex emotions. People mad at Stark for his actions of the past, but concerned about him still. Stark, in his weird subconscious dreamworld confronting his actions of the past, most violently in #24, via a weird blood-filled palace with his parents--an odd, half-symbolic representation of "the Stark Legacy".

This is comic book stuff yeah, but take it out of the comics realm, say, this was the next Iron Man movie and it'd be a fucking head-trip (where's the conflict? the resolution? the conventional love interest?) but that's a good thing. Fraction isn't so much "reinventing" or deconstructing his hero, which is sorta what every comic book does these days if it isn't totally towing the party line, but shifting how stuff plays out just a bit. He's using every bloated, event-ish aspect of contemporary superhero comics and turning it just enough that it means something again. But what does it all build-up to? A clever way to make Civil War something that never happened. This is both frustrating and pretty awesome. For once, I'm psyched to see where a mainline superhero comic is gonna go next.

This Just In: Batman: The Animated Series Is Really Good

Last night, I dropped $85 bucks I don't really have on the Batman: The Complete Series box set that came out last Tuesday, and it's really nice. A clear, plastic slipcase covering what's essentially a "Batman" cigar box with a cool, subtle images on the outside and inside, and an awesome booklet of production sketches and really fascinating "theory" pages, which are just a bunch of quick, reference sketches of Batman's face, cape, hands, head, etc. in every notable contortion or position. There's of course, every season of the series and a should-be-longer-but-still-cool featurette that focuses on the evolution of Batman in animation since the 1960s.

What's so cool about Batman: The Animated Series or rather, the cool thing I'd like to talk about is how the series was in a way, a cash-in on the success of the Tim Burton Batman movie that totally took advantage of that to make something really awesome. That's to say, in the early 90s, when everyone was rocking "Batman" shirts--shirts you can now buy replicas of at Urban Outfitters--the lamest, most played-out version of a Batman cartoon could've come out and people would've eaten it up. Think of how the release of the recent The Dark Knight brought about a not-bad "Arkham Asylum" mini-series and the Azzarello-written Joker, which somehow ends up being even more kinda torture-porn and cynical than the Nolan film; in short, these are not challenging and they certainly aren't doing a whole lot of "good", while the success of Burton's Batman gave way to probably the most challenging and interesting animation ever on TV.

Still, DC dropping The Dark Knight ball or not, if there's one thing that is exciting or interesting about the recent superhero movie craze, it's those weird comics that are O.K-ed by Marvel or DC either because they're just signing off on anything related to their hyper-marketable (or hopefully marketable) superhero movie or because there's some solid dudes behind the desk that are like "Here's our chance to do something weird and people'll still eat it up, so let's do it". I'm thinking of the particularly odd artwork by Seth Fisher in Batman: Snow, which came out around the time of Batman Begins or the brilliant Silver Surfer: Requiem coinciding with the release of the not good but unfairly maligned Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer or the re-releases of classic Michelini stories like "Demon In a Bottle" or "Doomquest" and of course, last week's Iron Man: The End.

Iron Man: The End

This one-shot written by 70s/80s Iron Man vets David Michelinie and Bob Layton is part of MARVEL's "The End" series but you wouldn't know it just from reading the comic because it's got nothing to do with the doom and gloom cynicism of the rest of the series.

Iron Man: The End envisions an uncomfortable and a little bad sad end to Tony Stark's Iron Man career that purposefully lacks the extremes of the rest of the series. No body dies and Iron Man as hero and icon still exists. It's a comic that actually has less to do with "The End" and more to do with the comic book subgenre of superheroes past their prime (Dark Knight Returns, Spider-Man: Reign, Kingdom Come, etc.) but without the simplistic "getting old is sad" sense all of those series contain however interesting they might be otherwise. This probably has a lot to do with Michelinie and Layton being over fifty and therefore, write aging as it really is and not from the perspective of someone in their twenties or thirties.

At the same time of course, the comic book isn't some silly "getting old is great" comic or something. It's all about adjustment and confronting changes and fundamental realities that sort of suck but will be way worse if you pretend they're not there. Much of the issue is an aged, hands-now-trembling Tony Stark refusing to see that he can't keep flying around fighting villains. An early scene has his slowed reaction time nearly causing the death of two Stark Enterprises employees and in a scene that's particularly astute to the psychology of men getting older, this isn't enough to make him really stop and think.

The event that puts him over the edge is being nearly killed by a super villain with better technology and less wrinkles. It's an interesting detail that points towards Stark and well, everybody's vanity; he only changes when his own life and pride are completely at stake. And even once he's decide to hang up the Iron Man suit, there's still plenty of angry outbursts and confrontations, especially with a young scientist that reminds Stark of himself. Of course, the problem soon becomes the young scientist's disinterest in filling any and every role Stark once occupied. A particularly ugly but real scene has the young scientist--who's just been promoted by Stark--denying one of Tony's request to which Stark spits back: "Listen up, Travis! Your position could disappear in a heartbeat! Strings can be pulled! You'll be lucky to get a job washing test tubes in a prep school lab!" Stark later apologizes.

This comic reads like silly stuff like "Civil War" never happened and instead gets back to the character-driven stories Michelinie was writing--most famously, the never-can-be-praised-enough "Demon In a Bottle"--back in the 70s. There's even a fun part of this new story where they kind of reference "Civil War" as Stark scans a database of noted heroes and mutants not for their registration but to replace him as Iron Man! It's not aggressive and doesn't veer into angry old comics writer junk, it's just a tossed-off and subtle reminder of how different (and less cynical) this take on Iron Man is than most of what's been going on (except for the movie which is really inspired by those old Iron Mans.

We all have a grandfather or maybe father who injured their back because they didn't want you to help or pretended they weren't paying attention when in reality they're developing a hearing problem, well this comic's a sober and sympathetic look into events like that. Neither seeing it all as tragic or stumbling into the idealization of old-age, Iron Man: The End just plain gets it right.

Powerful Panels: Iron Man #149 by John Romita Jr.

The original context of the two-part "Doomquest!" storyline in Iron Man isn't really known to me, but it's been recontexualized as significant or notable by a relatively recent hardback put out by Marvel that's a sort of companion piece to the other, big Michelinie-written, Romita Jr.-drawn story "Demon In a Bottle". In its current context then, opening up to the first issue of what sounds like a crazy-awesome story--Iron Man and Dr. Doom in Medieval times--you expect to be immediately blown away by something...that big, storyline opener that hooks you in or grabs you.

Not so much here, which isn't a surprise if you've read a lot of these pretty-smart, leisurely Marvel comics from the 70s, but it's strange in any era that the comic's first fight scene would be represented in a single panel like the one above, Even the most "sophisticated" of superhero comics never avoid illustrating a fight scene, but here we are, on page three of a new storyline, and John Romita Jr. represents a confrontation between Iron Man and a bunch of helicopter gunboat modern-day pirates in one rectangular panel of abstract images and odd sound effects.

The immediate things that come to mind are the old Adam West "Batman" show, with its over-the-top sound effects that bursts across the TV screen atop the awkwardly chereographed fight scenes, and old cartoons which often represented a fight or tussle as a cloud of motion lines and limbs popping out here and there. Both of these are references to things a little less serious than most Iron Man comics and so, it seems in a way, Romita Jr. even hinting towards the absurdity or at least, the weird, kinda hilarious choice he's made to not draw what could easily be a cool, mood-setting fight scene right at the beginning of the book. The sound effects too, are particularly weird and nonsensical, certainly not ones I've ever read before: "Whram", "Shrak", "Phlow".

It's hard to tell and silly to speculate as to why Romita Jr. chose to skip over this first fight scene, but the most reasonable argument seems to be that he and Michelinie have a whole lot of story go rush through in the next two issues--one double-size but still--and taking a page or two to illustrate a fight that's ultimately irrelevant just made sense. Of course, that only kind of makes sense...it's a fight scene! Show it anyway!


Still, there's a very cool, weirdly satisfying feeling to the panel, especially in the context of the ones before and after it. It reminds me of the "Superhero Minimalism" experiments over at 'I Love Rob Liefeld' where a comic's reduced to the fewest panels as possible while still making sense and retaining the power of the entire comic. Here then, Romita Jr. reduces the played-out fight scene of every comic into three panels: The Villian talks some shit, the Hero kicks his ass, the Villain goes to jail. Still, there's something inexplicably weird and almost like Jim Starlin cosmic about that odd frame of yellow and orange, "Batman" sound effects, and shards of debris or something flying in the center. It's easy to look at it and know it represents "Iron Man beats people up" but looking closer, it's represented in a really strange way.

This odd choice to eschew the fight scene for a bunch more exposition and set-up illustrates the specific joys of really good comics starring Iron Man, wherein the storyline and emotions are always much, much cooler than the action That statement could be easily applied to most good superhero stories, but it's especially true of "Iron Man", where it's Tony Stark that seems infinitely more fascinating and engaging than his alter-ego.

Even in the pretty-much perfect movie, the big, giant fight scene feels more like an inevitability and thing that's gotta happen than any kind of culmination or explosion of all the emotions and stuff that preceded it. Lopping off this "Doomquest" fight scene that really, really doesn't need to be in there and really would only serve as some kind of attention-grabbing device is a brilliant move, but one that would be rare in comics, even today.

Cinematic Subtlety: The Politics of Ironman

There is a moment in the opening act of Jon Favreau's Ironman in which Tony Stark and his fellow prisoner Yinsen are visited in their cell--really a cave somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan--by their captors. I happen to be this guy who can recognize Arabic when it is spoken and thus knew that the bad guys were speaking Arabic and Yinsen, an Afghan whose native language might be Dari, Pashto or even Farsi, but certainly not Arabic, responded in that language. A few moments later, Stark and Yinsen are having a conversation and Stark asks Yinsen how many languages he speaks. Yinsen's reply is that he doesn't speak enough to cover all of those spoken amongst their captors.

In that ever so brief exchange, the film acknowledged that Yinsen speaks at least three languages (English, Arabic and whatever his native language may be) and that the militants who operate in that region of the world are an amazingly polyglot bunch comprising some mixture of Pashtuns, Persians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Bosnians, Chechens and a handful of Arabs. This is precisely the sort of undemonstrative cue that assumes an informed audience that John Ford used in The Searchers but that one would not expect from a 21st Century comic book superhero movie.

Political movies are generally problematic because they are usually either obvious and obnoxiously preachy or they are too timid to commit to anything controversial for fear of turning off too many viewers. The thing about politics, though, is that if what you are saying isn't controversial, it probably isn't worth saying. The political content of Ironman avoids all this because it asks questions about some truly paradoxical stuff in American foreign policy, but also avoids making any naive conclusions about them.

In the scene in which Stark is demonstrating his company's new high-tech missile to the gathered dignitaries, he makes a comment about how the enemy will be afraid to come out of their caves. This seemingly throwaway line actually says a lot about the attitudes and assumptions of Americans in regards to our current enemies. Later in the film, when Obadiah Stane goes to Afghanistan to retrieve Stark's original Ironman suit from his captor, Stane makes a comment about how it was always technology that kept that part of the world behind. Taken together, these two comments reveal something of the impotence Americans felt in the face of what happened on September 11, 2001. Like, if these people are able to use our technology to destroy two of the largest and most robust structures on the face of the planet in a plan hatched in a cave in Afghanistan, we must be fucked. These scenes also point out the ironic doubling of cowardice in the current conflict against terror: They hide in caves while we hide behind our technology.

Although I think this was a relatively rare phenomenon, there were certainly some right-leaning critics of the film who pigeonholed it as a typical left-wing, anti-corporation, anti-military film. Still others coming from the left decried the film's portrayal of brown-skinned Muslims as the villains. Both readings are ultimately simplistic and basically ignore what is really going on. Insofar as there is a villain in the film, it is the double-dealing plutocrat Obadiah Stane. Sure he pays a group of presumably Muslim militants to kill Stark, but this is only one portrayal of Muslims in the film--the other and more affecting is as victims of just the sort of amoral business practices Stane engages in. Moreover, I would argue that the movie's primary moral barometer is none other than Colonel James Rhodes, a military officer in charge of the development and procurement of new weapons technology.

The film does ask some basic questions about the morality of arms manufacture as a means of earning a living, but it does so without pretending to have all the answers. As Stark himself points out, many of the technologies his company developed that have helped people around the globe were made possible with military money. Questions are asked, complexities are exhibited and acknowledged, people are left to come to their own conclusions--this is what politically and philosophically serious films do.

Suicidal Tendencies...

...is what Tony Stark's listening to when he's working on his car in that one scene in the Iron Man movie, out today on DVD.