Comics I Read This Week 2: Week of 9/3/08

Yeah, I know, I'm lazy. The update for the week of 9/3 comes a full week late, when new comics are already out.

There was only one comic I even bought for last week. Nothing really appealed to me on the stand that I wasn't already buying. Pretty much the only reason I stopped by the shop at all was because the title that I wanted to buy happened to be one of my favorite ones right now.

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1. INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #5
   
   I must confess that I've never really been a big Iron Man fan. He always seemed like nothing more than a rich douchebag, a Batman with-the-privelege but sans-the-darkness-and-conscience, and nearly everything I read of the guy during Civil War confirmed this. The way he was handled in Civil War tie-ins like Amazing Spider-Man and New Avengers made it seem like he was a borderline supervillain. He cared more about apprehending his colleagues in the superhero community than he did about fighting supervillains, making uneasy alliances with the fucking Kingpin even (see Civil War: War Crimes) just to get at them, without having any sympathy for their side of the battle.
   
   It was like it was a secret agenda to get all the heroes off the board so his own ego could take center stage. Or maybe he had a budding jealousy against them all from the beginning. Either way, it seemed like only evil motives could be attributed to Tony Stark.
   
   So what made me want to read the new Iron Man book that came out? It certainly wasn't reading Iron Man: Director of Shield that did it.
   
   Nope.
   
   It was the Iron Man movie.
   
   Finally, a take on the character that summed everything up about the mythos. Yeah, sure he's kind of a cock in his personal life, but he really is a man burdened by his conscience and past of being a weapons developer. Despite flying around in his own private jet and being a total womanizer, he's a guy that sincerely wants to do good in his life, and wants to be remembered much for that than for his career at Stark Industries. I walked out of the movie convinced that the story told and the summarization of the character was better than any Iron Man comic that had been released (of course, bear in mind that I had not read Warren Ellis's Extremis, which is pretty damn awesome). This statement I retracted once I read the first issue of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca's Invincible Iron Man.
   
   It came out at the perfect time. Right after the movie's release, I was looking for an Iron Man comic to read. Why not pick up the new first issue that came out? I should have no problem following it.
   
   And man, was I surprised by the quality of it. All the characters were written so appropriately. Tony was sleazey, sure, but he was also endearing. He was burdened by the pressures of his lifestyle, the ever-present phone calls and constant "Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark!" in the background. The sexual tension between him and Pepper Potts was real, something you could feel, without ever being too explicit or cheesy. And Ezekiel Stane was somebody so sinister and terrifying for a villain. I walked out of reading issue #1 thinking that if all of the issues in the series are this good, then this book could easily rival Ed Brubaker's Captain America.
   
   Now, for issue #5... This one disappointed me a little bit, as most of the cool SHIELD espionage in tracking Stane is over, so we have an all-out slugfest between the two of them that took up more than half of the issue. The fight scenes were pretty well done for a Marvel comic, but still nothing outstanding or anything. Not my favorite issue in the whole run so far, but then again, the dialogue was still clever, and there's a moment of genius in the opening page that's worth the price of the whole comic alone where we see Ezekiel in a tour group wearing a shirt with Captain America's skull on it saying "TONY WAS RIGHT".
   
   Pure genius. I want that shirt.