Tony Stark: Iron Man vol. 1 — Self-Made Man

After you’ve written “Amazing Spider-Man” for the past decade, what do you do next?  You start working your way through the rest of Marvel’s A-list characters, beginning with Tony Stark.  Dan Slott’s take on the character isn’t that different than what we’ve seen in previous runs. He’s still the charismatic, fast-talking futurist whose proclivity for getting into trouble is only matched by his facility for getting out of it.  Now he’s running Stark Unlimited and after securing an old robotics rival to join him in his latest venture, setting up a VR world called the eScape, Stark is ready to take on the world. Right after he stops a rampaging Fin Fang Foom from wiping out New York.

This first volume of “Iron Man” isn’t about innovation.  Like much of Slott’s run on “Amazing” it’s about doing familiar superhero stories with enough twists to keep them fresh.  That’s what we get here with the first four issues as they manage a nice balance of telling self-contained stories that also hint towards a larger plot.  Aside from the aforementioned fight with FFF, we have Stark and James Rhodes teaming up to take on a company that has made an assault vehicle using stolen Stark tech, an eScape test-run that’s interrupted by the Machine Man, and a dating program that leads to doppleganger chaos at S.U.  All of the setups for these stories are pretty straightforward, but they’re resolved with the kind of cleverness that I like to see in my superhero comics. That they all feature some superbly energetic and detailed art from Valerio Schiti is a big plus too.

The only outlier here is in the final story which focuses on Tony’s brother, Arno.  Introduced in Kieron Gillen’s run, my gut feeling here says that he’s important to Slott’s long-term plans for the his run.  You don’t give this guy a whole issue to set himself up as a benevolent problem solver only for his sinister side to reveal itself in an episode involving headless cattle.  This all screams “potential supervillain” to me, but it’s still easy to understand Arno’s motivations here. As with the rest of the volume, I’m curious to see where Slott is going with this.  Optimistic about it too.