The Invincible Iron Man vol. 4: Stark Disassembled

With this, the story that was started in “World’s Most Wanted” and the character arc that really began in “Civil War,” draws to a close.  Tony Stark is a vegetable, having successfully wiped his mind free of information that could’ve been seized by Norman Osborne, and now his friends and comrades have to decide if they’re going to use his technology to bring him back.  (Non-spoiler warning:  They do.)  As Stark is flat on his back and at the mercy of his friends for protection, Madame Masque (undoubtedly still pissed at the man after her treatment in the previous arc — no matter what she says here) takes matters into her own hands and hires the high-tech criminal known as “The Ghost” to dispose of the title character.

If you’ve been reading the series so far, then picking up this volume should be a no-brainer.  In case you were worried that writer Matt Fraction and artist Salvador Larroca somehow lost the thread since the previous volume, then don’t be.  The two make sure that this volume looks and reads just as good as the rest, despite some, shall we say, “overwrought” psychic imagery over the course of Stark’s mental quest.  This is more than made up for with some truly exciting scenes.  Chief among them being a sequence in the first issue featuring six pages, eight panels each, of Stark’s talking head giving his “state of the union” for himself and the Marvel Universe.  It could’ve been really self-indulgent and boring, but Fraction’s dialogue is electric, and Larroca nails the man’s facial expressions.

More importantly, despite the fact that this volume represents the end of a story, it also sets up a lot of potentially interesting story threads for the future.  While having Stark rebuild his company is one of the obvious ones, we also find out that because of the method he used to restore his mind, he has forgotten a lot of important events over the past few years.  This might seem like a cheap way to not have him account to his friends for the past few years worth of stories, but the reason for his memory loss makes perfect sense, and the final page of this collection shows that his memory loss is going to be more of a rude awakening than anything else.  Then there’s the fact that Pepper and Maria find out that they both slept with him during “World’s Most Wanted.”

… Yeah, I think after that, mending fences with the majority of the Marvel Universe is going to be the easy part of his recovery.  After the success of this volume, I’m sure that said recovery will be very entertaining to see.