Tony Stark: Iron Man vol. 3 — War of the Realms

I was planning on skipping this volume because I thought it was just a tie-in to the event.  Then I noticed it was labeled “vol. 3” and actually contained a proper issue of the series.  That being said, the two-issue tie-in from writer Gail Simone and artist Paolo Villanelli is the best part of this volume.  It’s basically an excuse for Simone to pit Stark against someone way outside of his usual rogues gallery, in the form of the gold-craving dragon Sadurang.  So you get two issues of Iron Man and friends fighting a dragon and Villanelli draws the hell out of it.  Simone’s work is pretty sharp too as she captures the title character’s voice quite well and even throws in some nods to the previous issues so that this storyline doesn’t feel like a huge digression from them.  Maybe we didn’t need the “Iron Man is Infected by Magic” business, but this tie-in was still better than I was expecting it to be.

After that, co-writers Dan Slott and Jim Zub, and artist Valerio Schiti get back to the main plot with a story that’s half setup/half amusing caper.  Rather than deal with his lapse of sobriety in the eScape, Stark has decided to remove his memories of it and everything around it.  Not only does he manage to annoy Captain Marvel by doing this (it has to do with his status as her AA sponsor), but Spymaster manages to get his hands on the hard drive containing Stark’s memories.  While they deal with the supervillain, Arno Stark gets to act… sinister.  I still think there were better things to do with Arno than turning him into a villain, but as a major addition to Iron Man’s origin that other people couldn’t get or didn’t want to work it was either this or being forgotten about.  Even if that’s disappointing, the rest of the issue is still solid enough.

Oh, and this volume also collects “Iron Man #25” from 1998 in which he teams up with Carol Danvers to stop Ultimo’s rampage.  The short version is that it’s not good enough to convince me that collecting these issues with “The Ultron Agenda” would’ve been a better value for my money.  And on that note…