Ultimate Comics Iron Man: Armor Wars

I suspect that the main reason for this mini-series’ existence was to provide more comics fodder for people who liked “Iron Man 2” to buy after they saw the movie.  God knows that it doesn’t look like it was commissioned because writer Warren Ellis had a burning need to re-tell one of the iconic “Iron Man” stories in the context of the Ultimate Universe.  Now as I’ve said before, even when Ellis is phoning it in he’s still pretty readable.  It’s efficiently paced, has some nice fight scenes, plenty of snappy dialogue — it’s a basically competent package.

The problem is that it has all the depth of your average Michael Bay movie.  Even though the story that this takes its name from hasn’t aged all that well in the decades since it was originally published, it’s still quite readable and you get a sense that the theft of his technology really mattered to Tony Stark and seeing him cross a number of lines to get it back really drove that point home.  Here, he treats it as a lark — as if he’s living his own James Bond movie where his success is ultimately assured.  All he has to do is look cool while doing it.  As you might’ve guessed, this isn’t the right way to go about selling the reader on the seriousness of the threat that forms the core of your story.

Really, this story could’ve used an extra issue or two to give Ellis room to elaborate on some of the characters and concepts he has on display.  Ultimate M.O.D.O.K. certainly deserved more than a panel, the role of Tony’s grandfather could’ve been set up better, and the Ghost and the climactic deus-ex-machina that allows our hero to triumph at the end definitely needed more development.  Coming off much better is artist Steve Kurth, who turns in some really nice work here.  The opening scenes set in a ruined New York are appropriately haunting, and his action scenes have some real juice to them.  The last time he worked with Ellis, we got two issues of “newuniversal:  Stormfront” before it disappeared into the same scheduling limbo that Kevin Smith’s “Daredevil:  Target” series has been occupying for quite some time now.  Based on what I’ve read here, I’d rather they taken the time to give us the final four issues of that series than the four that made up this collection.