Invincible Iron Man V1 - The Five Nightmares

Thoughts on: Invincible Iron Man V1 - World's Most Wanted

Written by: Matt Fraction

Art By: Salvador Larroca

How I Read it: Marvel Digital Unlimted on Ipad

Here's the solicit for the TPB

Tony Stark - Iron Man, billionaire industrialist and director of S.H.I.E.L.D. - faces the most overwhelming challenge of his life. Ezekiel Stane, the son of Tony's late business rival and archenemy Obadiah, has set his sights, his genius and his considerable fortune on the task of destroying Tony Stark and Iron Man. What's worse, he's got Iron Man tech, and he's every bit Iron Man's equal and opposite...except younger, faster, smarter...and immeasurably evil. Rising-star writer Matt Fraction (IMMORTAL IRON FIST) and superstar artist Salvador Larroca (UNCANNY X-MEN) join forces to repulsor-ray your comic books to a cinder! Softcover

With Marvel NOW in full swing, several long creative runs have ended. Now seems like a good time to go get caught up on a few. I'm going to start with Matt Fraction and Sal Larroca's Invincible Iron Man. Marvel Digital Unlimited on my Ipad works great and has all the chapters of this long, 60ish issue run

This series began in 2008 as a "jumping on" point at the time the first Iron Man movie was coming out. From that perspective, it does a great job cutting down to the Iron Man basics. The feel is very similar to the movie, from the tech based villain (who is the son if the movie villain), to the feel of the Pepper Potts/ Tony Stark interactions. The themes of technology that could be put to such good use (curing diseases, feeding the poor, etc.) instead being used for mayhem are also present.

At this point in comics continuity, we are post "Civil War" and Tony is the director of SHIELD. We see Tony having to balance his SHIELD responsibilities with that of his Stark Enterprises role. The book begins with several terror attacks, each one bigger than the last, and all of them having Stark-tech signatures. The book's main villain, Zeke Stain, has a memorable introduction, taking out a board room full of executives and jumping out of a 40 story building. He is made to look like a super genius foil, but to me, much of his bite is lost when it is revealed he is not inventing the tech himself, but instead is simply cannibalizing old stark technology and incorporating it into his own body. I love the line by Mr Fantastic... "He didn't invent the bread, nor the peanut butter, but...".

The art by Sal Larroca is fantastic. I like his art much more when he is finishing his own pencils (like his work on X-treme X-Men) rather than when some one else does the job (like his later X-Men work with Danny Miki inking).

The story is paced well for 6 issues (with a great Spider-man team-up epilogue in issue 7 not included in the Vol 1 TPB), splitting the focus well between Tony Stark character development and Iron Man action scenes with lots of big budget explosions, and building up to the final confrontation at the end.

Up next is the first part of the Dark Reign stories which follow Secret Invasion.

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