First issue of a new arc, and the second year on the book. In Young Avengers terms, the first 17 issues were the first season. This is the start of the next. As such, it places certain demands on it.
Spoilers, obv.
Cover: By Paul Rivoche, who’s doing really interesting work. The five covers basically have a sort of thematic journey across them.
Page 1: As such, I wanted big radical surprising start. Doing an apparent time-skip of thirty years would be it. The arc is about building a city, and how that could change the world. I felt showing the end point as an actual visible thing would lean into that. I was also creating the idea that this isn’t the sort of comic where you’re going to magic up a city and the world is changed. This isn’t the Phoenix Five in AvX. This is an enormous engineering project. Superhero Comics are oft fantasy, but the fantasy Iron Man sells has to be a bit harder edged. There are no easy answers. There is work, and decades of it.
Anyway – as an alternate future, there’s lots of detailing in here. Stuff people who know the book will recognise – HELEN resembling 451, Arno and Tony, doing their thing. The fact they’re drinking. Referencing to enormously changed gene tailoring – as well as the problems that emerge from capitalist gene-tailoring, etc.
First issue with Joe, and while there’s relatively hard-sci-fi ideas bubbling under a lot of this, he makes it properly Marvel Universe. That’s key to the mood of this arc, I suspect…
Pages 2-3: As demonstrated here! The vision of the future is a motif I love. Letting an artist have fun with it.
Also the start of the Double-page-spread-as-issue-start element which comes back in this arc.
The line is a nod to WHITE HEAT. No, not comforting.
Oh – special credit to the colours by Guru eFX, which really capture the view here.
Pages 4-5: Design by Tim Leong, which is startling stuff. We’re echoing a lot of the utopian ideas of early 20th century design here, and there’s fun art deco thing going on.
Matt Jones is a British Designer. The quote comes from a column he wrote from io9. The arc is inspired by that, at its core. If a city is a battlesuit, what happens if Tony Stark made a city?
Page 6: As sci-fi heads will know, Space Elevators are a real, theorised thing.
Theory and ideas here, about how “Troy” would work.
I don’t have to explain Trojan Horses, do I?
Page 7: Oh, I love Space Elevators. I just love how they sound. I’m sad in my lifetime we won’t be able to say “Hey, just off to the space-elevator” in conversation, and actually be talking about a space-elevator.
I like seeing the pair of brothers in such a good mood here. Bless ’em.
Love the space-ship design that Joe has in panel 4. Lovely stuff.
Page 8: Perhaps most obviously noticeable in this panel is how Arno is considerably younger looking than Tony. Tony was born natural human, though genetweaked at this point. Arno was genetweaked from birth.
Last panel: uh-oh!
Page 10: AIs are nothing but trouble. Nice freak-out of HELEN here by Joe, which only gets worse.
The hour that I spent working out my best guess for the percentage of human beings that is poop was a fun hour.
Page 11: Emergence as a concept always interests me, all the way back to my days as a games writer. “Emergent Gameplay” is such a tarnished meaningless buzzword by now, but there’s some core parts of it which are just fascinating.
The last dialogue needed rewriting a bunch of ways to make sure that neither Arno or Tony look like an idiot for having missed it too much – which also making it convincingly something that could create this level of disruption.
Page 12: More tricky writing. The idea of a Space Elevator killing the Earth if it falls seems technically off from everything I researched. As such, at this point, Arno and Tony are mainly thinking SO MUCH MONEY!
Last panel puts the stab back into it.
Page 13: Ouch.
Page 14:
This is something Joe likes doing – merging two pages to form a DPS, with panels beneath it. It’s ended up being a sort of distinctive part of the arc’s look, and by the end, I’m actively leaning into it.
Lots of detail in here, and a big Iron-Man-esque idea. An Iron Rain of Iron Man suits, each controlled by AI-copies of heroes (an idea which I probably got from NEUROMANCER back in the day).
Shockworker Colonies is a nod towards URDANIK over in FATAL FRONTIER, the Infinite Comic. The events of Fatal Frontier work their way back into my Iron Man run, via the Annual, btw. It’s really good stuff too, and well worth reading.
“Emperor Dorrek VIII” would appear to be Teddy, the Skrull/Kree boy Hulkling from Young Avengers.
…And reveal it’s a simulation. That sort of thing is always a risk, as some readers will think it “doesn’t matter”. In this case, I was hoping we’d get away as it buys us a lot of things. It says a lot about how Tony and Arno are working. Most importantly, it’s a visionary sort of arc. Showing a vision seems fair game.
Page 15: I play with the ARNO IS TYPING STUFF a whole bunch in different fonts before retiring…
Tony explicitly references 451’s point in the last panel.
Page 16: Creepy.
I said that this would perhaps link to the VIDIOT imagery from the Machine-Man arc where IRON MAN 2020 made his début. You can just about see it.
Page 17: Lots of people seemed to like Starksplaining.
The biggest bugbear in this arc is remembering to make sure the headpiece is visible. Man!
Page 18: A lot of this is to buy the idea that this is serious research work and Tony is [fricking] obsessed. Tony went into space to find new purpose and ideas. He returns with it. We’re not exactly spinning that 100% as a good thing. Tony is avoiding, as talked about over the page…
Crap Cyclops in panel 4 amuses me.
Page 19: Merging the idea of real-world problems and marvel-universe problems here, which is key for me in
Iron Man.
We can’t trust the AI, apparently.
Page 20: I did a considerable part of research the future of city design for this. Not to the degree that it overwhelmed everything else, but enough to get a sense of the big problems ahead. A lot of the more grounded parts of it weren’t much specific use for a Marvel Universe story, alas. That said, bits of that are worked in here.
Because this is a superhero comic, not an engineering project. Clearly, I’m not going to do an arc just about Tony assembling his lego toys…
Pages 21-22: So let’s introduce the complication.
It’s not really my style to bring back bad-guys from the dead, at least without a major reinvention. Dead tends to mean dead, unless I killed them (in which case, their return was always part of my plan. Though it normally just means “dead”.) So I wasn’t going to undo what Matt did. That said, an idea struck me which seemed highly pulp and fun, and played with his legacy.
“Mandarin Seven” implies there may be other mandarins. The Mandarin had ten rings. Only one of them is here. You can probably put the pieces together yourself.
How a reader took this sequence says a lot about it. If you’re a superhero mainstream fan, you may think of a riff on a certain major comics property, and you’d be correct. I’ll maybe talk about this more down the line, as there’s much to reveal. While I play up to it in certain places in the story (as here), we’ll be downplaying it elsewhere. Conversely, If you’re a certain strand of British reader, mainly coming from the Phonogram side of my work, you probably thought “LAURIE PENNY!”, who’s a young British political journalist of some notoriety. As she’s a friend, I asked her if she was okay with doing someone inspired by her, and it was. And in a MU-universe, of course Laurie would despise Stark. Radical young political journalist is a pretty fun archetype to play with generally anyway.
Who else has a ring? Good question. I’ll go as far as saying it’s a mixture of characters new and old, of all sorts of belief structures (and grudges against Stark). I like making up new people, but a Mandarin ring on the hand of someone the Marvel Universe already knows also has a thrill.
There’s also lots of other mysteries involving the rings, as the fact this one’s flying around and talking probably should suggest.
Gillen, Kieron (18 November 2013)
Writer Notes: Iron Man 18 Kieron Gillen's Workblog. Retrieved on 9 January 2017.
