It’s all fun and games until everyone dies.
That’s the structure of this issue. In fact, it’s the structure of the whole thing. Pop-Sci-fi is the obvious influence. Tony is viewing this almost as a holiday. The Voldi are openly decadent. Both have forgot the universe they find themselves in, and their relation to it. And then reality intrudes.
Basically, imagine a a film was set entirely on a cheery alien world, showing a tour of its sights and beliefs and peoples. The world is Alderan, and in the last five minutes, the Death Star turns up.
Basically, it’s application of tonal whiplash for a point, and sets the direction for the book going forward.
Cover: I think this is my favourite of Greg’s for the series so far. GuruEFX bring the sword and sandals in the colours. That it manages to evoke both Iron Man and Gladatorial battle in the meshing of the designs is especially cute. I’d pick this up if only to see what the hell this was doing on an Iron Man issue.
Pages 1-2: Written as individual pages, and Greg extrapolated on earlier multi-panel choices in the arc to do this. I think I wrote it as 5 or 6 panels tops. Clearly, it needed a bunch of thought in terms of how to rework the monologue to guide the eye appropriately.
With this panelling, Gregis is reminding me a little of British photorealist artist Arthur Ranson. I’ve always dug his stuff.
I’m not sure if I planned it at the time, but Tony’s dialogue foreshadows a lot of this issue, in terms of fantasy and romance vs reality.
Page 3: Clearly, I would have loved to have swear here.
“Organic Fascist” was originally “Carbon Fascist”, a nod towards Iain M Banks’ Culture and the name their minds call people who don’t believe in machine intelligence. I decided that it wasn’t a common enough phrase for people realise it was a nod, and I may just get the credit for making it up, so I decided to tweak it slightly.
With what happened in the last month, regarding Iain Banks’ announcement that he has terminal cancer, I kind of wish I had left it in as a tribute. I’ll probably work out something down the line. He’s one of the biggest formative influences on me as a writer.
Page 4: My friend, Jim Rossignol and I once planned to do a whole comic which was a only slightly abridged section of THE REPUBLIC, but the lines would be put in the mouth of warring apocalyptic giant robots. This is a little bit like that.
Page 5: Hmm. That Loc Cap is totally in the wrong place. Man!
Page 6: Yes, I’m playing the fight scene mainly for comedy, because I’d have to kill Tony Stark if I wrote it seriously and I’m not sure I’d be able to do that. I think Marvel would have a problem.
Page 7: It’s handy to have a good AI around.
ZZAP. I rarely write SFX in the script, and it’s normally only when pages come back they’re added, if required. Generally speaking, I’m anti-SFX as an aesthetic.
Page 8: The word “inappropriate” is pretty funny.
I would love a job where I got to shout out “KILL HIM! HE MUST NOT ESCAPE!” more often. At the moment, I only get to say that when working with McKelvie.
Page 9: The distant middle shot is to get a sense of scale and speed, and a force multiplier, etc, etc. The distant shot with small figure is something that was one of the main visual approaches popularised with The Authority.
Page 10: I’m not sure where that furry joke came from.
And we introduce the Armoury, who I only decided to give a personality in the second draft of the script. I sort of see him as an inappropriately chipper kinda guy.
I also realise that while Americans will probably go for Knight Rider as a precursor for the Tony/PEPPER relationship, with the Armoury, it means I only need to give Tony a talking gun for the full Rogue Trooper (From 2000AD) set. (PEPPER=Helm, The Armory=Bagman, Gunnar = No-one yet. And ever, as I’m not doing it).
Page 11: We’re still in our hero-escapes pop-action sequence here. Wisecracks, exploding robots, fun.
Page 12: And back with Veratina. I write the call back to the beard gag at least in part to remind the readers who she is.
And here are the Celestials, staring through that pretty image of the universe we showed in the first issue. Nice and ominous.
Page 13: And Veratina doesn’t know what time it is. Something was up with the previous page, but this starts hammering the nails into the Voldi’s coffin.
I’d mainly note how Greg presents the violence here versus how he presents it elsewhere in the series. The fact the Celestial isn’t even really paying attention to where he’s aiming is a nice touch. It’s a glance to one side, and annihilation.
A little reminder in the captions in the bottom right, in case someone hasn’t being paying attention to all the times I’ve laid this information out in this arc.
Page 14: The Justicar’s tears being a non-water colour was something in the script. I saw her having fiery tears.
The Tear (i.e. Crying) and Tear (i.e. Ripping) was on my mind throughout this arc.
I do feel sorry for the Justicar. She was the only person in the arc who really understood what was going on. In a planetoid of children, she was the adult.
Not that it helps.
Page 15: I had to do a couple of drafts to make sure Tony was active enough in the second half of this issue. He’s lost already here, of course, but Tony doesn’t know, and a desperate rush speaks to the character.
Page 16: Lots of hard-cuts and dialogue continuing in captions to compress information here.
Page 17: The death of the Justicar here. This bugged me, a little.
It’s one of the problems of writing action fiction. Ideally, I want a more diverse cast. I introduce a diverse cast? Because they’re in action fiction, they’re going to fall like flies, and you’ve crammed another woman into a fridge. There’s not really a solution, except to give the characters their own motivations and lives. While the death of the Voldi has clearly lit a fire under Tony by the end, she lived and died for her own reasons.
In terms of writing, I’m fond of 451’s monologue here.
Page 18: This is an interesting example of how comics works, actually. This page was originally written as a single-panel. I’m really excited to see an artist choose to take it a very different way.
Page 19: I like the use of the tall panel here.
Dialogue actually reminds me of some themes in Uber, actually, but you’ll see that soon enough.
Page 20: Tony explains the plot, as I suspect everyone’s been skipping along merrily and enjoying the alien world.
And then 451 calls back to his introduction last issue, changing the focus slightly and explaining the missing piece of his motivation.
Several people have noted that 451 recalls another of my favourite creations, UNIT from my X-men comics. I actually was playing with using UNIT originally, but decided not to, for a whole bunch of reasons, not least that dropping UNIT into the story immediately makes it clear that he’s a bad guy.
(Though I would have liked the inversion of the usual UNIT dynamic – he’s normally the guy in a cell.)
With 451, being new, there’s a question mark. It made me have to attack the similar archetype (A ends-justify-the-means-on-a-hyperbolic-scale diplomatic robot) in a different way. My shorthand would be if UNIT is Darkseid, 451 is Thanos. UNIT is entirely 100% happy with everything he’s doing. In a literal sense, he was constructed to act the way he does, and is perfectly resigned to it. He never has a shred of doubt, as he’s incapable of it. 451 is more of a creature of passion, which he tries the hardest to hide. He was a machine built to do exactly the opposite of what he’s doing, so every single action is hard for him. His body screams that what he’s doing is wrong. This makes him a neurotic, which I’ve tried to show in a few ways and will continue to do so the next time we see him. This page is 451 restating his core beliefs, so is as secure (and most like UNIT) as he’s ever been.
Still – I sort of suspect he’s a character who’d be easier to make work with movement that on the frame. Twitchy nervousness is reliant on some really “soft” body language. CP-30 and HAL were obvious influences here, but I was actually thinking about Woody Allen as a serial killer in terms of how he moves.
I like him here though. The last three panels are the sort of thing you can show out of context to explain a character.
Hmm. There’s an error on this page as well caused by a last minute rewrite in a previous balloon. Growls!
Page 21: Nice fade out here from Greg and GuruFX.
And a few readings of the word killer in that final panel.
Next issue: The secret origin of Tony Stark kicks off. The big one.
Gillen, Kieron (20 April 2013) [http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/5358/writer-notes-on-iron-man-8/ Writer
Notes on Iron Man 8]
Kieron Gillen's Workblog. Retrieved on 9 January 2017.
What happened to "no enhanced combatants"? "As nature finds you," remember? 
