Hard Reboot: Ultimate Comics Iron Man #1 Review

There are a variety of ways to read Ultimate Comics Iron Man #1, some of them cynical, others of them pleasant and forgiving.

The cynical side of me says that this comic book, in the most mercenary manner, throws aside a decade of continuity behind the Ultimate Universe Iron Man in favor of mimicking the depiction of Tony Stark by Robert Downey Jr. in the Marvel Studios movies, in effect putting itself aside in favor of a mass marketed version of the character designed to attract the maximum number of mouth-breathing summer entertainment seekers who don’t have air conditioning at home.
However, the hopeful and forgiving side of me says that the Ultimate Universe version of Tony Stark was originally depicted, in his first two miniseries written by Orson Scott Card, as a blue-skinned wuss who was mostly brain (literally; if I remember right, he sat on his cerebellum and pissed out of his medulla oblongata), with stupid organic armor and, if Card wrote what he knows, special magical underpants. In short, while it is weird to have positive feelings toward a comic book that so quickly and willingly throws away its own identity in favor of a popular movie depiction, the fact is that the old Ultimate Iron Man sucked hard, and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man was fucking awesome.

So what we got here is one damn strange book. One that feels like a cynical tack toward the widely popular while disgarding its own history… except its own history was mostly the sucky wankings of a controversial writer (not of comics) with some kind of spastic agenda who wrote the character as a snotty naked blue kid who sometimes liked to pretend he was a robot… which is arguably a bad story choice for a character written as having a brain situated in a way where getting a giant-robot-fetish-related atomic wedgie would give him a partial lobotomy.

All of which is a long way to go to describe what’s going on in a comic book stuck between a rock star and a polygamist’s place… but the overriding question is: despite what it is, is it any good?

It’s Better To Burn Out: Daken: Dark Wolverine #21 Review

We’ve had some fun at Rob Williams’s expense here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because to be truthful, I put Robocop on my pull list from back when Avatar was publishing Frank Miller’s Robocop – a Steven Grant written and Juan Jose Ryp drawn adaptation of Miller’s original script for the movie Robocop 2. And because of that, I kind of automatically get copies Dynamite Comics’s version of Robocop, and honestly? Rob Williams should not be writing Robocop comics. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to write the word Robocop.

And when it comes to Daken: Dark Wolverine, we kinda get it for almost the same reason: I put Wolverine on my pulls back when Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi were on the book about five years ago, and I started getting Daken by default. I mentioned the mistake to my local comic store owner, who knows me my name and asks me if I’d rather buy a couple extra books or get my comics from a Rite-Aid spinner rack while parents hustle their children away muttering “Don’t talk to perverts,” and wound up keeping it… even though I think that the term “Dark Reign” should only be used again when some comic geek biologist uses it in the name for a newly-discovered shit beetle.

So we’ve got a writer with some decent books under his belt – but some real stinkers, too – and a book born from the one of the longest and most irritating events Marvel’s produced since Maximum Carnage, and on top of it all? The book’s been canceled. So there should be nothing in Daken: Dark Wolverine to look forward to… Which is a shame, because it is a pretty damn solid comic book. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting, and that’s enough.