Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates, Review | Tagged: brightest day, Comics, iron man

Wednesday Comics Review: Brightest Day #19 and Iron Man #500.1

I do hope it's Swamp Thing.

Yes, I know, I have a lot of love for the Vertigo version and would have welcomed the China Mieville version, complete with machine guns, but there's something hat seems to radical for DC to have the saviour of the universe revealed to be a vegetable with delusions of grandeur.

Brightest Day is coming to the end of its run, with a couple of months left to go. And a stack of artists are piling in to keep the book on its fortnightly schedule.

And so as Boston Brand moans and groans about his lot, with the fate of the revived twelve now in doubt, Aquaman is on a mission to save the world as the Aquawar rears its head. Again. An army versus a beach of sunbathers is never going to be a long and arduous battle, and loses more than just the fight. Well, we know what happens next. It usually involves a beard.

This is very much a Point-A-To-Point-B comic, all about plot, getting the right pieces into the right places on the board for the inevitable finale. There is talking along the way, but it never deems to hit home emotionally. It never really has room to. A twenty page comic really shouldn't be able to afford three single page splashes and one double page splash and that really adds to the bittiness of this issue, even as it gives Joe Prado the chance to increase the value of his original art sales this month.

For the same price you can buy Iron Man #500.1. Now these Point One comics are weird. retailers and fans seem bemused as to how they fit in with their regular reading, but it seems that these could be treated as perennial, comics that address the current status quo of the character, or at least the status quo that the books will eventually return to.

And this issue is very much the Iron Man life story told to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, heavily disguised as something else. And it does that one trick that comics do so well, the unreliably narrator. So the reader sees the truth but reads the lie. My favourite example is the opening of Watchmen with the police detectives analysing the scene while you see what actually happened, speech as captions on a page that directly contradicts them. It creates a battle between the left and right hand sides of your brain which can be quite exhilarating. I'm using it myself right now, and it's rather fun for the writer too.

So here we have the Iron Man origin, in the caves of a foreign country, with a look taken straight from the first Iron Man film, presented to the group as a difficult working environment with overmanaging bosses. And the rest of his life presented in just as mediocre and mundane a fashion.

We even get to see the weirder bits referenced. Including Teen Tony.

And there's lots of it. This is a comic heavy on the word balloons and captions with 8, 9, 10, 12  panels a page, and a good thing to. Why? Because this is the first, it seems, twenty-page Iron Man comic story for $2.99. There is a two page spread at the end showing scenes pertaining to be from upcoming issues. But that's nothing more than a trailer, an in house ad. The story, is twenty pages long. But unlike Brightest Day, it's written in a way so that you don't feel it. No splash pages, no double page splash pages, but emotional impact felt through writing and an extremely agreeable art style from Salvador Larroca and Frank D'Armata. This feels like a full meal, not an entree. Oh and there's a letter page too as an aperatif. In which they explain why it was that issue 34 became 500 as well… because the three issues of Iron Man: Director Of S.H.I.E.L.D when it was War Machine: Weapon Of S.H.I.E.L.D. apparently don't count… oh and there's a restaurant called Heck And Lieber's too. See? A comic book for someone new to Iron Man to get on board, and some fanwank too. The best of both worlds.

Review copies are courtesy of Orbital Comics, London. Check out their signing this Saturday with Skullkicker's Jim Zubkavich.

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