Apparently set after the events of AXIS was born a Superior Iron Man with a Tony Stark that has the ego and drive which had once only been born of his love of alcohol in his youth. Long purged from his system, the weapon creator turned weapon hero has long kept himself as a futurist and now that thought remains, only in a very non-Tony form. The booze is back and so is his love for scantily clad women and doing everything in a an overly egotistical Tony-is-the-only-thing-that-matters way. He’s loosened his view on Extremis and has not only created a new version of Extremis but has given it freely to the public in San Francisco.
Well, maybe that’s not exactly what has happened.
Tom Taylor’s take on Tony Stark is going to piss off a lot of people and that really is the point. This is the ‘opposite’ of Tony Stark that emerged from the currently ongoing AXIS event even though many aspects of his personality may seem familiar to long term readers. Alcoholic? Check. Pure capitalist? Check. Womanizer? Check. Person who is willing to put his profits above everything else? Check. There’s a lot of the very old Tony Stark showing up here and Taylor clearly has a grasp of what parts of Tony we love and what parts which we’d hate if they were in place when he was young. Taylor has a history of taking heroes and making them unheroic from his time in DC and that trait shines through wonderfully here.
Yildiray Cinar and Guru-eFX really have the art stand out as we see a limited amount of action and some great character work. On top of that, while we don’t get to see Tony’s new suit in action we do get a look at it and find out that it is based off a mixture of technology and symbiote? Now that sounds like a winning combination! At the very least it is artisitically! I’m not sure why he didn’t just go back with something a little more Extremis based but hey, I’m not going to complain as it looks so much better than I was thinking it would.
The gist of the story is meant to show us that while Tony appears to be doing good throughout the issue he is actually becoming the world’s most creative drug dealer of all time. His drug of choice? Beauty, youth, potentially immortality. He’s decided to take this and sell it in one of the places where it would be easiest to sell. Just remember, the first taste is free.
I was initially thinking that a complete 180 on Tony Stark was going to come off as badly written and a bad idea. The way the first issue has presented it though really does work. The only reason I’m not super happy is that it takes place after the events of AXIS so it would appear that we may have a couple spoiler hints coming up. Still, a fun read and an interesting direction to take the character in which makes us wonder how they’ll end up redeeming him and how long that will take.
SUPERIOR IRON MAN #1
Writer: Tom Taylor
Artist: Yildiray Cinar, Guru-eFX
