Originally Posted by
SuperiorIronman
So years ago when I didn't have regular access to a comic shop I would go through the Marvel Database and just look at the pages of characters I liked and I stumbled onto a specific incarnation of Iron man, the one from Iron Man:Crash.
Get ready people because this is a god damned saga.
Why is this notable to young me? I could find nothing on it. Now granted I was fairly young at the time so I probably didn't even see the Wikipedia page, but I didn't even have a title to go off of. There was just a picture of Iron man holding a mini-gun and for years that's all I knew. The database entry even at the time (I don't know if it does now) didn't even have an entry so I had absolutely no context to the image. Every so often over the years I'd go searching for anything that could give this image context and I finally got it.
So cut to a decade and some change later and I think it was here on CBR where someone posts an article about Iron man's HUD and posted a scan from Crash. The costume mostly matched the cover (sans gun) and finally gave it a title. So without thinking I went to Amazon and snagged it for about 8 dollars.
About a week later it arrives on my porch because this isn't just some floppy comic, this is a graphic novel! And not just any graphic novel, the first one done using primarily computers. That's right, the art is done largely utilizing pixels on a Mac 2 because this is 1988 levels of old! So I open it up and I get my first surprise, it's not Iron man that's greeting me, it's a Malibu comic I've never heard of with two football cards of players not even my parents recognized. Seriously I drove this to my parents, guys who had been collecting for decades, and the old timers who frequent the local bar. Nobody knew who the hell these players or this comic was even about. Now if you think that's some level of quality on Iron man here because it's packaged with freebies of stuff not even my parent recognized...., you'd be right. This is a doozy.
So without getting into specifics (because I feel anybody else who can't find this thing needs to suffer as I did), Tony Stark is old and a recluse and he decides one day "**** it, I'll release the Iron man to the public". He finds a Japanese corporation that's suitable to partner with..., and things start to get a bit racist. See Stark's company doesn't trust them because they are Japanese because they played a part in some sort of event prior to the story. We never see the story and so we have no context to the animosity. Tony trusts them but a rogue agent in the company decides to use the Iron man and develop it to.., become modern Samurai by killing Stark and.., I have no idea. Seriously, the villain's plan is use Stark's tech to take control of Japan by using it to develop technology to become a technological superpower and bring back the Samurai (whatever that means). But he never has to even see Stark for this plan to work. See all he had to do was wait for the money and contracts to exchange hands and just build the Iron man and improve on it. That's what Tony is asking them to do. So if he never attacked anybody and just waited for everything to process, Iron man wouldn't have come into his building and fired a mini-gun on his staff.
Also, what the Hell? Iron man just flat-out kills people in this, how legal is what Tony's doing here because while mainstream Iron man does kill, he's a bit more reluctant to do it given his origins. And that being said, the ultimate laser weapon is literally in the palm of his hands, but he walked in here like he was a minute away from leading the charge on Hadley's Hope.
All and all it was a pretty disappointing sit to be honest because while it's a fairly quick read, the art makes it hard to see and Mike Saenz (the writer) delves into technobabble about Iron man when he should be writing plot-points. Not even the pixel boobs saves this thing. But that's another point I wanna address. Mike Saenz comes from porn. 1980's gaming porn to be exact, and he somehow landed a gig on Iron man. I'm not kidding, I looked up his list of gigs and it's just porn games, an independent comic, and Iron man. He's done nothing else following Iron man besides a Deviant Art account that I don't believe is regularly updated (but is recent at two years old). But that's not a knock against him either, because while Iron man kind of sucks, it screams back around into awesome territory. This might be a comic version of a work of art because what it lacks in competent art, it makes up for in spunk, and this book convinces me of everything I see on the page. It had plot-holes big enough you can drive a semi-truck through it, but I'm not sad I read it. It's seven bucks on Amazon and if you're into an irreverent sit it's worth the cash.
Mike, if you're out there, A for mutherfucking effort you deserve that. Bravo.
_____________
Small Edit but I want to add that this is basically so bad its good on Iron man books. Seriously. it's not good, but it has some charm.