I'm glad to see great Iron Man stories are out there again. I loved the Civil War and Secret Invasion stuff, and I'm really enjoying teh fall out. ( )

This book is collects issues #1-6 of The Invincible Iron Man, written by Matt Fraction with art by Salvador Larroca, originally serialized between May and October 2008.

Early 2008. The Iron Man movie has just come out. The existing Iron Man comic, Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., is being revamped as a War Machine title. Its writers are moving on to a different property, The Eternals. No worries. Marvel announces a new Iron Man series, The Invincible Iron Man, that will focus on widescreen adventure rather than politics and espionage. Matt Fraction is named as the writer.

Matt Fraction has certainly made it fast. He first worked with Marvel comics in 2006. Now, as I write this review a mere two years later, he's writing Uncanny X-Men and Invincible Iron Man, and while he's not writing Thor, he has written more Thor books in the last six months than JMS has on the the main title. This precipitous rise to several of Marvel's large properties has not been unearned: Fraction is a consistently above-average writer, occasionally excellent. Unfortunately, this story is not one of his strongest efforts.

The story opens with a high-yield suicide bombing in Africa -- a bombing involving some tech very familiar to Tony Stark. Turns out that Ezekiel Stane (son of old Iron Man villain (and, more importantly, Iron Man movie villain) Obadiah Stane) (one of several elements in this book to return from the pages of Fraction's excellent but ill-fated The Order) is a genius who's using Stark's tech to attempt to kill Iron Man and shut down Stark Industries. Unfortunately, and I don't know why exactly, some combination of his looks and his dialogue, but Stane comes across as about as threatening a villain as Ashton Kutcher, and never seems to present a credible threat. Like Fraction was trying real hard to convince me that Stane was a villain worth caring about but I just didn't see it. Anyway, a cat and mouse game begins as Iron Man tries to track down Stane before he can kill more people and blow up more property.

There are several details in the book that just didn't ring quite true for me. Hill and Dugan in this book are constantly just kind of hovering around Stark, as if, at this time sometime between World War Hulk and Secret Invasion, they don't have anything better to do than hover around the boss. A few times the flirtation between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts seemed beyond the level of their relationship as well, though obviously your mileage may vary, and what didn't work for me may not bother you in the slightest. Stark takes the moral high ground late in this book and decides not to kill a villain, which is kind of odd after he remorselessly killed a villain at the beginning of the story (I thought Avengers didn't kill!). And Tony's big save at the end has you wondering why he didn't do it sooner and save more lives. . .

That said, there are some nifty bits. A confrontation in China is fun, there are some laughs, some thoughtful moments, a choice confrontation or two. Larroca's art, while a bit too smooth and soft for my taste, is usually very clear. And Fraction's a good enough writer that this book isn't bad. It's just not that good, which is a shame, because by a writer of Fraction's caliber, it should be. ( )