Wanderings of Iron Man at Couture's

(exclusive and never before seen in Advanced Iron)

MARVEL DOUBLE-SHOT #4

"Man of Iron" -
April 2003

Story: Greg Rucka
Pencils: Klaus Janson

I'm not even going to attempt to make this sound interesting.

Tony Stark visits Gabriel MacGregor, a robotics engineer, only to find out that the man has lost his mind. The author makes a parallel between this guy and a certain Richard Cory, a character in one of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poems. In the end, just like Corey in the poem, MacGregor kills himself.

The cover is pretty good, but that's usually the case with well-known artist Joe Jusko.

Although this is not one of the best Jusko pieces I've ever seen. Iron Man's shoulder plates look funny, their size and position is wrong. But aside from that, it's a great cover. For an Iron Man fan, a cover like that is the perfect worm to get him to bite the hook. And now, let's move on to the hook.

In two words: everything else.

In all my years as a comic collector, I've read some really good stuff, but I've also read a lot of crap. This has got to be a new low, this is pretty much as bad as it gets, folks.

Let's start with the art. It's awful. I was looking at the art and thinking that some of my sixth grade students could do better than this. I'm not kidding, really. It's simply awful. I've seen a lot of A.I. contributors, amateurs from all over the world, who can do a job 100 times better than this, and I am deadly serious here. We only see Iron Man in two panels, but I was actually thankful because he looked so weird. Stark is barely recognizable, for the entire first page I was wondering who that guy was. In some of the panels, the art is so lame it's just shameful. Sometimes, the proportions are completely off, the characters look like doodles that a child would make. Like in the second panel on the third page, Stark's arms are longer than his legs, his upper body is about twice the lenght of the legs, it's unbelievable. I was just staring at this art in disbelief, thinking: "I can't believe Marvel comics is publishing this rubbish."

As for the story, well that's easy, there is no story. For long unending pages, Stark listens to an incoherent and completely mad MacGregor go on about how his work is taking all his time and how he doesn't see anyone anymore. He starts quoting from what I assume is Robinson's poem, then switches back to reality again. The guy's acting like a complete lunatic. Then, Stark is back in his office, looks at the newspaper and learns that MacGregor killed himself. The end. I'm not kidding you. That's all you get, six pages of some unknown character walking around his lab, making no sense whatsoever.

No Iron Man, you ask? You see Stark wear the armor for two panels at the beginning, to travel to MacGregor's lab. That's it. No action, no suspense, no interesting character development, no sense, no direction, nothing. This comic is a complete waste of time, of money and of paper. It's not even worth the paper it's printed on, it's THAT bad.

And you know what makes me mad? It's not that I lost 4,75$, it's that I know tons of IM fans who would give anything to have an opportunity like this, to be allowed 11 pages in a Marvel comic to tell any story they want. I've read tons of fan fiction in the pahes of A.I. over the years and every single one of these amateur writers wrote something better than this. They would have been thrilled to get published and they would have done a great job. Instead, we're treated to this waste.

Are you one of these people who dream of doing some work for Marvel but who are worried they're not good enough? Buy this book, I guarantee you will think you're a genius after reading this.

After reading this comic, Patrick Couture declares: "Calisse! This is the pits, even Grell's work on IM was a brilliant masterpiece compared to this garbage."

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