Iron Man #3

With the still potential threat of Extremis being in the wrong hands, Tony Stark is still on a vigilant hunt to make sure that it doesn’t. Through his journey he ends up going through a lot of personal strife as well.

Writer: Kieron Gillen | Artist: Greg Land

Cover: Greg Land | Publisher: Marvel

Kieron Gillen strikes again, with his superb writing, which goes so into the character of Tony Stark and what we can only assume is going to be a very strong plot if basing it on his track record currently. That’s not to say it hasn’t already had a strong start, but really, one can only expect it to get better.  Tony’s inner struggles are so palpable that despite his ego and cockiness, he still sounds so vulnerable, especially when it comes to his inner monologue, which is a huge nod to Gillen because you know he gets it. There are a lot of things that Tony has to deal with, both with himself, and the rest of the world and the way it’s going to be dealt with, it’s going to be huge, you can tell by these first few issues already.

It picks up right from where we’ve left off from the first issues and it’s sort of like a slow burn to what is going to hopefully be an interesting climax. We’re now introduced to our likely antagonists who, surprise, surprise, have a personal vendetta against Tony Stark himself. But it’s always interesting to see how Iron Man is going to fare against a foe designed to counteract his own tech, pushing Iron Man to take it a step further. 

Tony’s already been put through a couple of compromising positions in which he was forced to make certain choices and follow through on certain actions and not always necessarily looking like the good guy. It’s always good to see that Tony, despite his increasing popularity and cool factor knows that he’s still not a complete hero, and maybe he’ll never be. He’s still constantly haunted by deeds of the past, and they’ll never leave him fully, but we can see him fighting in each panel to try and be a better man.

Unfortunately as strong as Gillen’s writing is in portraying all this, the same can’t be said about Greg Land’s art, which is also not a surprise. The action scenes are stunning yes, and Iron Man’s stealth suit is a thing of beauty, to which a lot of credit goes to Carlo Pagulayan anyways (if you have a physical copy of the issue, plus the Marvel AR app, there’s a nice little segment on the design of the stealth suit and it’s super interesting), but Land’s people and expressions unfortunately will always look like people laughing alone with salad (yes it’s an old reference but it’s still relevant to Land’s art).

Thankfully Gillen is around to salvage the series, but nothing is official yet on how strong this series is going to be. Like I mentioned earlier, we’re sort of having a slow burn to the climax, and that’s the hard hitter. If it falls short of expectations, it may not just hold up, while the pacing so far has been good, for it to continue would get tiring. It’s doubtful that it’ll happen, but it's always a possibilty.