Posted on: June 30th, 2010 Comically Challenged: The Invincible Iron Man Annual
What makes a great comic book so great? Well, personally, I would place art pretty high on the list. Of course, there are debates all the time that argue for and against art being crucial to a great comic. Then there’s plot-obviously. Character development or insight, I guess. But you know what does it for me? Purpose. Books that are driven; books that know where they’re going and how they’re going to get there. That’s what makes it all worth while for me. I’m sure you’ve experienced this: you finish a series or a one-shot and say, “Wow. I didn’t need to know any of that.” It’s a throw-away book; a story that didn’t need to be told. I hate that. It crushes me. But when I get a book that is so perfectly inspired that I have to stop and say, “This is why I read comics. This is what I love”, it makes me go back to that shop every week and gamble on more stories.
Matt Fraction understands purpose. When I say purpose, I don’t mean it has to be crucial to continuity, or opening doors for future arcs-the story just has to have a reason for being told. Fraction has that but he also has style. Without sounding too over-the-top (which I NEVER do, right?), when he writes, it’s like good poetry. Not those crappy lovesick poems you scribble in that notebook under your bed, but quality work. Start-to-finish, it flows. I fell in love with his and Brubaker’s Immortal Iron Fist, there’s Casanova, Thor, Uncanny X-Men and now his Invincible Iron Man. He could be layering subplots, taking us through an action sequence or giving an origin tale-the guy’s a force of nature. And so goes this week’s The Invincible Iron Man Annual.
This hefty chunk of reading contained Fraction’s Mandarin: The Story of My Life; Carmine Di Giandomenico on art with Matt Wilson as the colorist, Joe Caramagna as letterer. Jun Shan is a brilliant film maker in China and Mandarin has decided to kidnap Jun and his wife Chuntao in order to make Mandarin’s life-story into an award-winning movie. Mandarin uses Chuntao as incentive for Jun to finish the project but he’s an asshole to everybody and he’s lying about his background. Jun knows he’s lying and secretly films an alternative movie that lays out the true origin of Mandarin. Mostly because of honor and truth in cinema (that’s how we know this is fiction). As I’m sure you can tell, it doesn’t end well for our hero.
Okay, not real crucial to Invincible Iron Man continuity, right? It’s simply a story that highlights what a narcissistic dick Mandarin is. That’s it. And that’s enough. A lot of books don’t even have that. What really made it work was the layering of timelines. You have Mandarin dictating his interpretation of his past, the truth, and then the movie. Somehow Giandomenico and Fraction are able to script the panels depicting all three timelines, lay them on top of one another, and have it make sense. That’s just effective storytelling. You’re seeing the fractured mind of a mad man without someone saying, “Hey, this is how crazy evil guys think.” Yeah, okay, I just told you. Sorry to ruin it. Same thing goes for the 12-panel grid where Mandarin is casting the part of Tony Stark. Which I thought was pretty impressive on Giandomenico’s part (he’s drawing a bunch of guys that look similar but totally different. That’s awesome.) Mandarin’s passing up actors that look just like Tony but gives the part to a guy that looks like an accountant with an ulcer. Good stuff.
The annual is a stand-alone piece. You don’t need to know anything about Iron Man going into this. All that, and you get a clear and concise explanation of all Mandarin’s rings of epicness.  It has a $4.99 price point OR you could go onto your snazzy iphone/ipad, hit up the Marvel app and get it broken up into three installments…and pay more for doing it. Why would you do that? Maybe you really want to save a tree, I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty dumb idea. At any rate, it’s great story-telling people. Hit it up.