Colorado Gazette shows no love for Iron Man
Nor for that matter does IM's current writer Matt Fraction, IMO. The Colorado Springs Gazette writes a fluff-coated article talking about how Tony Stark is being "put through the wringer":
The worst thing about this article is how there's no genuine opinion given, over whether it's good or bad storytelling, whether it alienates potential fans and readers for Shell-Head, or even if it helps Marvel in the long term. Just a whole lot of suck-uppity blather by people whose fandom for comics is questionable in the extreme.
Tony “Iron Man” Stark is losing his mind — literally.As noted before, it won't surprise me if it's worse than it sounds.
When Marvel’s monthly “Invincible Iron Man” kicked off a year and a half ago, Stark had prevailed in a superhero civil war and was in charge of the famed security agency S.H.I.E.L.D. — “the big man on campus,” writer Matt Fraction says. But that didn’t last long. In the wake of Marvel’s “Secret Invasion” big event, Stark was blamed for failing to prevent the alien invasion. The villainous Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, became the government’s point man on superheroes and labeled Stark a traitor.The more I think about what Tony's been blamed for, the more I begin to wonder if this is all a Blame Bush metaphor with Tony serving the role of the former president.
“Over the course of almost a year now, Tony’s intelligence has been degrading, which has always kind of been his superpower,” Fraction says.His power has been to degrade?!? What an insult.
In “World’s Most Wanted,” Fraction’s aim was to strip Stark to his core and have him pay “kind of the ultimate penance” for a lifetime of sins.Fraction can say whatever he wants, but I don't think he's a real fan of Tony Stark, nor the reporter who wrote this puff piece. I guess everything Tony did throughout his career as a businessman and a superhero was wrong, right down to his being a capitalist, is that it? Simply awful.
“I sort of wanted to take everything from him, one step at a time.”
“World’s Most Wanted” is followed by a story arc titled “Stark: Disassembled.” Fraction can’t say much about it without revealing the ending of the current storyline, but hints, “If ‘World’s Most Wanted’ is about Humpty Dumpty having a great fall, this is about all the king’s horses and all the king’s men trying to put Humpty together again, and having to deal with the fact that maybe Humpty doesn’t want to be put back together again.”Yeah, I get it, Tony's becoming a quitter. Not something new, really, there were a few times when he was hesitant to don his armor and fight the baddies (I do remember one time in the mid-80s when he wanted to resist taking frontline action, and have at least one issue from then, Iron Man #193 from 1985, where he tried this and finally came to his senses to fight a dinosaur guided by Dr. Demonicus, who was menacing a tribe on an island the West Coast Avengers were trying to protect). But this is really, really stupid now, to depict Tony quite forcibly as a wrongdoer and then make him want to pay for his "crimes" by wanting to sacrifice his mind, if not his life.
“Invincible Iron Man” won the Eisner — the comic book industry’s version of the Oscar — for Best New Series — at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con.This awful story is what wins an Eisner? That just shows how far award ceremonies have fallen. The Oscars, the Emmys, and now the Eisners.
The worst thing about this article is how there's no genuine opinion given, over whether it's good or bad storytelling, whether it alienates potential fans and readers for Shell-Head, or even if it helps Marvel in the long term. Just a whole lot of suck-uppity blather by people whose fandom for comics is questionable in the extreme.
Labels: dreadful writers, Iron Man, marvel comics, msm propaganda
