The Four Color Media Monitor

Marvel's character assassination of Iron Man continues in Invincible Iron Man #20, which features a cover with a scene deliberately meant to mirror the one in Civil War where Tony was shown standing above Captain America. Now, it's Thor standing above Tony as he lies unconscious and possibly dead on an operating table (on the cover anyway). And the story here is called "Stark: Disassembled", an obvious reference to the awful Avengers story by Brian Bendis that started this whole mess 5 years ago. The press release says:

"World's Most Wanted" saw Iron Man grounded and on the run after Osborn falsely implicated the iron-clad Avenger in the Skrulls' Secret Invasion. In order to keep any valuable information away from the current questionable regime, Tony downloaded top secret S.H.I.E.L.D files-including the identities of registered heroes-into his brain. And as desperate times call for insanely desperate measures, the valiant hero began deleting parts of his mind to keep the information safe.

Even if Tony isn't killed, I don't expect anything good to come out of this. Maybe he'll be reduced to a vegetable that needs to be reeducated from scratch. And it's possible that Iron Man, like Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, will become a victim of more contrived, forced replacements - a new protagonist may take up the armor in his stead.

The saddest thing that there may be no outrage from the fans, yet I realize that it's because many readers have given up on modern day comics because they feel they're powerless to stop this slow, terrible destruction of famous superheroes by the inmates now running the asylum.

Comic Vine's page on the issue asks an excellent question:

What will be Tony's final fate? Is he still deserving of all the bad things that are still happening?

The answer is: absolutely NOT. Because he's only a fictional character and the characterization forced upon him during Civil War was not his fault, nor was it inspiring or positive. He did not deserve this destruction to begin with, and it should be stopped. And the only way to do that now is to avoid buying the series, for as long as Quesada's destruction continues.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, Iron Man, marvel comics