The Four Color Media Monitor

Usually, when I look at major websites dealing with fantasy entertainment, I realize I'll have to expect them to be very sugarcoated, no matter how bad a step made by Marvel and DC happens to be. This is a serious problem with a lot of prominent sites for comics and movies.

Amazingly, one of ScienceFiction.Com's reviewers didn't toe a PC line when he was reviewing the 17th issue of Iron Man, where Kieron Gillen retconned Tony Stark's background:

This feels so far removed from what is going on in the Marvel Universe right now and retcons so much of Tony’s past in an annoying way that I almost want to drop the book in frustration here. There’s still a lot of questions to be answered and unless this is revealed as some new kind of setup where Tony is being played and he really is Howard and Maria’s son, I don’t think they’ll be able to ever play this off properly.

I’m sorry, Kieron, but I don’t like what you did with this story arc. I was enjoying it up until these reveal and really feel that it falls short for Stark in a way that hasn’t happened in his series since pre-Civil War.

I’m not happy. I don’t know how you are going to redeem the story line after this one. These were changes to the character that I can’t say were at all needed for character development. Also with everything else going on in the Marvel Universe I can’t see this being helpful for true plot development. All of the build up on this story arc for this? I guess we’ll wait and see but if something huge doesn’t happen in the series that gets me drawn back into it on the Iron Man side of things I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to follow this one.

I sure hope he'll wise up and stop paying his hard-earned money for this fiasco. There is no character development or drama in retconning the status of a classic hero's parents while making a villain the real biological son in his stead. Even if it turns out that's not the case, they're still wasting a lot of time when they could've spent it introducing new relatives in the Stark family lineage among other new co-stars.

If only more reviewers would be as objective as this one was, comicdom might have had a better chance of being repaired long ago. Unfortunately, there's only so many reviewers out there who still gush over mishmash like Dr. Octopus as Spider-Man, and so long as they continue fawning, it's no surprise famous comics are destroyed.

Labels: dreadful writers, Iron Man, marvel comics