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| Collects Ultimate Iron Man I #1-5 Writer: Orson Scott Card Artist: Andy Kubert |
"This guy is the head of a multi-million dollar international corporation—that's a full-time job. He is also a scientist-inventor-engineer—that's a full-time job. And he wears a suit and goes out and saves people?
"But then I found out I could give him a childhood—that's what I do."
— Orson Scott Card, to SciFiScanner, on Ultimate Iron Man
I have a problem with publishers that bring in high-profile novelists to write comics. Admittedly, the concept sounds great on paper, but it ignores the fact that these are two very different mediums and it takes an extremely versatile author to bridge that gap.
Novelists are afforded the luxury of time and space, where they spend years crafting a tale that spans hundreds of thousands of words. Conversely, comic book writers are confined to monthly deadlines during which they must write compact, economic stories that ideally work as individual compositions as well as single pieces of a larger whole.
With Ultimate Iron Man I, Orsot Scott Card fails in much the same way that fantasy juggernaut Tad Williams did with his foray into DC with Aquaman. Card's story reads as if it was originally conceived as a 10- or 12-issue series, but was truncated to suit a more impatient medium.
As a result, Ultimate Iron Man I—a book defiantly different than its source material—is a frenetic, anxious mess.
A chronic problem I have with comic book writers (or, more accurately, comic book publishers) is their restless manner of storytelling. Trying to fit what should be a 250-page story into 125 pages makes for bad writing—plot, dialogue, character development, believability, resolution, etc.
Everything happens too quickly—most especially the forming of relationships and animosities, and the progression from problem to solution—and this impatience causes the story to lose all sense of credibility. It says to the reader that these events are happening because they were supposed to happen, that they were clearly pre-ordained by a writer who has crafted this tale. Because of this impatience, Ultimate Iron Man I tries to establish too many classic staples for any of them to have any gravitas at all.
Frustratingly, the first two issues show that Card is capable of writing with a steady hand; nothing feels rushed. The story—while strange at times—moves along at a measured pace, sidestepping the obligatory action set-pieces that so often pollute origin stories. The story doesn't demand action, so Card wisely avoids it altogether.
But then issue #3 comes along and it seems clear that either Card or his editor made a firm decision to bring the energy up ... by throwing the pubescent Tony into a furnace.
You read that correctly. Tony Stark, as a teenager, is thrown into a furnace. Essentially, that's Ultimate Iron Man I in a nutshell.
The turning point of the trade, for me, is the moment that Tony meets Rhodes (aka War Machine). From that point on, the story moves along at such breakneck speed that it abandons any semblance of sense. Their friendship feels completely fabricated, moving from hatred to annoyance to camaraderie in a matter of minutes.
Before we know it, the two go from fending off school-yard bullies with an Iron-Man prototype (during the aforementioned furnace scene) to becoming best buddies with Nifara and moving into the Baxter Building, to designing both the War Machine and Iron Man suits, to becoming arch-enemies with Obadiah Stane (who does almost nothing to warrant it), to fighting off a group of terrorists on a boat, to Tony becoming addicted to alcohol with his first sip.
All the while, Tony's father Howard gets divorced, remarried, has his wife die in childbirth, loses half his company to Zebediah Stane, reclaims his company, gets framed for murder, and goes to jail.
It's a lot to take in, especially when one considers that each of these scenes is suffocating under the weight of the zany science fiction Card's introduced into Tony's origin. As a result of an embryonic virus, Tony has neural tissue all through his body (which effectively means his entire body is a brain), resulting in super-intelligence and super-human reflexes. He also possesses regenerative powers.
In the infamous aforementioned furnace scene Tony has his entire lower body seared off, only to grow it back by day's end. Furthermore, Tony's entire body is coated with a bio-tech armor (which colored him completely blue for the first three issues...) that effectively made him impervious to any attack short of bullets.
I understand that this is the new "Ultimate" re-envisioning of Iron Man, but Orson Scott Card completely missed the boat with his interpretation of Tony Stark. The Ultimate universe was meant to re-imagine these characters, not completely re-write the book on them. The essence of Tony Stark has always been that he is a human among superhumans. He is a hero regardless of the fact that he has no natural powers. Now, with his body-brain and his regenerative abilities, he's lost that. Card took the one thing that differentiated Tony from 98% of the Marvel universe, and incinerated it. In a furnace no less.
This origin story didn't work for me on any level. The characterization was flawed, the relationships were irrational, and the overall concept was unnecessarily bizarre. This book failed to the point where I was shocked to discover that Marvel had given Card a second mini-series with the character in the form of Ultimate Iron Man II.
Stick to writing Ender, Mr. Card. Or, at the very least, characters you enjoy.
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