COMICS: Invincible Iron Man #510 Review

Despite Fear Itself, I still love Matt Fraction as a writer. His run on Invincible Iron Man has been amazing and truly epic. Due to his notorious reputation of writing long decompressed stories, I've only picked up his Iron Man run in collected hardcover format and I've been loving all of it. I've been looking forward to the return of the Mandarin ever since it was hinted back in the conclusion to "Stark Resilient", so I couldn't wait for the hardcover on this one. For those of you that haven't read Fraction's run, let me do a little explaining. Way back in his first issue on the series he introduced a new villain, Ezekiel Stane, son of Obadiah. He later introduced the Hammer Girls, a mother and daughter team who sought to take down Stark's newly formed company, Stark Resilient. He then revealed that the Hammer Girls and Ezekiel Stane were working with the Mandarin, Iron Man's greatest foe. This is the issue where the set-up finally begins to pay off and we get to see Mandarin's plan take shape. All caught up? Good. Time to review the issue.

First off Salvador Larroca is still doing great on art. I'm really glad that this run has been consistent and kept the same artist throughout. Larroca has always drawn a good Iron Man and this is no exception. I don't really have much else to say on the art, there aren't any spectacular pages that really stuck out but I don't have any complaints.



The story itself is pretty good too. We see Tony going to an AA meeting since he got drunk during Fear Itself and we get to see him struggle with avoiding taking another drink; he's thinking about it even while flying around as Iron Man. The Mandarin's plan seems really ambitious and I'm looking forward to seeing how it will play out. It is revealed that he has recruited seemingly dozens of old Iron Man foes like Blizzard and the Living Laser. It's going to be awesome to see all these old villains, who have been improved by Mandarin, coming out to take down Iron Man. It appears as though each villain has their own place in the plan; in the beginning we see Blizzard freezing a country's water supply. Mandarin has also equipped thugs with weapons that can harm Iron Man in an attempt to bring his reputation down. The Mandarin himself seems a little odd in this issue. He seems too hip for my taste. I could be wrong, since he doesn't actually do much in this issue, and I love Fraction's writing of the Mandarin in the Iron Man Annual a couple years ago so I trust that he should turn out fine. The one thing I didn't like about this issue was a little elf character who Tony brought back with him from Asgard in Fear Itself. Now I haven't read the Iron Man Fear Itself tie-in(waiting for the hardcover) so maybe he's actually a good character and I just haven't seen enough of him yet, but so far he just seems like an annoying little sidekick whose sole purpose is comic relief. He sometimes speaks in weird Norse symbols(basically a way to bleep him out whenever he says something that could be a curse word) and he does it way too much. He just seems to get too much exposure in this issue and comes off as annoying, although he did have a heartfelt little speech at the AA meeting. Hopefully Fraction's just building him up to kill him off later in the arc.

Overall, aside from the annoying elf, this was a pretty good issue. We see that things are all working against Tony and that he will probably be brought to a dark place in the next couple issues. The Mandarin's plan is also definitely looking to be cool with a lot of classic Iron Man villains crawling out of the woodwork.

8/10