The Good
It's the end of Matt Fraction's and Salvador Larroca's time on Invincible Iron Man, a run that redefined the character and his role in Marvel universe, and it's a bit of a bummer. Why is this a bummer? Well, the team that got me re-interested in Iron Man is gone.
This is a bit of a clean-up issue. We get a lot of epilogue moments smashed into one issue. Questions are answered and characters move on. A lot has happened here in the past few years. Tony has to deal with the events of Mandarin City, Jarvis becoming corrupted, Tony having some "bad code" within him, and S.H.I.E.L.D. demanding answers. It bares down him, and it leads to a personality change in Tony. One most fans aren't used to.
Awesome opening scene for the issue. We get this insanely cool scene as a man tries to blow himself up in a crowded area, but Iron Man swoops in and stops him. The captions really carry this scene as we learn that Tony won't let his tech be used for evil, and if it is, he gets notified of it. My favorite part of the whole scene is seeing Iron Man in his old school, red and gold suit.
It's sad to see Salvador Larroca leave, but his work continues to be great, especially on the final splash page which was beautiful. In fact, there's quite a few amazing looking splash pages here mixed in with some well paced, multi-panel pages. Larroca really hits his stride in the scenes with Tony and Director Maria Hill. There's great use of pacing here as well as facial expressions. There's no exaggeration, just honest emotion in each of these panels.
The Bad
In that same sequence, I had a problem with the colors and shading. Light seemed to be coming from multiple sources which didn't work with your traditional interrogation room.
On another note, as a wrap up to a run, I felt it was just ok. It wrapped up some of the story lines pretty well, but I wanted more. It felt so short to me. This issue would have worked better as a 40 pager.
The Verdict
It's sad to see this amazing creative team off of this book, but I'm so glad they had their chance to tell these stories. Fraction and Larroca's run on Invincible Iron Man was phenomenal. This final issue may have felt a bit short, and it left me wanting so much more, but overall, it was a success and filled with some fantastic moments.
Overall, I highly recommend this issue.