Superior Iron Man #2

Didn't they learn with Civil War?

I was willing to give this a chance at first. Personally I liked the boozing-and-schmoozing loveable scoundrel type Tony Stark from the movies; I also, dare I say it, never liked the 'Demon In A Bottle' storyline and felt that it just introduced a gimmick -- and clumsily -- that subsequent writers always used as a crutch. Every time Tony needed some sort of 'shocking' development, well, let's have him fall off the sobriety wagon again, or let's have him go nuts and do something no rational person would do, or kill someone.

The thing is, Tony is a genius. They can be more than eccentric. But most of the people writing him don't really grasp that. As is so often done with him, he abruptly changes and it for some reason takes the people around him an inordinately long time to notice. By the time they do, it's always too late.

Unfortunately, while the Superior Iron Man story is an interesting concept, it's kind of hamfisted in this same way. And of course, it was caused by Scarlet Witch yet again being used as a deus ex machina. I used to love her character, but now I can't stand her. And the people around her -- did they forget that her big talent was for chaos? Hey, let's get the same woman to cast a spell who accidentally all but wiped out mutantkind, turned evil a number of times (though admittedly usually as stupid-evil as Tony is here), and has shunted the world into alternate realities before. That should turn out really well.

But back to Tony, people seem to think that somehow he's being 'morally ambiguous'. He's not. If the writers of this had really thought about it, if they'd been really clever, they'd have had him price the Extremis daily renewal at $10, not $100. Pricing it high is not good business, and he'd get far more profit off of it than the high price he chooses...which is clearly just to show he's 'evil'. It's not like he didn't release Extremis on the entire city. Of course it's going to have people going mad and committing crimes to get their Extremis fix; but if he'd priced it more affordably, it would give him much more plausible deniability. With this, it's pretty obvious what's going on and there's not really any ambiguity whatsoever.

As stupid as Daredevil being in San Francisco is, and as forced as the conflict seems, I still do like Daredevil for some reason and I like seeing someone come up against another character they almost never have any contact with at all. Matt comes off as about as douchey as Tony, but of course in a different way. Clash of the Douches! Couldn't we have had someone who had more of a chance to actually take Tony down? Oh gee, the one-trick pony Frank Miller hosed, who fights with a stick is going to take on the dude with armour made of living metal. I wonder who will win! They'd have to pull some serious Batman-cliche 'because I said so' writing to even make it a little tense.

It's pretty clear they only used Daredevil because the character has a disability, and they're probably going to use this as a big platform to try and voice what I've always found a pretty offensive stance. See, Daredevil is blind. But his power is basically that he's not blind. Yes, he uses his other enhanced senses to compensate for his blindness, but it's essentially just a superheroic application of the 'lose one sense, the others become enhanced' trope.

With Tony giving him his sight back, I'm pretty much entirely sure that this is going to lead to Matt wrestling with being able to see again, having an issue or so about him dealing with sight along with his powers, and then deciding that he's better off blind and taking a holier-than-thou stance about it. Superhero comics tend to take this bizarrely sanctimonious attitude when it comes to disabilities, that somehow in a world filled with super-technology and even alien tech, even the extraordinary don't have their disabilities successfully treated, if possible. It's always presented as negative, if it's brought up at all; I realise that Daredevil's character kind of revolves around his blindness at this point, and there's likely no way they're going to keep him healed.

But in the real world, people who live with disabilities often do seek treatment for those disabilities. Most of the time, you try to minimise its effect on your life, especially if it is a pain-related one. If it's a possibility you could have a treatment to free you from it, even temporarily, you usually are at least willing to listen. You don't just have a disability and do nothing about it. Every day can be a struggle against depression, frustration, even resentment if it was something that happened to you, just as it happened to Matt so randomly. You'd better believe that someone who puts on colourful tights and risks life and limb fighting super-powered villains -- who is constantly in contact with people who can heal, technology that can repair, and even time travel -- is probably, at some point, going to call in a favour or two and see if something can't be done.

So much of the time, characters are criticised and presented as being completely in the wrong for simply wanting that or doing that. It's true, there are rich and vibrant communities of people, which have sprung up from sharing the same or a similar disability. But at the same time, that's kind of beside the point -- and most super-types are either loners or picky about the company they keep.

But I digress. Problems of that aside, the Extremis virus/app thing is also weird and clunky, and I'm not really sure how it works. It's presented as a sort of magic wand that makes people perfect and fixes anything wrong with them, but I'm sure there will be some sort of weird exception for the things it fixes, like Matt's eyes. I know it's superhero comics, and I know I'm not supposed to think about it this deeply and thoroughly, but it really concerns me that the whole thing seems unbelievably arbitrary.

The art is solid though, at least. It's a mess, but at least it's a hot mess. Which is kind of appropriate, or possibly ironic, given the subject matter. The new Iron Man suit is also great. All the designs are fantastic, and I really hope that, once they sweep this inane story under the rug (which they will inevitably do), they'll at least keep some of those great looks. Tony also looks super-hot and even if he's a villain -- a surprisingly stupid and perplexingly incompetent one -- he's kind of got that whole 'sexy devil' thing going on, which has got to count for something.

I just wish they'd given more thought to the logical flow of the story and things that happen in it. No-one does anything for any reason but 'the script says so', which has always been a pet peeve of mine. It's not very in-character for anyone to do anything in the story, which touches on another of my peeves, and that is changing characters to suit a story, rather than changing a story to suit the characters. It's especially vexing when one of them is the titular character, so you'd assume that at least that character would be consistent and believable.

Unfortunately this is likely to be another debacle like Civil War, and as they've squandered the 'perfect storm' of the Iron Man films and their casting of Tony Stark, it will take a serious miracle to save Tony's character...or the rest of the heroes, for that matter. In a steadily-shrinking Marvel Universe, which seems only to concern itself with the Avengers and the X-Men, turning the heroes into villains because of a magic spell seems more than a bit facile, and will probably have an equally facile resolution and handwave wiping it away.

Heroes are not 100% good, and villains are likewise not 100% evil. Good and evil are not clear-cut concepts, even in fiction, and especially in this post-modern landscape. For a character to become more of a heel, it has to be an organic transition. Superior Iron Man looks good, but there's very little beneath the surface. And that really is pretty ironic.