These issues change the title to add Tony Stark’s new, post-Civil War title.
It’s also where the Knauf brothers’ run moves from good to great.
Iron Man #15 is the kick-off for the Initiative Event, which will cross-over into several titles and also launch a few of its own.
Picking up right where Civil War left off, Dum-Dum Dugan attempts to quit S.H.I.E.L.D. over some of the early changes made by new Director Tony Stark. Dugan’s biggest concern is that Stark personally led a recent mission, in his armor, and Dugan seems to think that is leading to field agents being overly dependent on Iron Man.
Strange, because Nick Fury often led missions and, whenever he did, he was the central actor and the most important agent in the room. Oh well. Most of this is setting the table for through lines—Tony Stark is overly involved, but he gets results, and he’s adding some great weaponry to SHIELD’s arsenals.
The narrator of #15 is Dugan himself–we’re seeing the Stark changes at SHIELD through his eyes as he attempts to tender his resignation to the Secretary of Defense–who refuses to allow him to retire.
Tony Stark has been painted mostly as a villain during Civil War. There’s a bit of that here, too, but at the same time we learn that overall morale is way up and Tony even installed day care onboard the Helicarriers.
There’s lots of great politics and spy-stuff in this arc, but the main story is about Mandarin. The first issue of this arc also introduces a man in a lock-down mental-health facility in China who never eats or sleeps but is somehow still alive.
He’s Mandarin.
Simultaneously, SHIELD is fighting a new wave of terrorists who break into the Chinese facility and offer the prisoner his rings…
Mandarin then kills nearly all of them because he’s BAD-ASS in this story arc. Mandarin has to go through a series of rituals to gain the rings power back, which include having boiling liquid poured on his own back (for the ring of fire) and other tortuous practices.
Dugan leads a covert op to go into China and find out what this old man is up to, and see if he really is Mandarin. Iron Man joins the mission as they uncover cyborg terrorists protecting the facility.
A third running plot continues the Extremis storyline, with other researchers developing their own forms of the technology while Maya Hansen tries to make Stark’s version of Extremis non-fatal to the user. All the while, Tony is sleeping with Maya. All that is to explain that Maya is part of Stark’s SHIELD team now. While the mission in China (or maybe it’s Mongolia?) is going on, Maya is performing an autopsy on one of the cyborg terrorist, and the body literally explodes into a mass of tendrils that then attacks her. It then takes over the entire Helicarrier, which has to be destroyed to contain the threat.
Maria Hill supervised an evacuation before the scuttling, but Maya is unaccounted for.
I suspect that the cyborg army and the animated entrails from the helicarrier are a form of Extremis.
At the end of the story, we see Maya in Nebraska being welcomed aboard Prometheus Gentech, Inc., by a very familiar face…
Warren Ellis’ Extremis story was the best Iron Man story I’d read in many years. What made it great was the ideas—the science fiction of it. This story is the best Iron Man story I’ve read in years in terms of its maturity and complexity.
Fantastic arc.
English (US) · 