Jonah Chuang recommends Superior Iron Man #1
The arrogant, pain in the butt Tony Stark we all love is back in the Superior Iron Man #1.
After some personal struggles like twenty years ago, The Avengers’s resident bad boy has been a little smug but mostly pretty righteous; he even became the head of SHIELD for a time, and hunted down Super-Hero Registration Act dissenters. Gone was the rogue, reckless Tony Stark who did what he wanted and stood in open defiance of the establishment, but thanks to a wonky spell in AXIS #3, he’s reverted back to his cutthroat playboy roots but is taking it to another level.
He has a new suit, which is a symbiote hybrid, capable of finding and bonding itself to him wherever he is, and, more dangerously, also developed a new app, which allows anyone with a smart phone to use the Extremis virus to change anything they want about themselves (the same virus that Tony once considered too dangerous to have out in the world, and made him fly around the world to hunt down all existing versions). Only he doesn’t do this out of the goodness of his heart—after a short and highly addictive trial period, the app charges users an exorbitant fee to continue using it.
Tony is the perfect candidate for getting the “Superior” treatment. His complicated past and his never-ending cycle of trying to do the right thing and giving in to his own nature makes this saga feel less like a sales gimmick and more like something that’s been a long time coming. Who can forget how exciting it felt when, at the end of the first Iron Man movie, Tony Stark, with alibi and SHIELD-prepared statement in hand, steps up to the podium at a press conference and gives in to his ego, saying, “I AM Iron Man”. This series is the comics version of that!
Jonah Chuang is a Production Coordinator Assistant at comiXology. He is having an OK day, bought a Coke Zero at the gas station, and is incorrigible.