Is it Tony Stark’s new start? Or the beginning of the end? Your Major Spoilers review of The Invincible Iron Man #1 from Marvel Comics awaits!

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1

Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Juan Frigeri
Colorist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: December 14, 2022

Previously in Invincible Iron Man: Tony Stark, the genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist, has lost it all: His wealth… his fame… his friends. But Stark doesn’t realize he still has so much more to lose, especially when the assassins start to come for him! It’s the beginning of the end, as the Golden Avenger must fight for his life and find out what it really means to hit rock bottom.

ALL OF A SUDDEN: BOOM!

This issue begins with Iron Man’s origin, albeit abridged, in the form of Tony Stark’s autobiography, which also serves as the narration for this issue. We get the broad strokes of his life, including the loss of his fortune to buy up tons of dangerous technology, bringing us up to the end of the last volume of Iron Man. It features a Tony who feels older than his years, overseeing Ironheart’s research into the Mandarin’s rings and promising to tell HIS side of the long story of his career… until his home explodes. Tony wakes up in the hospital to find that he has miraculously survived, but his brownstone did not. Neither did one of his neighbors. After negotiating with She-Hulk to pay off ALL the claims for damage from the explosion, including those that she knows are false, Tony relocates to an abandoned garage in Jersey City. When ANOTHER assassination attempt comes there, including a remote armor with an innocent man trapped inside as a martyr, Iron Man realizes that it’s worse than he thought.

Then, he wakes up in the men’s room of a local bar, rushing to the street just in time to be photographed seemingly sick from drinking.

HITS THE GROUND RUNNING

From the first page, this story really takes off running, handling the matter of getting new readers up to speed with great skill and craft, then suddenly hitting us with the first explosion. The sheer number of things that happen in this issue is pretty stunning, and I appreciate that it feels action-packed, rather than rushed. Frigeri’s art is a big part of the success, from the scoring and scratches to Tony’s last armor to maintaining Stark’s shaggy-hair-and-jeans look from the Cantwell series. By the time we get to the unexpected final-page cliffhanger, everything built up in the earliest chapters has been torn down, leaving Tony Stark at his lowest. In a lot of ways, it feels like Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye series a few years ago, taking into account all that we know about our dynamic hero, but reminding us that he has feet of clay and can have his nose broken just like anyone else. It was hard to make that work for Hawkeye, but it’s even more impressive with a billionaire playboy who can literally BUILD himself new superpowers on a whim.

BOTTOM LINE: THEY HAVE MY ATTENTION

While a part of my mind is a little stressed by the fourth or fifth complete upheaval of Tony Stark’s life since 2018, Invincible Iron Man #1 gets right to the point and establishes its interesting new status quo fast and smart, with attractive art to seal the deal, earning 3.5 out of 5 stars overall. Iron Man himself says that he feels like hard-luck Spider-Man in these pages (and given that Peter stole his whole CEO/armored hero schtick not so long ago, I’d say turnabout is fair play) and it makes for a really strong first issue.

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