|
U.S. WAR MACHINE #1
Highly Recommended (9/10)
|
Marvel Comics/MAX Comics
Writer: Chuck Austen
Artist: Chuck Austen, Wild and Wooly Press, and NIC Entertainment
Layouts: Victor Lopez
Editor: Ralph Macchio
Price: $1.50 US |
In a line that launched with books by popular established writers Brian Michael Bendis and Garth Ennis, relatively new writer/artist Chuck Austen has managed to hold his own quite well. The military fiction concept appeals to my G.I. Joe-influenced sensibilities, and his out-of-continuity approach to SHIELD,
Tony Stark and the concepts of Iron Man and War Machine are fresh and
interesting. I have the advantage of having read the first three issues of this
weekly series and knowing that it gets even better with the second and third
issues, but even without that advanced knowledge, I think I would have been
quite impressed with this book.
Over in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Bendis gave us a new look at Iron Man that was more
interesting than the mainstream character has been in many years. Austen does
much the same here, although his focus is less on Stark and more on the Iron Men
that surround him. Introducing War Machine first and then Iron Man is a fairly
important change in the character, emphasizing the weapons merchant that Stark
started out as and making his business reversals as important as his decision to
adopt a more morally safe alter ego as well. The issue isn't much about Stark,
though, because it's more about the ramifications of this new decision on James
"Rhodey" Rhodes, the current wearer of the War Machine armor. With Stark's new
"no weapons" policy, he's just found himself obsolete.
Making things worse for him are the events
in the second half of the book, in which Rhodey screws up in a way that causes
loss of life and property on a grand scale, in front of a live television
camera. Just as Bendis used the mature readers freedom to have more realistic
language and sex in his books without going hog-wild, Austen uses the
opportunity to do something that would be hard to justify in a mainstream Marvel
book. It's not just the hero losing, or even the hero killing, but it's hard to
imagine a Marvel super-hero screwing up so badly that he costs innocent lives,
and then topping it off with an execution. What's more impressive is that
despite this poor and tragic showing, Austen doesn't make Rhodey seem like a hot
dog or a glory hound who screwed up, but just a guy who had a bad day with
fairly nasty results.
Though I've found some of the work on Elektra a bit stiff, I think the look for War Machine
was just about perfect. The black and white format, combined with Austen's
pacing on the action scenes, reminds me of manga storytelling. I was
particularly impressed with War Machine stopping the truck, which is a slow
motion action sequence worthy of blockbuster movies, and viscerally captures the
destructive power that the War Machine armor represents. The tense stand-off
between War Machine and the terrorist, as well as the violent fallout, is also
incredible, capturing the emotions that drive Rhodes and his opponent at that
moment. In all honesty, I do still find the art a bit stiff at times, but it's
very well-suited to this high-tech world.
Despite wanting this to be good and hoping
it would be, I honestly was afraid that it was going to be the weak link in the
MAX line. Instead, it is one of the stronger books, and with time may even
become my favorite of the line.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
