Iron Man: Extremis | Review · 11:51pm Apr 17th, 2020
Now that the first storyline in Heart Forged of Iron is finished, I've decided to go back and re-read some classic Iron Man comics. There's a lot of great ones out there: Both Armor Wars, Demon in the Bottle, the three separate times Tony Stark has basically died and come back to life (not counting both of the technically separate times he's been crippled) —there's a lot to love. But there's one comic in particular that means a lot to me because it's one of the first comics I read.
Iron Man: Extremis was written in 2005 by Warren Ellis, known for The Batman's Grave(still ongoing series,) Planetary, and the first twelve issues of The Authority that didn't suck. It was a soft reboot of the character, meant to revitalize interest with a fresh take that reflected the 21st century.
Now, most comic book writers are just fanfic writers that conned their way into their franchise, so it's interesting that Warren Ellis didn't grow up reading superhero comics. His stories tend to deconstruct their main character, but he does this to explore their philosophies rather than just because he has a chip on his shoulder about superheroes being silly. Likewise, his focus on realism in superheroes leads him to explore the kinds of powers and science that could allow them to work and the kinds of tactics that they would use. It's still creative and imaginative, just applied along with a more narrow focus. To use a more local example: The Triptych Continuum is basically My Little Pony by way of Warren Ellis, and I highly recommend it. Except for the one where Luna's a critic because it's just the amazing Luna's Lottery Lunancy but Luna's three times as angsty.
Anyway, the plot itself is very straightforward. After a call from his old friend Maya Hansen, Tony finds out that a white supremacist named Malleus has been dosed with a super-soldier serum called Extremis. Malleus isn't a supervillain— he's the kind of racist jerk that populates the internet these days, but since this was written in 2004 he's mad at the government instead of blindingly adoring it. He goes on a rampage targeting government buildings and politicians, and Iron Man has to stop him.
This simplicity lets Mr. Ellis really get under Tony's skin. This was a back-to-basics story that happened right after Tony left the Department of Defense and the original Avengers broke up, and Ellis has stated he only studied the original comics for research before diving in. The first time we see Tony, he's fallen asleep in the Armory. In the course of two pages, we quickly establish this version of Tony Stark: He's obsessed with his work, sarcastic, and still guilty over his past. This is expounded as he does an interview with an aggressive documentarian who lays out everything the Stark name is responsible for. We then see Tony expound on the good he still does and admit that he not perfect; showing us that he's concerned with building a better future for himself and the world.
We also meet Malleus, who is not as fleshed out. He's scary, mind you; his powerset is impressive, his transformation is violent, and one of the doctors who sold him the drug commits suicide out of guilt over what he's done. (I first read this when I was eight, BTW. It took two sittings on our visits to Barnes & Noble.) But he's interesting because of how people react to him; Malleus himself is just a hick. His parents were crazy extremists and were killed in a stand-off, and he's inherited that crazy and wants to hurt the world right back.
On the one hand, I don't like stories with hicks. I'm from Kentucky, and I love being from Kentucky. But this story didn't need a complex, Killmonger style villain because that would have pulled to much focus from Tony. Malleus gets enough depth that we understand why he is the way he is, and he feels like a real person. Not just real in the sense that he's a fully-realized character, but he feels like the kind of person you'd bump into on the street or suffer working alongside at a job. He's not a likable guy, but he's clearly still a human being.
It takes too long to get to see Iron Man in action; before this, we only got a pretty uninteresting scene of Tony flying. This fight is in the third issue of a six-part story, and while the slow pacing allows for good character work getting to see Iron Man save people from a... science disaster of some kind would have sold why Tony likes being Iron Man and been far more exciting.
The fight we do get is intense. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier; Warren Ellis's interest in realism forces him to be more creative. Tony can't just land in the highway, catch the van, and say something smug; there's a strategy here that almost always gets overlooked by other creators. He coordinates with the police, waits for the van to get on a ramp to ensure it's away from civilians, and then cuts the can in half to separate the two non-powered crooks from the powered one. He allows the front half to coast to the police with the unenhanced inside, flips the other half to keep the meta off-balance, and attempts to verbally de-escalate the situation while placing himself between the villain and the officers.
This kind of thinking should go into every confrontation a hero has with a villain, regardless of genre. It's also one of the reasons I hate it when people bring up the collateral damage that comes with superhero fights as if it's always the hero's fault when frankly the creators just need to put more work in. Or its an anime and basically everything explodes if it looks cool enough. But anyway.
Malleus's powerset is similarly well thought through. He's roughly Luke Cage strong, and Spider-Man fast, with fire-breathe and... lightning fingertips... I'm not sure what these two pages are exactly, but it's cool. His speed is emphasized the most for two reasons: First, it's his biggest advantage over Iron Man. Not only are his reflexes faster, but Tony's slowed down by the control interface he has to use to control the suit. The underneath that connects Tony to his armor also makes the suit bulky and slower than normal metal armor otherwise would be.
Secondly, and this one might be unintentional, but it connects to the deeper theme of the book. Tony is doing his best to be the futurist with outwardly important things without dealing with guilt and past properly. The Iron Man armor is his most advanced work, and Malleus tears it apart. And again, Malleus is not a supervillain. He's a very average guy with access to something dangerous. If Spymaster or Whiplash had access to this, they'd straight-up kill Tony. So he needs to rethink how to improve by looking inward.
As it is, Malleus comes very close to killing Tony. It's a brutal fight, and we don't see how brutal until he returns to Maya's facility. As she helps get the armor off there's blood pouring from the pieces she's removed and his right arm is crushed. (Again, I read this when I was eight years old.)
Tony has decided its time to upgrade himself and injects himself with Extremis, symbolically mirroring his original origin as he rushes to complete an invention under a ticking clock and furthering the theme of improving yourself by reconsidering what's most important. Oh, and he's symbolically dying and being reborn, but he's died once before this and twice since, so I feel like some of the gravitas is gone. We also get a full-issue flashback to his time with Yinsen and two pages of Malleus talking to a kid while heading towards Washington DC, but they don't add a lot. The Yinsen stuff could be cut almost entirely and while seeing Malleus have the piss taken out of him by a teen is nice, it's mostly redundant.
Extremis connects Tony directly into the Iron Man suit, and it's my favorite thing about Extremis. I don't like Tony having an AI run his suit; it's still too clunky and slow to be efficient in a fight the way Extremis is. It's fine in movies and cartoons because it's a good way to explain things to the audience but comics don't need that crutch.
Tony easily catches up to Malleus and we immediately see the difference. Tony hits him hard and fast, and while he's trying to talk him down he's also not holding back. All the same strategic thinking is still here; Tony is constantly keeping him off balance and pressing the advantage. His healing factor is the only reason he's still in the fight.
Malleus has snapped. Like I said, this all because his parents were killed by police in a stand-off and he can't let go of the past. He's obsessed with destroying what he things hurt him and he can't imagine a future without his revenge. He eventually gets his hands around Tony's throat, and he's forced to fire a Uni-Beam through his chest. He then has to blow the guys head off and the body still tries to get up before it gives up and dies.
(Eight years old. Don't tell ma.)
But Tony's not done metaphorically killing the past. Turns out that Maya Hansen was the one who sold the terrorists Extremis. Her funding had been pulled and she needed to prove what she had was viable, so she gave it to someone who she knew would cause trouble then called Tony for help. The most advanced hardware in the world vs the most advanced software. Tony confronts her in her lab.
Man do I like this book! Most of it went over my head when I was a kid, it still really stuck with me. A Byronic hero, hard(ish) science instead of vague hand waves of radiation and alien cosmic thingamajigee's, and hard questions. None of that is a complaint about more straightforward characters or the wonders of Science! (or magic, while we're at it) but this was pretty significant for me. It was my first grown-up comic, and one of my first comics at all.
Now, there are still caveats. The art in the first issue is very clearly done on a computer, and until the artist (Adi Granov) switches to doing normal pencils and shading before layering color and texture over it, there's too much 'pseudo' in his psuedo-realism. There's a sequence several pages long where Tony and Maya go to see their old mentor Sal, and while it's also about Tony needing to expand his mindset Sal is a pretentious hippy.
Seems legit.
There's a lot of filler. While I love the structure of the fights, they move very slowly. There are several times where we get a whole panel of Tony firing a weapon and then a whole panel waiting for it to land and then another panel on the reaction. It does mean was get a very clear sense of exactly what's happening, but I feel like a lot of these actions can be condensed into fewer actions or panels. And like I said, the flashbacks with Yinsen are really only there to pad out the story while Tony is Extremis-ing.
Overall though, this is still one of the best Iron Man stories written. I love all the secondary systems the Iron Man armor has, like this heat shield he uses to save a car that's on fire during the first fight with Malleus. So many incarnations of the Iron Man suit are generic outside whatever gimmick the writer decided to add for his run. The Extremis suit is honestly still one of the most advanced suits Tony's ever made.
This is still my favorite Iron Man page. It's pretty early on in the fight, and its the first signal of how badly Malleus has done goofed up.
I generally don't like superheroes killing, but its less about the objective value of life and more about the correct use of force. When you're faster than a speeding bullet, you have time to be careful because you can limit collateral damage, which makes it easier to keep the villain alive without endangering the civilians. In this case, not only did Iron Man give Malleus multiple chances to surrender but Malleus was crushing the armor around Tony's throat. It's justified, and it fits with the way the book calls attention to the messy reality Tony has to deal with while he's trying to improve the world.
This is the best first story for an Iron Man fan to read.
Au contraire! The scene with that poor kid works for both Malleus and Tony, partly because it's one of the few times a normal person is part of the story. Tony's alone even among fellow geniuses and what community he had with Maya is destroyed by the end because, y'know, she's kind of a monster. But when that kid's laying her heart out about how isolated she is just for how she dresses alone, Malleus does what all bigots do. He assumes they're the same. Seriously, everything that girl goes through for not being part of a small town is the sort of persecution fantasy guys like him want to go through, with the added out that he's inherently right and has the power to prove it.
And she immediately sees through the racist asshole. And it should not still be as relevant as it is that she dies for it.
Tony might be alone because of what he has to do and what he has to live with, but like he says, he can look himself in the mirror (on a good day.) Malleus is alone because he's a repugnant piece of crap with a mild tragedy that doesn't make a lick of difference to his crimes. He'd be doing this anyway. Right up to assuming he's a hot shit outsider and right up to murdering someone for pointing out he's just a racist scumbag.
Also this was 2005, a few years after 9/11 when conservatives were freaking out twice as hard about stuff they'd freak out over anyway, like Marilyn Manson or anything even remotely goth or punk. And this is Warren Ellis who's always been a student of alternate cultures and very definitely isn't a conservative.
So! Scene fits the theme of the story and is also Ellis at a specific, politically charged point in time giving the middle finger to people who condemn anyone with a piercing and then try to piggyback on their isolation to feed their woe is me fetish.
Also you could probably count the Warren Ellis stories where someone doesn't die horribly on one hand, soooo...
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I hadn't thought about that. I especially hadn't thought about rasisct thinking that they're the normal ones. Thank you.