Review Shooter: Invincible Iron Man #506
So a billionaire genuis and a couple dozen dwarves walk into a bar…
Invincible Iron Man #506 continues the Fear Itself tie-in and follows Tony’s deal with Odin and Pepper’s reactions to a world on fire.
FEAR ITSELF #4 SPOILERS FOLLOW
Invincible Iron Man has been my favourite Fear Itself tie-in, and this month is no different. This issue focuses more on the personal struggles of Tony and Pepper and less on the fight against Grey Gargoyle, which I will say is a bit of a letdown, but what we get instead is still good. On Tony’s side of the story, we see him building mystical weapons with Dwarves, while drunk. Tony’s internal monologue throughout the whole thing is about him confronting his biggest fear (drinking again) and trying to tell himself it’ll only happen this once, and it’s executed really well, and shows how conflicted he is. While this aspect of the story promises to be interesting next issue, the Dwarves’ penchant for swearing drew on my nerves after a while since the swears are replaced by random Asgardian letters and make their dialogue hard to follow.
Meanwhile, Pepper is trying to cope with how bad things are getting, and decides that even though she is freaked out, she has to go to Paris and try to help. Now, the Pepper stuff, quite frankly, is not nearly as interesting as the Tony stuff to me, and I think that’s because we haven’t spent enough time with her in these Fear Itself issues to get to know how she feels about it all, other than the fact that she’s scared. That’s really my only major complaint about this issue. We need a bit more Pepper so we can feel for her better, and that looks like it’ll be the focus of next issue.
The artwork is solid, as per usual, especially the pages set in the Asgardian Forge that a have a great colour job, and they give Larroca a chance to draw Dwarves, which is awesome. I also want to shout out the cover, which shows Tony putting those Dwarves to work, which is actually the big focus of the issue, even if they aren’t actually building a factory.
New Reader Accessibility Rating: 5. The re-cap page sums everything up nicely, so you can jump on here if you haven’t been reading.
Recommendation: READ IT. It may be the weakest issue of the Fear Itself arc so far, but it’s still a great read.
