I Am Iron Man #1: 60 Years of Past, Present and Future Collide!

As a celebration of the character’s 60th anniversary, I AM IRON MAN #1 succeeds in being both a nostalgic love letter to the character and examining one of Tony’s momentarily construed traits as a hero.

This is hands down, a beautiful book both in presentation and in storytelling. While the backgrounds are penciled with a sterile emptiness, Dotun Akande lays down excellently drawn characters, colors, and color effects that aren’t often seen in western cape comics. Akande also does a lot with POV placement, leading to a book with dynamic characters, action, and visual storytelling set against a world that exists only to tell this story. While I am a succubus for backgrounds rich with life, I can understand why Akande focused so heavily on our character’s designs and expressions. It does, in an odd way, service the plot at hand.

The story is told with an unconventional narrative woven throughout the past, present, and future of Tony Stark. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t track through some of Stark’s history from the past. Instead, we focus on a villain of Tony’s from the far-flung future who is moving her way through the timeline to fight an Iron Man with pizzazz. In her time, Tony loses the luster that made him fun, charismatic, and happy. As she attacks throughout time, Tony is seen saving civilians first, fighting the villain second. The story is focused on his choices and how they always hurt him.

That aspect of Tony Stark has been misconstrued over the years as a symptom of ill-intended mistakes and hard choices, typically never for his own gain. Civil War was primarily his fault, but he came from a place of wanting to do more for the people he served. I AM IRON MAN #1 contextualizes that aspect of his character’s arrogance as complex but heroic. This folds into the story’s ending, a gut punch that generated an amount of sympathy for Tony that I have rarely experienced as a reader.

The previews for this issue have made the vain effort to say this book would be suitable for old and new readers alike, but I can’t help but disagree. The narrative’s delivery is very hands-off. It is fable-like, which will be disengaging for some. A lot has to be inferred this bout Tony and why this story matters as an examination of his choices as a hero, a good amount of having to come from a knowledge of his history.