Friday, May 6, 2011

Didjutal Comiks: IRON MAN #237

Digital comics are the future of comics, so says everyone on the Internet and everyone trying to justify their purchase of an iPad and leveraging that into a desperate attempt to generate content for their blogs and stuff. It is in this spirit that the management at Witless Prattle continues the following new, exciting, weirdly specific and slightly iconoclastic feature.

Iron Man #237

December 1988

"Star Hunter!"

Writer: David Michelinie

Artists: Jackson Guice (pencils) Bob Layton (inks)

Wearing his rocket booster made of marital aids, Iron Man ins investigating a space station where everyone's been ripped apart and is floating around in space. That can't be good, obviously.

We then flash back, tying up a post Armor Wars thread wherein Stark fires his utterly hapless legal counsel and some very ominous government types show up and offer to drop all the government lawsuits against Stark for Iron Man's behaviour during the Armour Wars and most of the civilian ones as well.

Iron Man soon learns that the lab was working on a biological "satellite killer"--something that could thrive in space and destroy satellites. Obviously they succeeded--kinda, except it apparently mistook "people" for "Satellites." Worse still, it's taken up residence on Stark's abandoned space station (contaminated with a plague in #216), which means the rest of this story will, uh, liberally borrow from the movie Alien, let's say. Iron Man finally kills him by unleashing the plague on it. Iron Man angsts about the people who would create something like this and goes home.

Yes, well, you've seen this story done many of times already, by this point, and it's all a but by the numbers, but it's an effective done-in-one that has some splendid art by Guice and Layton and as a bonus we get the unexciting part of the the Armour Wars (the legal drama) tied up and move on to something else.

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