Didjutal Comiks: IRON MAN #305

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 #305

December 1993

"Green Politics"

Writer: Len Kaminski

Artists: Kevin Hopgood (pencils) Steve Mitchell (inks)


Iron Man, resplendent in his Hulkbuster armour, rumbles with the Hulk, who's on Stark's property to destroy a Stane International facility (Stark bought Stane in #281 or so) Stark's understandably annoyed that people conflate Stane and Stark, and they trade punches.

Meanwhile, Bethany Cable and the gang are trying to track down the hacker who leaked all these documents about Stane International's dirty deals in the first place. Bethany finally nails him in the backup story this issue.

Back at the Hulk/IM rumble, Iron Man says he would have been happy to work dismantling the plant out amicably with the Hulk, and the Hulk says fine, he didn't come here for a punch-up: but Iron Man was too busy picking a fight to listen to him. As the Hulk puts it: "You built a weapon as big as the fight you expected and having it blinded you to the possibility of other options."

It's nice that Stark can be talked down from this rather than tanking an entire country when his hubris gets a little too much, isn't it?

Stark chews this over and comes to a decision: He's shutting down Stark Enterprises.

This is Part 4 of "Crash and Burn," a storyline wherein a long-simmering subplot in the book is finally taken head-on: namely that when Stark bought out Stane (his former company) he was really getting something of a poisoned chalice. It's a decent story, and there's a lot of thought put into the whole notion of rebuilding corporate structures to make them more transparent and open to the public.

Of course, there's also some really gratuitous guest stars as well--the Hulk in this issue works OK, because there's some history there. Venom and Thunderstrike? Well . . .not so much.