Broken Frontier

Tony Stark has been taken out but Iron Man lives on as a fugitive as Adam Warren’s stunning take on the techno world of the armored Avenger continues.

Tony Stark has been ambushed and critically injured by a group of unknown mecha. But all is not lost for Iron Man, as the latest version of the suit has been built with a failsafe for just such an eventuality: if Stark is incapacitated the armor uploads his memories into a digital consciousness… a Tony Stark 2.0.

However, Stark’s mysterious attackers won’t let things rest there. The now sentient armor has been framed as rogue and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Cape-Killer forces are on its tail. As Tony Stark 2.0 struggles to come to terms with his/its existence he is also being attacked from the inside by a virus, represented by an avatar of a beautiful woman named Absynthe, which has infected the armor’s processors.

With attacks from within and without, can the Stark 2.0 consciousness survive long enough to discover who framed the armor and tried to kill the real Tony Stark before S.H.I.E.L.D. takes him out or Absynthe deletes him from the armor’s systems?

It’s not often these days that a writer comes along and can pinpoint everything that is unique about an individual super-hero, extrapolate those qualities to their fullest and give us a take on that character that exploits the potential of his series to its ultimate end. Adam Warren has done just that on Iron Man: Hypervelocity.

Too often in the past Iron Man stories have casually thrown technobabble at us without any real understanding or thought as to the true story possibilities of those concepts. Here the writer embraces everything that separates Iron Man from his contemporaries to give us a quite exceptional take on the character.

Warren’s storytelling skills utilize the comic strip form to its utmost in order to switch between the environments that the narrative demands. A significant amount of the story so far takes place within the armor as Stark 2.0 struggles against invasion. But there are also clever flashbacks throughout the series where Absynthe has imposed herself into Stark’s memories of his past, as the virus she represents continues to corrupt this version of his consciousness. Added to this are a number of dynamic chase scenes as, in the "real" world, S.H.I.E.L.D. closes in.

Adam Warren provides breakdowns for artist Brian Denham who has co-created a look for the book that is simply breathtaking. His art has a beautifully photo-realistic style, however oxymoronic that sounds for a series that spends much of its time in cyberspace! This month’s renditions of an undersea subculture of disillusioned mechanical beings and A.I.s are, quite simply, inspired.

Iron Man: Hypervelocity is a book I suspect will have slipped under many readers’ radars. Whether you pick up the individual issues, or wait for the trade, this is fast-paced, un-missable Iron Man action. Highly recommended.