Written by Rob Williams
Illustrated by Rebekah IsaacsTHE IRON AGE IS ENDING AND THE FUTURE IS DEAD! A beaten Tony Stark is trapped in the past and his quest has failed. As one last desperate act, he’ll put together an unlikely team of heroes — but can anyone overcome the power of Dark Phoenix? One Marvel icon will die, and it’s not who you think as Rebekah Isaacs (DV8) returns with Rob Williams (GHOST RIDER) to bring you this synapse-shattering conclusion!
The Iron Age is dead! Long live the Iron Age?
Let’s find out after the cut.
The Iron Age is one of those comics that I had so readily in advance planned to ignore until my natural curiously got the better of me and I found myself purchasing the comic anyway. It’s an intriguing concept: an “event” that’s not an event (mainly, I think, because it doesn’t seek to change the universe forever – just make an entertaining dent) written by multiple people over a lost era of comics with one man guiding it all. Iron Man has been written by Matt Fraction and Brian Bendis for so long now that you kind of forget that other people can write Iron Man too if they want, and Williams wanted to. Good thing it worked out!
Iron Age: Omega finds Tony Stark lost in time from the last issue, trying desperately to figure out how to get back to his future and save the world. While I don’t think it’s too great of a spoiler to say that he does indeed find a way back, the issue is just about what you’d expect from a final issue Boss Battle: our wayward gang gets together, fights the villain and saves the world for a better tomorrow. As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t specifically an event set out to chain the world forever; this is an event in so much that it is a big occurrence that doesn’t fit into other titles and needs it’s own place to happen on it’s own scale. To that end, this is basically what you’d expect from a superhero book in it’s plot, and not much more than that. So it’s not Earth shattering (er-…), but it’s still damn good.
The real beauty of the title lies in the execution from Williams and Isaacs. Williams brings all these culturally obsolete versions of characters back and writes the heck out of them, with a lot of great moments to be had. Williams brings the right amount of sass in the book without losing it’s serious qualities to make this book quite Whedon-esque in a way, which offers up high entertainment value. Due to each character of the team being given an issue to be developed for the story previously in the individual Iron Age one-shots, having everyone get together now just feels like a celebration of a long lost era, and not just pining for days gone by (that can honestly be felt, to a rather annoying extent, in work by other modern writers).
Rebekah Isaacs provides wonderful illustrations to the series bookend, just as she did the opening. Isaacs has a great sense of character here that keeps the visuals classic but in a more modern sense. Isaacs doesn’t try and go over-the-top with the homage to eras that these characters are pulled from, but rather brings them to the here and now in a visually appealing sense. She also creates beautiful action sequences throughout the issue that are clear and precise, highlighting what makes the individual characters special in their given arenas. It’s interesting because on a grand scale, this is a bit more muted from the visual ferocity of DV8, yet Isaacs never loses her luster (and if nothing else, this should act as a good “Why you should buy Angel & Faith from Isaacs” art tease). She also draws the heck out of an old bearded Tony Stark, which is awesome in it’s own right.
What can I say about Rob Williams that I haven’t already said? The man is writing damn good comics. Williams is bringing a very playful attitude to his work that takes everything serious enough to tell a good and solid story but yet open enough to play with more ridiculous ideas and notions to a very successful outcome. He put together an incredibly successful, entertaining and stand-alone mini that can be read by anyone, regardless of how much they know about Marvel. It’s easily one of the most accessible yet big comics that I’ve seen Marvel put out recently, and it’s one of the few to really actively walk that line.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy, or at the very least, grab the collected edition whenever it comes out
