As the Iron Patriot drifts to the bottom of the ocean, it’s becoming clear that not all is as it seems for James Rhodes. Piling on the intrigue and suspense, Ales Kot and Garry Brown are carving out a corner of the Marvel Universe no other title on the shelves can match.
Written by Ales Kot
Illustrated by Garry Brown
“UNBREAKABLE” PART 2
• Who is controlling the IRON PATRIOT suit?
• The conspiracy to destroy America from within grows
• And…James Rhodes dies!!!
“Sometimes you don’t even know what’s wrong with the system until it breaks.”
You know, maybe it’s just because I’ve been watching a lot of House Of Cards lately, but reading “Iron Patriot” #2 that line really stood out to me. It’s the line that really made me understand what Ales Kot and Garry Brown are trying to do with this title and even though it seems like such a throwaway line amidst a scene with much more pressing matters (like Rhodey almost drowning, for instance) I think it speaks volumes for what this title is trying to be. With his work on “ZERO”, Ales Kot seemed like the perfect fit for “Iron Patriot” as way of exploring themes of corruption in the military-industrial complex under the mask of a superhero story wherein the main hero literally wears the American flag for a costume. What Kot and Brown do here is they take the stark morality of a character like Captain America and the ambiguous, tech- and politics-based conspiracy stories of a character like Iron Man and play them off of each other. If you’re after more of that kind of thing after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, “Iron Patriot” delivers in spades.
This is one of the slowest moving stories Ales Kot seems to have written as, instead of piling a lot of world building information into story beats, he focuses on the characters of the story and gradually feeds information as to the larger mystery of the book. What that creates is a sense that the reader only barely knows as much as the characters do and that simply wouldn’t work if Kot hadn’t created such endearing and intricately layered characters to care about. With Rhodey and his family at the centre of a plot seemingly put in place to take out America and, by extension, the Iron Patriot, that puts a very interesting spin on the idea that the world is turning against the hero. That feeling wouldn’t work with any other characters and Kot really has a handle on the socio-political landscape of not only the world he is creating here, but the characters that inhabit it. While it’s true that the story is set to a very slow burn so far, the intrigue that Kot is creating with his writing more than makes up for it and seems to be building a mystery worth following.
If Ales Kot was the perfect writer for this kind of story, then there could be no better artistic collaborator than Garry Brown. Brown’s artwork seems steeped in a sense of realism with a focus on a very earthy colour palette thanks to Jim Charalampidis and heavily inked pencils that breaths life into Kot’s writing. Without that sense of realism from the artwork grounding the book, it’s possibly safe to say that the conspiracy and intrigue that permeates the book would be much less effective and the whole issue would fall apart. Thankfully, that’s not the case as Brown not only perfectly creates the sense of utter fear caused by a group of men in black ski masks breaking into a home, but also the sense of helpless caused by being dragged to the bottom of the ocean in a suit of armour. While other superhero books might link a sense of existential fear to the hero losing their powers or having to hide their identity from those closest to them, Kot and Brown put it right there on the page by isolating the character with very real and very relevant situations caused by how violent and unpredictable our world has become.
While a superhero book title “Iron Patriot” about a man wearing a billion dollar suit of weaponised armour painted to look like the American flag could come off as old fashioned or out of touch or even aggressively patriot, Ales Kot and Garry Brown smartly subvert that notion by placing the character in a situation where the world he thought he was protecting is set to take him out. It’s the same kind of smarts Captain America: The First Avenger had by having their character that dressed in an American embody the best qualities of what America should stand for in a world where that isn’t necessarily a reality. What the means for “Iron Patriot” is that Ales Kot and Garry Brown have created a title that embodies in the 21st century what Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s “Captain America Comics” embodied in 1941.
