La Zona Muerta

“I prefer fact to fantasy, no matter how inviting,” Stark smirked at the apparition before him. The otherworldly face of the unknowable Goddess twisted into a sneer.

“You have no belief in anything, then,” she thundered. “You are a hollow, soulless being who can never achieve transcendence.”

Tony Stark never met a challenge he couldn’t face head on and narrowed his eyes. “You’re wrong. I believe energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared— and in Fermat’s Last Theorem and Godel’s Proof to name a few. I believe that scientific method is humanity’s most powerful tool— and that through the will to knowledge man can achieve his own transcendence– without bowing to gods with the manners of spoiled children.”

The above exchange was certainly not my first experience with Iron Man; I had been reading the book off and on for at least five years at this point… but it was an example of a pitch perfect bit of characterization. Stark, a rational man, even in the face of the unexplainable, cooly displays his belief in science, not fiction. Even in a world of gods and magic and things that would shatter the minds of those of us in the real world, Stark wears an armor not only of cold steel, but of cool rational thought, of an unthreatening atheism that doesn’t denigrate but rather uplifts. Man has it in his own hands to find the path to enlightenment, to transcend.

I love this run of Iron Man, scripted under the pen of Len Kaminski, a writer hardly anyone talks about, which is a shame. This dialogue from a comic from thirty years ago is still burned into my brain. I barely had to look it up to transcribe it for you.

Kaminski helmed Iron Man just under four years, and with his co-writer Scott Benson, launched a War Machine solo series. They also did a number of fun text pieces for the anniversary issues and annuals where Stark would do things like give interviews to Playboy or Newsweek, present schematics of new armor… all sorts of fun, ancillary content. He also did things like showing the actual Iron Man operating system while Stark was piloting the armor, adding a bit of a modern spin on a classic concept. This was the GOOD kind of updating; not scrapping the past but rather applying a modern filter to it.

Kaminski worked primarily with two artists that largely go unsung these days, Tom Morgan and Kevin Hopgood. I did not do a Tom Morgan riff (this time) but I decided to try to mimic the two foil stamped covers from issues 288 and 290 that Hopgood produced for Iron Man’s 30th anniversary.

Here’s the cover from 290; what’s funny is that this isn’t actually armor! At this point in the book, Stark is bedridden, betrayed by an ex-lover who shot him, rendering him paralyzed from the waist down. Through a series of events involving a great deal comic pseudoscience, he establishes control over his body through a special microchip implanted in his spine (!) and by converting his body’s autonomic functions to machine code, programming the parameters himself (!!!). With the use of a phone jack now in his head, he pilots this Iron Man rig through “telepresence,” a sort of crude Virtual Reality deal (hey, it was the 90s).

Note the big gun on his hip, there… this apparently didn’t make it past the drawing board as the only place it’s ever featured is here. The wrist gauntlet thingie also is sort of apocryphal but he does have a lot of retractable gimmicks in this suit; since there’s no person inside, it’s bristling with compact, retractable weapons. I like this design but it lasted only roughly ten issues before being refined and turned into Iron Man’s “modular” armor that he would wear for the rest of Kaminski’s run.

The far more iconic look, still referenced today is this one:

The War Machine Armor… possibly the last classic addition to the armor line up. Most of the armors after this are just variations on a theme and don’t break a lot of ground. Mayyyyybe the Hulkbuster armor, but that largely just looks like the armor above but bulked up. This is the last one to really have a different look and although this cover doesn’t show it, shows a complete deviation from what thirty years of what we could pretend to be Stark’s typical design sense. The War Machine armor is packed to the brim with guns, missiles, all sorts of mini weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of minor destruction? I remember pushback in the fan press at that time, wondering how miniguns and missiles could possibly be more destructive than energy weapons such as repulsor rays but… comics are a visual medium. Even if a guy has a cool, hand mounted ray gun, there’s something pretty visceral and visual about a shoulder mounted minigun spewing out hot rounds. Kaminski and others would even go on to give in story reasons for these changes; this armor, although used by Stark once, was designed for James Rhodes, a former soldier and helicopter pilot. It’s no coincidence the War Machine armor is kitted out with miniguns and missile pods, exactly like a helicopter gunship in real life might be.

A couple of words about Kevin Hopgood: this was a guy laboring in the fields of 2000 AD and Marvel UK and the like for ten years before getting a crack at Marvel proper in the early 90s. I hope he gets SOMETHING from the movies featuring War Machine and the Hulkbuster armors (not to mention the cartoon, the toys, etc.)… I bet not, but I hope he does. I hate using the terms “gritty” or “realism” when it comes to comic art but he definitely injected a real world groundedness to his work. I was bummed when he left after three years (especially as he missed the Heart of Darkness crossover, arguably the climax of the Kaminski run). These two covers he designed are eye catching and iconic, especially the War Machine cover on issue 288. I labored LONG to make that drawing look half a decent as the real thing. There are a lot of advantages to digital art but it’s still not the same thing as pen and ink; it’s hard to make things look as smooth as you can with templates and a pen on Bristol board.

Anyway, a couple words about my favorite Iron Man run and some of my favorite Iron Man creators, and two hand busting attempts to homage same. Hope you enjoyed.