I Am Iron Man #4 // Revie
Tony Stark and Doctor Stephen Strange have a lot in common. They’ve both made mistakes. They’ve both had problems with alcohol. They both carry the weight of an overwhelming amount of responsibility. They share dinner on a rooftop at the beginning of I Am Iron Man #4. Writer Murewa Ayodele’s mini-series reaches its penultimate issue with artist Dotun Akande. Tony’s dealing with demons as the director of SHIELD in the days after the Civil War crossover. Ayodele’s distinctly humorous look at the psyche of a man who has to deal with A LOT feels particularly charming in its fourth issue.
Tony’s having a burger. Stephen’s having chow mein. It’s night. There’s a silence between science and magic. There’s a silence between the two men. Tony asks Stephen if he sees anything weird. Stephen is ultra-aware of everything, so it’s difficult for him to relate. Later on, he asks a couple of other people. Moon Knight doesn’t see anything. Spider-Man doesn’t get a single tingle from the rooftop in question. Maybe there’s some sort of a problem with HIM that makes him see all those big purple tentacles in the sky. Looks like Doctor Strange has a little bit of work to do with Mr. Stark.
Ayodele has a clever way of allowing a moment to play out on its own time. There’s a tremendous amount of patience on the writer’s part. So often, a script seems to feel as though it has too much to do in too small a span of time, and so everything gets...cluttered. There’s a lot going on in various moments of the penultimate issue of I Am Iron Man, but Ayodele’s gift is presenting the long silent moments and letting them play out with the kind of art that is capable of resonating through the silence. Not that there isn’t action in this issue. There is. A lot of it. But the issue’s heart beats with long, slow, silent panels between all the action.
Akande is the perfect artist for this sort of thing. Give most artists such a simple series of events, and they might have a tendency to overburden page and panel with way too many details. Akande understands that mood and atmosphere can sometimes need to have vast emptiness and delicate shades of shadow. A particularly reflective glance through the Marvel Universe continues to play across the page in a truly distinctive narrative vision that feels quite unique. Marvel Manhattan is a place of constant action. It’s nice to see it in its more muted moments as it accompanies a character who is suffering from an inner struggle that elegantly echoes into the outside world.
Tony’s been through a lot over the years. His psyche has been explored on page and screen quite a lot over the decades. Ayodele and Akande are exploring Stark in a way that feels like it might be coming from a wholly new perspective. It’s a lot of fun to see him outside the traditionally explosive action of a standard Iron Man story.
