Iron Man: Hypervelocity

Collects Iron Man: Hypervelocity #1-6 written by Adam Warren and drawn by Brian Denham.

I will admit that I bought this book by mistake. I saw Adam Warren's name on the cover and figured 'I haven't seen anything drawn by that guy in a while, he should be interesting on Iron Man, I remember that Teen Titans thing he did, that was pretty good' and quickly put it into my virtual shopping cart. The word to hang onto here is 'drawn', because Iron Man: Hypervelocity isn't drawn by Adam Warren, it is written by him. And although I have enjoyed his Dirty Pair stuff (and that Teen Titans thing) I don't remember liking it particularly because of the writing, rather I was impressed with his manga-inspired yet very personal art. If I'm not mistaken, he was also one step ahead of the pack when it came to utilizing computer graphics in comics, I remember his Teen Titans as a good example of this.

But this is a review of Iron Man: Hypervelocity, and unfortunately I cannot offer the same kind of praise for this book. But first things first. Iron Man: Hypervelocity originally came out in the beginning of 2007, and it takes place before Iron Man: Extremis, but was actually published after. Go figure, smells like editorial shuffling around if you ask me. The gist of the story is that Tony is attacked and badly wounded by unknown baddies, but in preparation for just such a situation, he has managed to make a software copy of his own mind and uploaded this into a new version of the armor, enter Tony Stark 2.0. I kind of like the idea of the story this far. But then it turns out that the baddies are a group of angry mecha, the cyborg remains of some evil experiment, who are now dedicated to getting back at the world when they're not busy having mecha rave parties in sunken ships. And then the story sort of falls apart.

The mecha baddies fool Shield into thinking that the Iron Man armor has gone rogue, so it can only sit down for very few moments at a time. When things are at their worst, the armor is hacked by the leader of the mecha, a weird chick cyborg that goes by the name Absynthe, and the armor has to come up with one clever trick after another to survive while having drawn out virtual conversations with the Absynthe chick. I guess this could have made for a good story, but the execution just isn't there. It took me a long time to get through this, it simply wasn't entertaining enough to keep my attention.

I have several issues with this book. The story is messy and far, far too wordy. Warren uses lots of fancy tech terms, which can make a setting seem well developed when used with care, but here it's just too much for my taste. And robot rave parties, come on... The art is not very good. For a story like this they could at least have found someone good at drawing mechanics, but Denham seems to prefer just covering every single piece of machinery with as much shadow as he can get away with. Even the baddies are just dark human silhouettes with shiny characters on them. Some of his human characters show a lot more promise, but not enough to save the book. And then there's the little things, like the page where the editor has obviously asked someone to draw in a seat belt in the picture of the Iron Man armor driving a car. Yes, I understand that people should be wearing seat belts in their cars, but this is an Iron Man armor! Stark isn't even inside the armor!!! Jeez...

In the end Tony Stark 2.0 is blown to atoms by a massive nuclear device, and that pretty much sums up this book. I am left with the feeling that it would have been much better if Warren had drawn it himself, and this is substantiated by the page layouts by Warren at the end of the book. As it turns out, the pages by Denham are simply copies of these layouts with nothing added or removed, and if you ask me they should just have had someone ink these pages and used those instead. If you're looking for some good Iron Man, I suggest you try the Knauf's excellent run. If you're looking for good Adam Warren stuff, I suggest you try his Dirty Pair or maybe some of his newer stuff like Livewires or Empowered, although I haven't read this. Meanwhile, I suggest you just forget about this book.

2/10