Ever wondered whatever the heck "Extremis" was? (Pt 1)

[dc2houseofmystery]

One of the things I love about comics is the science. The stuff that makes no sense but looks beautiful (Jack Kirby!) to the stuff that makes a perfect amount of sense by people who have thought it through and taken ideas and concepts from now and projected them toward the future (Warren Ellis!).

A great example of this is the Extremis process from Ellis' relaunch of Iron Man from a few years back.

Here's a page from Iron Man v4 #3 explaining how Extremis works.



And obviously (because this is comics!) when Tony Stark gets his hands on it, the whats and whys and hows of Extremis change immensely and again it's just so. Damn. Cool. You can probably guess I'm having ultimate fun combing through back issues right now.

I'll hopefully be following up with what Tony does to Extremis later on in the series later this week, if you're interested?
 

Comments

[qalchemist]

I've been curious about this, missed this arc entirely!

[dc2houseofmystery]

Argh, the tempation to post the highlights has now struck me...

[stubbleupdate]

Does one of the highlights include Tony kicking a headless corpse?

And can it not include the torching of the lobby? That creeped me out quite a bit

[dc2houseofmystery]

Kicking the headless corpse was going to make an appearance for every post... I thought that was a given!

And yeah, that lobby scene was just brutal. There's something about Granov's art that, whilst not "realistic" in the strictest sense, is deeply unsettling and uncomfortable. Sterile, maybe?

[renne]

See now I want to see the lobby scene.

[shadowpsykie]

me too :D

[stubbleupdate]

Extremis was a good story, and looked really good.
Thing is, I can read the whole thing in less than half an hour.

I'd be miffed if I read it in singles

[dc2houseofmystery]

Yeah, re-reading it tonight it took me about half an hour. It's massively decompressed, but I think that was the done thing at Marvel around that time (and pretty much still is, unfortunately).

[littlepunkryo]

I miss Extremis, to be honest. I really enjoyed that Tony story.

[sharky_chan]

Very much interested if you're willing to post :D.

[dr_archeville]

For a long time I was never sure if Extremis was a canonical story or not. It just seemed so weird, giving Stark actual powers (though nothing compared to what he's got now).

I saw the motion capture comic version of this on Netflix a few months ago. It's a pretty good adaptation!

/ still gnashes his teeth at the "body repair center part of the brain." Yes, Comic Book Science is often full of weird stuff like that, but this struck me as egregiously bad.

[silicondream]

Not a knock on the literary value or fun factor of Extremis, but the idea that our brains store perfect blueprints of our bodies doesn't really qualify as "stuff that makes sense."

[skemono]

Yeah, that was all I got from this, too. "The human body's recuperative powers do not work that way!"

[halloweenjack]

I know. A lot of Ellis' transhuman stuff reads like a combination of "stuff he read in Wired last month" and "stuff that he made up on the spot."

[mrstatham]

And then Fraction thought he was so original when he basically replaced this classic costume and power-set (which made perfect sense), with an ugly, inferior model and Extremis 2.0...

[silverzeo]

Has Extremis ever been use again in any other story or book?