Iron Man: Fatal Frontier #2

[arbre_rieur]

"Robots are pretty much a great metaphor to talk about almost everything in 21st century society. Robots are the new zombies, probably. [New robot character] Udarnik is a little different to any of my other core ideas, I suspect. At the core, he came from the place of me that loved WALL-E, Silent Running and the iconography of Cosmonauts." -- Kieron Gillen

(Note: Keep in mind that this is one of Marvel's online Infinite Comics. They're designed to be read on a digital device, with each page replacing the previous one on your screen. When the pages are instead side-by-side, stacked vertically, like in this post, it can make for an awkward reading experience. Also, the format makes page count a tricky matter, but if you count each "slide" as a page, then this is well under 1/3 of the issue.)

Iron Man flies to the Moon to find out who's been using it a base to launch missiles at Earth. The other Avengers remain planetside in case any more missiles come flying.







When he arrives, there's an armed welcoming party.











There's a lot of shooting and blowing stuff up before the two agree to quit fighting and talk.

























That sets Udarnik off.

Comments

[hyperanthropos]

Tony, Tony, Tony, you should have told him that the costs weren't worth the effort, that there were social and geo-political problems that needed to be solved first, that we had to fix are own planet.
Definitley not "I guess we thought we had better things to do."

[icon_uk]

It does seem to be a very weird thing to say.

[randyripoff]

This isn't working for me.

If it 's this much of a threat, where are the Avengers? The Fantastic Four? The Guardians of the Galaxy? Tony shouldn't be facing this alone.

I am curious to see how he's going to deal with the obvious reality that he's going to run out of power. One wonders if the story would have more suspense if it just happened rather than the foreshadowing that's being used here.

[sadoeuphemist]

What? It's not really that much of a threat, comparatively. It's a giant robot and its robot base and its drones. Superheroes fight giant robots all the time.

Also superheroes fight major threats alone all the time because it would get really boring if Captain America brought all the Avengers with him every time he fights the Red Skull.

[donnblake]

"You never came back. Except the Fantastic Four, who swing by to visit the Watcher sometimes. They were kind of cool, although a bit too capitalist for me. Oh, and the X-men come here every once in a while. There was that one American astronaut- JJ something... but he turned into a wolf and the whole thing was kinda weird. Oh, and there are the Inhumans who actually built a whole city on the moon, which I should actually probably be more excited about. But other than them."

[silicondream]

"Also, I can't understand why you guys never came back. Because, despite my amazing infinite-energy power source and mad engineering skillz and generally human-level intellect, Earth's politics and economics are completely incomprehensible to me. It's not like I could monitor all your wireless communications or anything."

But yeah, Dracula had a moonbase, Apocalypse had a moonbase, Namor actually fought a bunch of robots on the moon way back when....

All this could actually be acknowledged without compromising the point of the story, I think. Maybe Mr. Populist Soviet Robot watched all these exceptional individuals show up and frolic on the moon, and he was always expecting them to pave the way for the arrival of the common man/woman. It made him even more frustrated when he realized space travel was always going to be a privilege reserved for the superguys....

*Edit* What razsolo said, in other words.

[icon_uk]

Also that time the entire Shi'ar Imperial Guard showed up to fight the X-Men when Phoenix was going nuts.

[donnblake]

Well, I figured he didn't much care about extraterrestials showing up.

[naebler]

So I'm confused, Tony has flown back and forth to the Moon many times along with space, why is this time such a drain on his battery reserves?

[icon_uk]

He's switched to a hybrid?

[silicondream]

The in-story rationale is that the Moon is just a little too close to be inaccessible via the usual warp speed he uses to get to other planets, but too far away to be easily accessible at normal flight speeds. Yes, this contradicts earlier stories--I'm pretty sure Tony escorted the Sentry to the Sun through normal space, back in New Avengers a few years ago when they fought the Collective.

It's also kind of a silly problem--if he can warp over interplanetary distances but the moon's too close, why doesn't he just, say, warp from Earth to Venus and then back to the moon? And why would the onboard AI be a significant power drain relative to the amount of power it takes just to travel?

Presumably the writer contrived all this so he could have a more old-school Iron Man wrestling with more limited technology, but he should probably have just done the story as a flashback to when Tony had a more primitive version of the armor, or something like that.

[drtechnobabel]

See, now this confuses me even more when I think about it. Even if the batteries on that outer shell he's wearing run out and he can't contact anyone to help him get back for some reason, why can't he just ditch it and fly back the slow way anyway? I mean, in the last part he mentions it'd be a ten hour flight back. Sure, he'd be hungry, tired, and probably REALLY need to pee (assuming he can't do it in the suit like in Iron Man 2), but he wouldn't run out of power or air, so he'd still survive.

Only two reasons I can think of for why he couldn't would be that the batteries would also drain his suit, which seems like a major design flaw, or he's not wearing the space suit under there, which seems like a REALLY stupid decision.

[arbre_rieur]

It's not really a shell and an inner suit. I mean, yes, it is, but functionally it seems to be one suit. I think it might even have been a permanent conversion, since he never uses just the inner suit for the rest of the series (or at least the chapters I've read so far), instead using the yellow-black armor.

[silicondream]

Also, spacecraft don't have a top speed, barring light. They can move however fast they can reach at full burn, given the amount of time they can spend accelerating before they have to start decelerating to match the velocity of the destination body.

Also also, the Apollo missions broke Mach 30 back in the sixties. Considering that Tony regularly maneuvers at multi-Mach speeds within Earth's atmosphere, dogfighting jets and such, Mach 30 is a ludicrously low top speed for him to hit en route to the moon.

Also also also, why is the Russian guy telling the other Russian guy what "udarnik" means?

Also also also also, the Soviet hammer doesn't mean "soldier," it means "urban factory worker," in contrast to the farm worker represented by the sickle.

[spacebetween]

Also if the power supply was such a big deal. Why not take a Quinjet modified for space travel or some other space vehicle to get close to the moon. Plus it would better for life support and other things.

[razsolo]

Gonna echo what a lot of other people have said...I think this is an interesting idea for a story, and if it's setting up a significant Earth presence on the moon that's a pretty cool change to the status quo, but all the ruminating on how the moon is so untouched by humanity is kinda jarring in the Marvel Universe and takes me out of the story.

I do think you could make a case for Marvel humans in general having given up on space exploration....while there have been a lot of Earth people on the moon or out in space, the vast majority of them are elite superheroes (or villains). If the story had been built more around Tony's comment that space exploration needs to be about more than one guy in a suit of armour, I could see the relevance. Really weird to see him worrying about his survival when he's had a bazillion space adventures on his own and with various other groups though....

[flash_fan]

I'm almost positive around three years ago on free comic book day a whole bunch of wealthy elites were on the moon and Ironman and Thor went up their to deal with whatever cluster-fuckery they had going on.

[starwolf_oakley]

There has to be a part where Udarnik says something like "A Blue Area of the Moon where there's oxygen and an empty city where superheroes fight sometimes? That sounds pretty farfetched, and I'm a robot from the 1960s."

[chrisdv]

This is so dumb. Hell, the Avengers & X-Men beat each other up on the moon, and that was only one big event ago!