Iron Man: Fatal Frontier #7

[arbre_rieur]

"I suppose the one thing I find most fascinating is that he's not really a good guy. Tony's kind of a failed human, and has a history of making catastrophically bad decisions. He's a horrifically self-destructive man who's made some terrible mistakes in his life and now has to live with them." - Al Ewing

(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 under 1/3 of the issue.)

This issue takes place pretty much concurrently with both last issue and the issue before that. In those issues, we saw Tony Stark doing two things at once: While his flesh-and-blood self was foiling an armed robbery at a party, he was simultaneously remotely controlling his armor, getting it to break into Cortex, Inc.'s vaults to steal information. This issue, we find out what *really* went down.

























He's attacked by the security software, but he reprograms it into something friendlier.







So the security jellyfish activate, catching Eli and the Iron Man armor in the process of breaking into the Cortex vaults.





When Eli's data-miner enters the Cortex databank, Iron Man feeds it the disguised surveillance footage.







Basically, he's accomplished three things with this shell game of his:

1) He's destroyed Textile.
2) With the surveillance footage, he can kick Eli and his New Modernist Army off the moon before they cause problems.
3) In the eyes of everyone else, he's the hero who thwarted the New Modernists' scheme to steal from Cortex, so he's won the company's trust.

Also, on his way out of the databank, he unearths some highly classified information about Cortex's regional director on the Moon, C. Anderson Sixty.

Some time later, once Eli Warren and his people have discovered how Tony betrayed them, they are understandably quite wroth. (Which catches us up to where the last issue left off.)





The mechanical spiders -- the "droogs" -- make short work of Dr. Warren's group. They swarm over the humans and use their countless bodies to form a container around them.

Comments

[freezer]

"We hope you enjoyed tonight's feature presentation of The Smug Adventures of Iron Dick."

[icon_uk]

This.

[leoboiko]

Iron Dick

That does conjure certain mental images…

[icon_uk]

And don't think Tony doesn't know it.

[featheredserpent]

a.k.a. Steely Dan?

[lieut_kettch]

"Iron Dick" is Kitty's nickname for Piotr.

[skemono]

When I want backchat from my own hacking suite, I'll ask for it.

Uh, Tony? You did ask for it. If you wrote said suite, you had to have put that warning message in there yourself.

[icon_uk]

It was probably written by another portion of his conscious mind and they still haven't caught up with each other yet.

[captainbellman]

Nah, it just happened that the Silence got bored one millennia and had Tony and the Eleventh Doctor swap places for 12 hours.

"Hmm. Given we're on the moon, I'm not sure I'd be justified hurling this irritatingly primitive OS into the sun...better give her a little dash of TARDIS sarcasm to make things more tolerable."

[skjam]

I choose to believe that Defenders fan-fiction is huge in the Marvel Universe, and that Kyle Richmond writes it under an assumed name. It's much closer to what actually happened than most fanfic, but Nighthawk comes off much better than in anything not written by "Barbara Norriss."

[beyondthefringe]

Leading to the epic story, "Defenders for a Day...Lovers for a Lifetime."

And "The Avengers-Defenders Orgy."

And the surreal "Elf with a Dildo."

[thanekos]

I can already see the nifty.org hyperlinks..

[salamangkiero]

Now that's a site I haven't even thought about in a long time. Nifty!

[skjam]

One of the reasons Defenders fanfic is so huge is that the rights to the name are so confused that there's almost no chance of anyone ever getting fined for taking some liberties.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

On Tumblr they figure in-universe Defenders fanfic is the equivalent of our-universe hockey real person fic.

[michaelhealy]

Isn't overclocking regular computers very dangerous and you need to take special precautions so that it doesn't over head and fry it's own hardware?

Doing this to one's own brain just sounds like begging for a stroke or some kind of intense brain damage at least.

[cainofdreaming]

Not really. Nowadays it's pretty easy, if you have taken time to read on some "how to" pages. And unless you plan to go for the max then most non-crap aftermarket coolers are good enough for the job.

[icon_uk]

I would imagine Tony Stark is aware of all those tricks and even knowing all that is STILL referring to this process as "overclocking", which suggests it's at the insanely risky end of the spectrum.

[psylynce]

You know it's rare for a good guy's plan to be executed so perfectly without the villain screwing it up some way, so kudos to Tony for that. But if multitasking and over clocking are going to be his new super power then I'm hoping there will be some serious physical/ mental repercussions.

[donnblake]

Oi, what's with the caper film? I was promised a Moon Western!

[skemono]

That was basically my reaction to Inception.