2020... The Culmination of Arno Stark's DESTINY!!!

[shakalooloo]

Dan Slott's Iron Man run has built up to 2020, and having Tony's half-brother Arno stand up to his destiny to defend humanity from the Extinction Entity, only like the fourth Marvel villain in the last decade to try and merge organic and technological life. Now, with co-writer Christos Gage at his side, Slott bows out in the grand finale!







...

Yeah.

...

Arno quietly shuffled off, Jocasta up to very suspect actions and that whole 'back from the dead' business neatly tied off with a bow. Somewhat anticlimactic, and more of a story that served no purpose other than to tidy up a few loose ends. Most disappointing.

And another prime opportunity to introduce Circuit Breaker to the 616 proper missed. Bah.

Comments

[mistersandman]

I was barely aware that this event was even going on until I saw a Machine Man tie-in on Marvel Unlimited last week. Sounds like the status quo has been restored. Yay?

I wonder Tony if studied the Krakoa resurrection process, could he iron out the "nucleotide link degradation" problem?

[scorntx]

... yay?

So Arno gets turned into a jerk, then shuffled off in such a way that seems blatantly designed to make him into a villain if / when he returns.
*sigh*

Dan Slott is one of those writers with a fondness for "putting the toys back in the box".
And sometimes it's really a stretch.


-"But it didn't stick, so, sure, we're good."-
"Plus, if word got around that you'd actually killed me, your popularity would skyrocket, and I won't allow that."


And, uh... that's a way to go with Rhodey's entirely justified fear of being in armor after dying in one.
None of that "therapy" nonsense. It's just a defect in the resurrection process! All fixed now!
Um...

[mordalo]

If I remember correctly (and it's been awhile since I read the original version of IM2020, so I could be wrong), Arno was a jerk to begin with.

He was more a hired thug/mercenary rather than a "do-gooder" super hero.

So if Slott (whose Iron Man run, quite honestly, didn't impress me) did turn him into a jerk, it was probably more just trying to bring him in line with the classic "Iron Man 2020" Arno Stark.

[scorntx]

Different Arnos.

Classic Arno is Tony's nephew from the far flung future of 2020 (... wait, hold on...)

Modern Arno is the Starks' actual biological son who was raised in isolation because of a ludicrously complex origin involving an alien robot and a doomsday machine, but who when introduced seem mostly nice and only a tiny bit morally ambiguous.
Then Slott got him and he suddenly ratchets up the smug jerkassery.

[beyondthefringe]

God forbid we get a good exploration of justifiable hero trauma to be worked through in a satisfying story fashion, instead of handwaved by a resurrection machine.

[jgeils]

Circuit Breaker was from Transformers #9, right?

[shakalooloo]

Marvel snuck her into Secret Wars II before her Transformers appearance to maintain the rights to use the character, and since then has done precisely nothing with her. It's not as if they couldn't just have her origin tied to another villainous robot. Ultron? Sentinels? Take your pick.

Anyway, she cannot appear in any Transformers media, but Marvel seemingly doesn't want to use her.

[scorntx]

Does anyone at Marvel even remember she exists at all?
(with the probable exception of Al Ewing, of course.)

I’m getting Clone Conspiracy flashbacks, both good and bad...

[deh_tommy]

Oh Jody, no...

Dangit, the Slott run was so much fun and really interesting until this. All the hard questions raised throughout the whole thing all answered with “eh, don’t think about it too much” or swept under the rug like they never meant anything.

[silicondream]

When you look into Grant Morrison, Grant Morrison also looks into you.

[beyondthefringe]

Perhaps it's because the pandemic completely fucked up all of Marvel's Big Summer Plans, or maybe this storyline was just blown out of proportion, but it came across as something of an anticlimax. A six-issue storyline with interesting implications that I'm sure will never be referenced by most writers, a reset of the status quo for a few characters, and in general a buffering zone between one writer's run and the next.

And the various tie-in minis were pretty much all entertainingly useless, or uselessly entertaining, and certainly skippable if you didn't care about Alfred and Elsie-Dee, or whatever-the-fuck Rosenberg was doing with a handful of characters, and so on.

Maybe it all looks better and reads better as a whole, once it's collected.

[shakalooloo]

The Machine Man tie-in was fun, as it explored Aaron and Jocasta a little more, but I really think the whole Iron Man 2020 would have been better had it been a whole year of Arno leading up to the big event. As it is, Tony's still Iron Man in all the Avengers books etc., so this little corner of the universe feels far, far removed from the rest of it.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

When was the last part of this? I thought it had been tied up ages ago, and I either just missed it, or it wasn't posted here.

[shakalooloo]

This final issue came out last month. Issue 5... feels like a much more satisfying conclusion than this one, to be honest, had the Extinction Entity not shown up on the last page. I can post some here, if'n people want.

[dan_ingram]

Not gonna miss Arno, not really

[mordalo]

Ah, thanks. I knew I'd forgotten something. That's the problem when you get old. ;)

[zachbeacon]

Jocasta is going full Bride of Ultron here, isn't she? Poor Machine Man doesn't know he's just the rebound guy.

[silverhammerman]

Never been the biggest Slott fan, but the whole Iron Man 2020 thing seems to have been kind of hamstrung by pandemic delays and a general sense that nothing Slott was doing mattered in any other books.

It's a very neat wrap up, which I suppose could be taken as a credit in Slott's favor, but it seems a little underwhelming in its neatness. Rhodey's whole character arc gets written off as something that doesn't need to been revisited, and as ever the approach to the question of Tony Stark's underlying humanity/mortality fails to grapple with what could make that so interesting. Even the idea of trapping Arno in a simulation could be thought provoking, but it isn't in the pages above. Also, the whole "we can't do this again!" thing with regard to cloning their bodies is a bit rich when Bendis already had them say that exact thing when he did it the first time.

Really, the whole project is very much a lesser effort from Slott, and it's been hopeless overshadowed by stuff like Immortal Hulk as a reinvention of an old hero and Dawn of X as radical superhero scifi.

[shakalooloo]

I think the only mention any of this got in the wider universe was Dario Agger being told how Baintronics social media was overtaking Roxxon's in a Hulk issue.

Everyone else seems to have completely missed the massed robots in the streets, just like they did in Secret Avengers and Avengers AI before this.

[zachbeacon]

I mean that's always been a thing with stories that stick to one title or franchise. Its weird when nobody notices Magneto* took over NYC or Kang nuked Washington DC**.

*Or Sublime possessing Xorn pretending to be Magneto pretending to be a different Xorn.

**But a few hundred kids die as collateral damage when the New Warriors fight Nitro and and it's a world changing event.