Written by: Gail Simone
Art by: Paolo Villanelli
Colors by: Edgar Delgado
Letters by: VC’s Joe Carmagna
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 5, 2019

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve fallen a bit off of the normal run of Tony Stark: Iron Man. The book has suffered through numerous delays and the overall story has been a lot of setup and little payoff so far, in my opinion. So, why am I suddenly reviewing this issue? Two words…Gail Simone. Yep, I am a big fan and I go where Gail takes me! Whether or not I stay when she is done is a question for later because right now, I want to see if she can get me excited with a War of the Realms tie-in story. Does she? Let’s find out…

We open with Malekith heading to Jotenheim to ask Sadurang, the Asgardian Dragon and former student of Dormammu, a little favor…kill Iron Man. Yea, the Dark Elf has a bit of a weakness for iron so he mentions the trigger words for a dragon…gold, gold and more gold.

Meanwhile, Tony is working on a solution to Bruce Banner’s little Hulk problem. Of course, that itself is a problem for Rhodey and we have the back and forth that Tony goes through at least 5 times a day. All that aside, Simone has created some Stark helperbots that will forever remind me of the awesomeness of Morrissey and Johnny Marr and I thank her for that! Plus, they are partially run on a dating app…Swipe right, indeed!!! As things usually do around Tony, his Hulkbot / Gammadroid / Mr. Incredible prototype goes haywire and Tony has to blast it’s head off. Simone does a good job here of tying in some bits of the recent eScape story while also giving the reader some giggles as well.

Getting back to the War of the Realms stuff, Sadurang shows up at Stark Unlimited in his flaming hands barbarian in a suit persona and wants all the gold. The shit really hits the fan when he gets back to being a dragon and with the Stark defense dead (or at least speaking a dead language) Rhodie and Dr. Shapiro are on the attack.

The issue ends with some Latin-knowing nerd getting a promotion, Tony showing up to kick dragon ass and Sadurang running away to gather some spells. The cliffhanger, however, shows that Tony may have a bit of those up his armored sleeve…but is that a good thing?

Gail Simone gives readers a pretty good issue of Iron Man that is better suited for readers of this run than those just showing up for the War of the Realms stuff. She ties in a ton of stuff that Dan Slott has set up and expands on it a bit herself. One of the things that intrigued me from the get-go was Tony wondering if this second life was really him and Simone adds the idea of not ruining the “fresh start” as well. Plus, there are a ton of jokes and pop culture references that I always enjoy when Gail is in the house.

I like Paolo Villanelli’s art, but I really liked Paolo Villanelli’s art with Edgar Delgado’s colors which make everything pop off the page. I’ve mentioned this before, but reading this digitally on a tablet looked so good.

Final Thoughts:

Gail Simone jumps on Iron Man and while it was more for regular readers of the run, hopefully, War of the Realms readers who check it out can have some fun with it as well. It is peppered with the usually Simone pop culture references and jokes so if that’s not your thing, you’ve been warned. It is 100% my thing and because of that, I had fun with a book that had recently had fallen off my pull list.

8.0/10