I Am Iron Man #1 starts a tour of Iron Man’s life through the eras to celebrate Tony Stark’s 60th Anniversary as the man behind the mask. What adventures await?

Is It Good?

Ehh. Well, hmm. I don’t know what to make of I Am Iron Man #1. It’s not a terrible comic, and it’s also not a great comic. Billed as a series of stories (one-shots?) designed to take a living tour through the eras of Iron Man’s history, this first issue reads and feels like a confusing, incomplete short story. The creators are trying to celebrate Iron Man through the past, present, and future, but the wraparound story is so clunky and confusing. It’s like receiving a birthday present in stained, mutilated wrapping paper.

I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

Ayodele weaves a tale about (you have to get to the end to figure this out) a time traveler who kills Iron Man at various points throughout the titular character’s history as part of some cathartic therapy or release or something (it’s never explained). Iron Man figures out the time traveler’s gameplan and eventually steals away the time travel device to right a past wrong that has already been corrected from the time traveler’s point of view.

Truly, you have to wait until the last page to figure out any of that plot, and even then, I’m making some assumptions to fill in the blanks. When the story ends, it doesn’t end so much as it stops on an emotional beat. It feels like a vignette or partial short story that doesn’t have enough time to fully develop because you never see Iron Man’s final act as it’s only implied or suggested.

Put another way, the story execution is clunky, disjointed, confusing, and just plain weird. An editor should have stepped in to make this script make sense before it ever got to the art team, but here we are.

However, Dotun Akande’s art converts this issue from a jumbled mess into a serviceable mess. The fight scenes are interesting due to Dotun Akande’s unique figure style and eye for motion. The simulation graphics look great, and the time traveler’s “minions” are distinctive. In general, I like the look of this comic, even if the story is a confusing mess.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Final Thoughts:

I Am Iron Man #1 is a love letter to Iron Man’s history, but the incoherent plot, clunky scene transitions, and incomplete ending ruin a perfectly good story. The stylized art looks great, and the action scenes have a wow moment or two, but an editor should have straightened this script out long before it went to the artists.

5.5/10