Tony Stark goes to Hell. Too good for him, we say! A.X.E: Avengers #1 is written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Federico Vicentini, colored by Dean White and lettered by Cory Petit.
Sean: As with many tie-ins to big events, the focus is on a specific moment in the story. For some of these tie-ins, it’s either a fight scene that didn’t need to be in the story, a character beat that is superfluous or important information that’s cut out of the main book because it would fuck with the pacing. Avengers-X-Men-Eternals: Avengers is the second one. Specifically, it’s the universe looking down on Tony Stark and sending him to hell for all that he has done.
Rasmus: See, right off the bat, this is going to be an interesting issue for us to tackle. Because I’m much less harsh on Tony Stark than you, Sean. Sure, he has made some questionable decisions over the years, and his main flaw is obviously his hubris. But he’s always trying the best he can and he definitely has good intentions, and with that mindset what can really go wrong? I mean, it’s not like the road to hell is paved with good intentions or anything, right?
Right?
Other People
Sean: So we open on our heroes walking in God’s innards. I’ve got to say, Vicentini and White do a superb job highlighting the moody atmosphere of the insides of God. Everything is dark, washed out and bleak in contrast to the neon nightmare the previous issues have presented.
Rasmus: Yeah, this is very much the horror movie part of the story. Walking in the guts of a god is very scary. Ironically, it amps up a bit and brightens as the monsters show up. It feels like a regular superhero comic for a few pages, until the horror vibes are back big time.
But before we get to that, we have some absolutely choice Mr. Sinister moments: Pitching himself as an Avenger, asking if he can rummage through dead Thor’s cloak closet, knowing exactly where to place the blame for everything that’s gone wrong since they built the Progenitor: on themselves. But mostly Tony, who’s trying to play holier-than-thou on Sinister, which should be easy, since he’s literally sinister, but somehow Tony fumbles it.
Sean: It really says something when Mister Sinister — noted eugenicist and Scott Summers fanboy — is not the worst person in the room. Especially when the nightmare that is Celestial antibodies decides to attack our heroes. Especially the ones that send you to hell.
…And One Was Death.
Sean: Tony Stark, you who were called Iron Man. You have traveled with us for 21,535 cycles by your reckoning of time. There is now something we have to tell you.
You are total ****.
Tony Stark is a man who ruins lives. Who destroys everything good and decent in this world of ours for the sole purpose of his desire to be a hero. To do right for the decades upon decades of cruelty he has wrought upon this world. A war profiteer who feels bad about it. Except, tellingly, his guilt isn’t in his war profiteering. It’s in the people who died since he became Iron Man. It’s the weapons he built in the wake of being Iron Man.
And he knows it. He knows he keeps fucking up, be it with the Superhero Registration Act and subsequent Civil War, the creation of a God (both in Judgment Day and with the Thorbot, to say nothing about the current run), the various ways he’s tried to save the world from his own failures, such that he’s addicted to it. He knows.
Even though he’s self-aware, it’s not enough. It’s not enough that he knows he’s ****. It’s not enough that he feels bad for being ****. He keeps being **** because the alternative is killing himself, and he’s too egotistical to just die. But then again, Tony would find a way to make dying an excruciating experience for everyone around him.
Of course, it’s telling that Tony can’t comprehend the worst of his deeds. His hell has no place for the people his weapons destroyed. The little people who were burned to ash by White Phosphorus drones. He can allude to the implications of all of this, but never grasp the horror. Whether this is by design or by limitation from a corporation who wanted to work with Northrop Gruman is irrelevant. The consequence is a limitation on the character of Tony Stark. He can’t see past his own egomania no matter how much he might want to. And people die as a result.
And yet, he passes.
Deus Ex Machina
Rasmus: Look, you’re not wrong. Tony is shit.
I mean, he starts the issue, as the entire group is walking into the horror dungeon that is the undead Celestial god, by making it all about himself, remarking how he’s the only Avenger present. Before both Sersi and Logan remind him that they too were Avengers (even serving on teams with him present). He has a severe problem seeing beyond himself.
Then he and Sinister argue, before Sinister points out that A) they’re all to blame for the mess they’re in and B) Tony is merely trying to unload his anger onto Sinister instead of facing it himself. He can’t handle his emotions, so he directs them outward, lashing out.
So yeah, Tony Stark is shit.
And yet…
He’s trying not to be. I think in many ways, that’s the source of his heroism. He’s not perfect, he has made mistakes and by god, he continues to make them. But he’s trying not to. He wants to do better, to be better. Yeah, a lot of the time, that just means he makes more mistakes, because he’s a clever idiot who can’t see that he actually needs other people and to face his problems head on.
He knows he’s done wrong in the past. He knows. That’s the whole reason he’s a superhero, to make up for past mistakes. First and foremost, to make up for his war profiteering (even if Marvel seems to ignore that part of his origin these days), but also to make up for Yinsen’s death, for the pain he has put Rhodey through and for the messes he gets the Avengers into, just to name a few of the many ways Tony keeps ****ing up.
Because he’s on an impossible mission.
One that I hadn’t really thought about before, but that the Progenitor (and via it, Kieron Gillen) gets. Tony keeps trying to build a perfect machine, because a machine failed his parents and caused their death. It wasn’t an assassination attempt, a faked death or any of the convoluted ideas that Tony (and the writers at Marvel) have put forth through the years. It was just car trouble. Tony is simply trying to build a machine that can do the job his parents’ car couldn’t do, and keep the people he cares about safe.
Well, that and chasing his dead father’s approval, but that’s like the mission for 90% of Marvel’s characters. But in a rare moment, he actually gets it. The Progenitor takes the form of Tony’s dead dad, tells him what he always wished his dad could and then lets him know that he’s too hard on himself and that he passes.
Which leads Tony to a startling realization: If the Progenitor is still testing him, then it’s still testing other people, too. The startling part isn’t that the Progenitor is still testing. It’s that Tony can finally see beyond himself.
Tony shows that even if we’re total shit, we can try not to be and maybe, just maybe, we can even succeed. There’s hope after all.
Jury Box:
- One of the difficulties with this issue (in terms of reviewing it) is that it’s basically a longform essay on Tony Stark. As such, everything is in the text rather than the subtext. We are told every detail about Tony’s failings and virtues. It’s an examination. It’s compelling reading, but makes for difficult writing.
- “Plan B! Stab them, Logan! Stab them with your claws!” is an all timer.
- Despite this mainly being a Tony-centric issue, Sinister has wonderful lines and moments here. Gillen should definitely do more with the character, like, I don’t know, doing an X-Men event focusing on him.
- In some regards, the final moment between Tony and his dad is akin to the ending of the Amazing Spider-Man tie-in for Judgment Day, wherein Peter is given a moment to speak to Gwen Stacy. Here, however, the moment feels more like God’s final Judgment on Tony rather than a reward for being a good person in spite of his setbacks. Note the degree of self-awareness in Howard Stark’s description of himself as “a terrible father. We wanted you so badly, and then when we had you, I still wasn’t great. We did a number on you, and then we left you.”
- Tony Stark as a “Broken machine [that] keeps on ticking away” is perhaps one of the more healthier interpretations of the character, right up there with Shane Black’s “The Mechanic Who Fixes Things.” We don’t need a billionaire, playboy philanthropist going about saving the world in the name of his own egomania. We just need someone who can fix what’s broken. And that often means not doing it alone. He is, after all, part of a team.
- Interestingly, what’s never brought up directly is Tony’s involvement with the Illuminati. I.e., the time he thought he could save the multiverse via committing mass genocide on a cosmic scale. Then again, as the Ultimate conclusion of that story came crashing down upon him, Tony declared he would change nothing about what he did. Sometimes you have to be honest about your own bastardry.
- As we’ve seen throughout this event, honesty gets you far. Being honest and true to yourself is what has gotten most people a pass.
- Tony might be shit, but at least he hasn’t killed an entire solar system. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next week as murderer of billions, Jean Grey, takes the center stage.
- Just to the right of her will be the Eternals in Death to the Mutants #3!
- And let’s not forget A.X.E.: Starfox!
- … Events are crazy, y’all.
Rasmus Skov Lykke
Rasmus Skov Lykke will write for food (or, in a pinch, money). When not writing, he spends his time with his wife, their daughter and their cats, usually thinking about writing.
