Welcome to the Machine: A Brief Review of The Invincible Iron Man: Extremis

"Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream? It's all right; we told you what to dream."
- Pink Floyd

As mentioned several times previously, Gentle Reader, Mr. Reads and I just returned from a lengthy trip abroad. As our plane tickets were much cheaper flying out of New Orleans, my hometown and our Winter Break Destination, than they were from our current place of residence, we went to the UK via The Big Easy, and drove the several hours to and from. This means that not only did we have over 20 hours of flight time, we also had over 16 hours of driving time, more, if you count the trips between The Reads' and The Reads-In-Laws' houses.

All of this preamble to say that Mr. Reads and I had a lot of time to talk on these lengthy driving legs of our trip, and, as things often happen when Mr. Reads and I are alone, without anyone to judge us, we talked, a lot, about comic books.

I'd like to offer you the question Mr. Reads posed to me somewhere around the Louisiana/Texas Border:

What comic book superhero as metaphor works the best?

Now, this is Quite An Intriguing Question, and I thought about it for a few miles. Batman seems the quick and obvious answer; The Dark Knight—-Byronic, broody, dark, melancholic in the Renaissance Sense—-seems a heavy-handed metaphor from the start, although over the past several years, the in-your-faceness of his symbolism has diminished slightly. Superman, too, for truth, justice, and the American Way, but let's not forget Wonder Woman, symbol of rising feminism and women's rights. The X-Men, as a whole, represent the periphery: what happens to the outsiders in a society hell-bent on destroying anything different? But I dismissed all of these out of hand, and offered this final answer:

Iron Man.

It's quite simple really, when you get right down to it. Tony Stark discovers he's dying, so he builds an iron suit to protect his fragile body. He creates weapons for the government in order to fund his superhero gang. The more elaborate, the more complex the suit, the more Tony *is* the suit. In fact, the more unified Tony is with his suit, as exemplified in the trade hardcover collection of The Invincible Iron Man: Extremis which I read during my trip, the less human he becomes, not because of his cybernetic flesh, but rather, because of his corporate soul.

Do you see it, Gentle Reader? The more Tony is the *suit*, the more he is The Suit.

Tony Stark is, above all else, a warning against the greedy corporate giants we see every day in the media, the ones who steal their employees' pensions, dump oil in land reserves, move businesses overseas so they can pay someone next to nothing to do backbreaking labor. His motives, while seemingly innocent, are almost always underlined by corporate initiative and interest. Tony Stark is in the business of making money, and Tony does his business, very well.

In fact, Tony Stark as The Suit is a metaphor that moves beyond the familiar Cyborg metaphor we have come to know and love since, really, the nineteenth century, but perhaps even before. Wilkie Collins' novel The Law and the Lady, for example, presents us with the character Miserrimus Dexter, who is described as "a strange and startling creature—-literally the half of a man" who comes into a courtroom "Gliding, self-propelled in his chair on wheels" (163) and rebukes anyone who touches his wheelchair as to do so is to lay hands upon himself. For, as Miserrimus often says, "My chair is Me" (138). He for certain is the Cyborg, the half-man, half-machine that we have seen for some time now. Count them, if you will, in comics (Cyborg, Iron Man, Cable, Deathlok), in literature (Frankenstein to some degree, Gibson's Case and Molly), in movies and television (Terminator, Robocop, the Borgs). They are everywhere, reminding us of our continuing dependence on technology to save us.

But where Iron Man moves beyond that beautiful-in-its-simplicity metaphor is in this fact: he is not dependent on the technology, but rather, the technology is dependent on him. As The Suit, as The Corporation, Tony Stark decides more than any one man ever should decide. Civil War presents the aftermath of this overwhelming power, as does the seductiveness of all Tony has to offer. Look at those who have fallen under his sway; I could name several, but I think Peter Parker speaks to them all.

In Warren Ellis's and Adi Granou's The Invincible Iron Man: Extremis, we see the dangers not of a man obsessed with science and technology and yes, it's true, Friends, not even his own mortality, but rather, the very simple danger of a man obsessed with making money. When being interviewed by a documentary maker, Tony Stark responds to accusations of his impartiality at the world's suffering: "Am I an arms dealer? No. Did I start out as a weapons designer? Yes. Do I intend to die as one? No." For Tony, at this moment, the ends without a doubt justify the means. He believes the initial intentions for his inventions don't really matter, that their lethal origins are overwritten by the good he's wrought as well. The filmmaker asks Tony, "Do you think they have your painkilling drug pumps in Iraq? Do you think an Afghan kid with his arms blown off by a landmine is remotely impressed by an Iron Man suit?" to which Tony responds, "I never claimed to be perfect. I always knew there would be blood on my hands. I'm trying... I'm trying to improve the world."

Tony Stark is trying to improve the world by rewriting it in the image he sees fit. Jump ahead to Civil War, and that image is one of order and registration. In this book, that image is one in which he controls and maintains the ultimate weaponry power. In Tony Stark's perfect world, he, and only he, is The Perfect Machine.

"My chair is Me," Miserrimus Dexter says, and the 21st century response from Marvel Comics could be, "My suit is Me." Tony Stark is defined not by what he gives the world, but by what Iron Man can take from it: technology, money, safety, danger, all of it's the same in a Stark Industry kind of world. Even though Tony says, "I went from being a man trapped in an iron suit to being a man freed by it," the ending of this arc belies those words.

Tony melds himself with the suit using the advanced technology that sparked the latest rampage on the unsuspecting public. He becomes one with the suit, can see through satellites because of it. Or, as he tells Maya, his scientist companion, "We can reconfigure Extremis to do all those jobs. Make me the Iron Man inside and out."

And lucky for Tony, he's brilliant. He does become the Iron Man inside and out, literally in this case. When Maya asks, "Tony... what have you done?" He tells her, "This. Supercompressed and stored in the hollows of my bones, Maya. I carry the crucial undersheath of the Iron Man suit inside my body now. Wired directly into my brain. I control the Iron Man with thought. Like it was another limb."

The only problem with being The Suit inside and out is that you no longer know where you fit into all of this mess. And isn't that why we love Iron Man? Isn't that why we read Tony Stark, watch him self-destruct again and again, because we love our very broken men consumed by their jobs, their passions, their vendettas, their insecurities? Until I read this book, Tony reminded me of Bruce Wayne, Marvel's answer to The Batman problem. After reading this book, I realized that Tony Stark had a much different DC twin.

Lex Luthor.

Two men, both driven, both determined, both dying but for the grace of God and suit, both corporate Giants, both rich and morally ambiguous—-sometimes doing good, sometimes doing evil, but always for their own ends. Both sometimes blinded by their obsessions: for Lex, Superman, and for Tony, alcohol. Both self-destructive and self-loathing, again and again and again.

But for Tony Stark, in this book, there is a tiny ray of Hope. What the art presents us with—-besides sheer gorgeousness-—are little moments of reflection. Reflective surfaces are nothing new for the Cyborgs of literature; think only of all that shiny metal, or Molly's mirrored lenses surgically placed in her eye sockets. This book presents us with dozens of such reflections: Tony confronting the suit, the suit confronting others, even the buildings made of mirrored tempered glass. But most importantly, we see Tony confronting mirrors. In the beginning of the book, he takes a shower and then sees his reflection in the mirror. "What are you looking at?" Tony asks his reflection, or his reflection asks Tony. We're never quite sure, even when he says, "I hate it when you look at me like that."

This confrontation, mirrored (no pun intended, Gentle Reader!) in the very last scene of the book, demonstrates that there is hope for Tony. That as long as he continues to be reflective, introspective, diving inwards for the answers to The Iron Man, he may, just may avoid becoming Marvel's Lex Luthor. That maybe, just maybe, Tony can coexist with the machine, rather than consume it. Because The Iron Man Suit represents corporation *and* the hope for a better, brighter tomorrow.

Because, Gentle Reader, isn't that the very promise of technology?