Official Iron Man 3 Prelude Comics!

If you are anything like me you are waiting with baited breath for the new Iron Man film to come out next week, and while we don’t have long to go now, Marvel have done us a solid in putting out some tie in comics to get us up to speed for the new movie.

I hit my local comic book shop Quality Comics last week to pick up the trade, headed out to the Daily Planet coffee shop and had a squiz.

The trade features a short comic catch up on Iron Man 2 and then shifts into the lead up to Iron Man 3. It includes the first issue of the Extremis series at the end. A solid book if you get the chance to grab a copy.

If you don’t have a chance to grab one and you’d like to know what the deal is before going to the Cinema this week, then please join me under the jump for Shawarma adventures featuring War Machine!

The Iron Man 2 catch up works well in the context of the prelude and I am glad that it’s included in the trade, though the story suffers somewhat from the clipped nature of a two issue comic. Given that it wasn’t a very strong story to begin with, this doesn’t bother me too much. It’s great to see Rhodey as War Machine and be reminded of his and Tony’s friendship and how he came to be War Machine in the first place. I’d completely forgotten that Black Widow’s purpose in that film was to assess Tony’s viability for the Avengers initiative; maybe I was busy being aghast by the general way the movie went down, including her costume and character. She seems better in this comic.

The prelude takes us further into Tony’s design of the War Machine model specifically for Rhodey and his use of it for military purposes. His particular investigation is of the group that captured Tony in the first Iron Man film; the cause of Tony building Iron Man in the first place. They have Hammer industry weapons and an agenda.

As it turns out they are targeting War Machine specifically because they want the tech and they think it’d be easier than going after Iron Man himself. But it seems that they don’t realise how well trained and robust both Rhodey and his War Machine armour are, until we discover at the end that the point of keeping him in battle and throwing everything at him was to scan his armour and collect data. Oh dear Rhodey. Not so good.

The best part of this prelude comic for me, aside from the opportunity to get a closer look at Rhodey and his purpose in the overall Iron Man universe, was the explanation as to why he didn’t take part in the events that went down in The Avengers. Being tied up investigating this group, and being blasted apart in Asia, meant that by the time he reached the conflict it was over. A hysterical one page image of Rhodey entering in on the gang eating Shawarma was my favourite development.   

Towards the end of the comic we are also introduced to the idea that the events of The Avengers have indicated to Tony that Iron Man and War Machine are not enough, that he needs to be prepared for threats of both this world and others, and he ends by suggesting that he needs to build an Iron Legion. Dun dun dun.

Are we excited? I know I am.