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It’s Iron Man madness yet again! The Marvel Premiere Hardcover Classics that preceded this one was an Iron Man book and this was done surely to set up the movie. I still haven’t seen it yet. Deadly Solutions was Iron Man’s return to the Marvel Universe coming off a year-long absence after the Onslaught Disaster. This collects Iron Man (Vol. 3) #’s 1-7 and each issue was written by Kurt Busiek and illustrated by Sean Chen (although Patrick Zircher pitched in a fill-in job for #6) and it hit the shelves monthly starting in February of 1998.
The story starts innocently enough. Tony is back, he starts a new company (Stark Solutions) and doesn’t want to take his old company (which joined with another company) back. He brings Happy and Pepper into the fold, not knowing they were divorced and more importantly, Iron Man is back on the scene. Of course, someone is gunning for Tony Stark and they are after his life. Who is it? Tony doesn’t know and the next 7 issues hope to resolve that. Tony battles a group of soldiers called the Deathsquad, the Siege Engineers and the Dreadnoughts, discovers an arms dealer that is selling off weapons, battles an enemy called Firebrand as he’s in a tropical island (that is completely destroyed), teams with Black Widow to stop a kidnapping of scientists scheme and stops a Sentry with a drunk Ms. Marvel. In the end, he stops Vanessa Snow from selling out to the Kree and stopping a Kree attack on Earth.
-The Bottom Line- There is plenty of action going on during the 7-issues and Chen does a noble job of illustrating. I feel that Busiek did the best he could with what he was given and the first six issues were chock-full of happenings and goings-on. However, it seemed that the prerequisite Avengers tie-in was needed and Ms. Marvel was chosen as the Avenger in dire need of help. She’s facing an alcohol problem now and it brings in a brand new element that wasn’t seen in the previous six issues of the Kree. I felt that the first six issues were really headed somewhere good but the final issue just went in a totally different direction and I don’t even know if we figured out WHO was trying to kill Stark. Was it Vanessa Snow or the Kree? It wasn’t made clear and it hurt the overall enjoyment of this collection. I also wonder why this was collected of all things. There was NO Iron Man story that was better to release around the time of the movie? Also, there is a $25 cover price here (though let’s go with the $17 Amazon price for our guide). That’s $17 for 7 issues, just slightly over the book value (about $25) which means you can get this for a lot cheaper on E-Bay. It’s a decent story, although certainly not on the caliber of other stories presented in the Premiere Hardcover Format and just for price alone I’d have to say this is a book that belongs in the avoid column.
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Questions? Comments? Shoot me an email.
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