A Bunch of Snobby Rich People

     Well, it was that time of year again: Free Comic Book Day.  While it may not have been as exciting for me personally as last year, I did make off with a bunch of comics and a couple of good trade paperbacks.  Of the free comics, however, the only one I picked up was Iron Man/Thor, since I like both of those characters quite a lot, and it’s by Matt Fraction.  What’s not to like?  So, Thor is flying around the world dealing with absolutely crazy weather patterns that are destroying all sorts of stuff.  Then he notices clouds swirling on the moon.  Tony Stark meets with some guys who are creating a city on the moon for rich people to live on, and Tony basically tells them that they’re crazy, so forget it.  Tony realizes that they’re using his tech, so while he starts to investigate, he bumps into Thor, who wants to know what’s going on.  Tony explains to him that he created one machine for terraforming, and one for weaponizing weather.  And now, those guys on the moon are using the latter to terraform the moon, and it’s wrecking the weather on Earth.  So despite the issues between these two, they head off over to the moon to stop what’s going on.  They tear through the city’s defenses and eventually reach all the people living there.  The rich assholes tell them that because they are rich, they can renounce living on Earth and do whatever they want, since they have more rights.  Tony ends up putting them all on one of his space stations and sends it in an orbit between Earth and Mars.  Then, he and Thor get to work cleaning up those schmucks’ mess.

     All in all, that was a nice fun story that showcases Fraction’s skill at writing Tony Stark and Thor.  While I do think it’s rather unbalanced, since Fraction’s take on Tony is one of the definitive ones, he’s no slouch with Thor either.  I do wish, however, that they would lose the gloves with Thor.  I don’t know why John Romita Jr. likes to draw him with gloves, since he doesn’t wear gloves, and they look silly.  At any rate, this, like other of Fraction’s great Iron Man stories, really contrasts Tony with other rich folks to a rather funny effect.  While I do wish Fraction had done more of his homework, since Tony already had weather-manipulating tech in the works back in Mighty Avengers (which went by a different name), I won’t hold that against him.  Much, anyway.  Of course, Romita Jr.’s pencils are second to none.  His faces certainly have more nuanced emotion than I remember, showing that he’s still evolving as an artist.  And yet he’s still got everything else down solidly enough that it’s clear why I started loving his work in the first place.  I also significantly prefer his take on the new Iron Man suit to everyone else’s, because he makes it a tad bulkier and the helmet a bit less angular, so it just looks more uniform.  So in conclusion, this was a fun story that wasn’t that serious while showing why Matt Fraction rocks on everything but Uncanny X-Men and why John Romita Jr. is one of the best comic book artists around.

Plot: 8.8      Art: 9.4      Dialogue: 9.0      Overall: 8.8