The rare moment Marvel let’s a 25th issue go by without it being an oversized, more expensive thing. The final New Avengers tie-in devotes its pages to Iron Man. Jim Chueng is up on art duties, inked by Livesay and colored by Justin Ponsor. Presumably the main book running late helped Cheung hit his own deadline. We begin with a mysterious man outside Avengers Tower, who uses a tablet to switch off the cape-killers outside and enter.
The mystery man turns off the alarm, and then apologizes to Jarvis for shooting him. Then Iron Man appears, threatening to kill the guy, but he says a code phrase and the Iron Man armor shuts down. Bendis just loves shutting that armor down. Mystery man says “Now the war is over.” Up on the helicarrier, after some investigation, Hill notices what’s happened and scrambles fighter jets and the whole nine in response.
As Hill and the gang dither outside, this guy keeps rambling and takes off Tony’s helmet. Tony, who calls him Kenny, could barely breathe in there without power, and then Kenny produces an antimatter generator and turns it on.
Cut to Hill being outfitted with all the latest in Marvel U spy tech as she prepares to breach Stark Tower. So she begins infiltrating as Kenny exposits that his bomb will make the whole building fold in on itself until there’s nothing left.
First of all, Hill started to give Tony this speech in New Avengers 20, but was interrupted. She’s been thinking about this for a long time. I was, I feel compelled to point out, the first person to catch this on the Bendis board, maybe anywhere. Second of all did Bendis and the Knaufs know they were both going to offer Tony the SHIELD Director gig in different ways? Seems odd. Most writers really seemed to pick a side in this event. Mark Millar was clearly on Iron Man’s team. Straczynski, Cap’s. But Bendis, being a better writer than either of them, just told stories about each of his characters that played to the event, whatever side they came down on. He did end up covering more anti-reg heroes than pro-, but that’s largely down to who the Avengers were at the time. Cap had Luke & eventually Spider-Woman on his team, Iron Man had Sentry. Despite hanging around the last few issues before the event, Ms. Marvel wasn’t on the team. Wolverine had his own solo title and at least one other team book, he didn’t need a spotlight, and Spider-Man was already appearing in 60 pages of solo content per month during this, he didn’t need anymore, either. But B just tried to do right by the event, character by character, and that was cool of him. Ok. We’re almost back to the main book. Almost. One last thing.