I suppose it must be noted that, by this time, Iron Man has undergone the Extremis process, which means he now has a thin first layer of his suit stored inside his bones, and he can summon the outer bits via mental command. And also they could break off like this. This issue opens with Daisy Johnson, last seen in Secret War 5, chasing off an unwanted male admirer with her earthquake powers while reading in a park. And if you think celebrity tracin’ Mike Deodato missed out on the fact that she’s Angelina Jolie, you are a fool. Anyway, Sharon Carter shows up to bring her in because Cap wanted her. Bendis finally gets to write real Sharon after using her so much in Ultimate comics. But guess who else is getting pulled into this?
Sometimes things really work out on this blog. If I hadn’t covered those Young Avengers issues, I would’ve felt obligated to explain who all these people are. Also shout out to Deodato for swiping the wrong Iron Man helmet. In this transitional period, post-Extremis, he was showing up in the wrong helmet a lot, but here he’s swiped from Adi Granov, the guy who designed both helmets, so it’s extra egregious. Back in Cleveland, the bad guy has grown huge, and Iron Man is telling all the other Avengers they should actually run for it.
Hey, like on the cover! Carol swoops in to pick Tony up, still all Binary’d up, and then flies into bad guy again, who grabs her in his giant hand.
Seems like an experience you don’t have everyday. He keeps doing… whatever he’s doing to Carol until the Sentry shows up and hits him so fast no one saw him, blasting him into space, where they start to have a tussle on a level none of the other Avengers could participate in. 16 issues after killing Carnage, the Sentry finally does a second thing in this series. Back on Earth, the others rush to Carol, helping her get her feet back under her, and she tries to describe her experience.
The armor flying Steve down there is another, particularly funny Adi Granov swipe. I’m only catching all these because he’s not going any deeper than the covers of these Iron Man comics, and I looked at those myself for my last couple drawings to try to get the details right. But I didn’t outright swipe them. In space, the Sentry is overpowered and whooshed into the distance by some energy or whatever, and then bad guy man zooms back toward Earth.
(Iron Man swipe in panel 6)
Spider-Man knows what he is! That’s our guy. And, you know, most readers could also figure it out, reading that list of mutants depowered in House of M. But it’s nice for Spider-Man to be the brains. Next 2 pages are a splash of Michael headed back to Earth. A lot of pages wasted on frankly underwhelming splashes in this story. Like splash pages are cool, but “energy beam heading for photoshopped picture of Earth” is not an exciting splash page, let alone several of them across this story so far… I almost wonder i Bendis was playing for time, making this story longer before the entire publishing line had to get into lock step in a few months…