Iron Man: Director of SHIELD #29 Review

IRON MAN: DIRECTOR OF SHIELD. #29
Written by Stuart Moore
Art by Roberto De La Torre

As someone that's been following the Knaufs' run on Iron Man: DoS, even if I didn't already know it was a guest writer, I was able to notice the change in voice, specifically in the narrative and style, of the writing for this issue. This immediately pulled me out of the story and made it less enjoyable on the whole for me. Others probably won't even notice the difference, as it's not as drastic a change as Fraction's Invincible Iron Man.

As the first of a four part story, this issue was concerned with setting up the plot. As such, we see Iron Man just "relaxing" in his new role as Director of SHIELD as he engages in a field op with his Alphas (the SHIELD agents in Iron Man-like armours), strictly in an agent role and supposedly letting Maria Hill lead the op.

The op was a "simple" search for nuclear devices supposedly planted by terrorists in a foreign country. After one goes off, Tony quickly finds the second and sees that it's far from the ordinary bomb. It's miniturized, has no nuclear fallout and is incredibly sophisticated. He struggles to disable it and uses his Batman-like prep time armour modifications to defuse it in time. As it was a small bomb and there was no fallout, the bomb that went off did relatively little damage to an abandoned part of the town.

From here, though, the story quickly gets convuluted and goes down hill. We're introduced to Nicolas Weir, "the other Nick Fury". I don't recall who he is, so I'm not sure if he's new or not, but he's a little upset with Tony Stark for making him and his wonderful gadgets obsolete with his Alphas and fancy armour, so he decides to rebuild a super weapon that nearly started WW3 during testing by SHIELD.

His nanobots go to work modifying and repairing the device and, just as he's found by SHIELD agents, the machine comes to life on its own and looks very Phalanx or techno-organic-like in nature. Weir quickly makes his escape and leaves the SHIELD troops to die.

Tony eventually reveals to us that the terrorist that claimed responsibility for the bombings is none other than Nasim Rahimov, a former classical pianist and connoisseur of Belgian Ales (wonder how, hic, Tony met him?). Rahimov's wife once painted the finest portrait of Tony Stark. Seeing as Rahimov has one arm, I'll guess Tony somehow is responsible for that and I'm also guessing that he was invovled in the wife's death. However, I don't know who this guy is or if he's even an old villain or if he's being made solely for this storyarc.

Simply put, this has the plot and story of the more super hero-like Invincible Iron Man, but is written in the dark / gritty / realistic / noir style that the Knaufs employ, making it read awkward for me. Maybe it's just the fact it's different that's throwing me off and others will enjoy this more than I did.

Verdict - Check It

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