InsaneJournal

Slowly getting to the end.
Four scans from Invincible Iron Man #17, with which this story has only two parts to go.

First off, in a scene that follows up on one of my earlier posts, Osborn gets word from Madame Masque that she's killed Pepper and secured her armour, and so he decides to head into Russia to pick them up (Pepper is pretty obviously posing as Masque here). Of course, he's previously been denied entry by Colonel Bukharin:




His accent's a lot less of a purposeful gag here. I do like what Fraction's done with this guy in his, like, two scenes.

Elsewhere, the single-most obviously overstretched plot heads towards its end, as Maria Hill and Black Widow prepare to meet with Captain America (an event that Widow seems to think far more complicated than it really should be for her; seriously, stick Maria in a car trunk and drive to his place in Brooklyn; she goes their regularly enough for sex). Anyhoo, instead they spend a bunch of time setting up a meeting in some industrial site. However, Hill realizes that HAMMER agents are swarming all over the place:




That bit at the end there I really liked.

I don't find anything wrong with the fundamentals of this story, and Fraction evinces a good handle on the cast, but this story would have the urgency he clearly wants it to have at maybe eight issues. At twelve, it's often painfully slow.

I think Fraction has two different story models going here, which are at cross-purposes: on the one hand, the big Jeph Loeb-style "journey through a character's whole universe, with appearances by everyone and their dog", which is heavy on spectacle; and on the other a tighter thriller story.