Nu Iron Man #7 is out!

TL;DR: This is probably the best issue of Cantwell's run so far. The pacing is flawed, but for once, there was nothing here that completely bounced me out of the story because it was obnoxious and/or out-of-character. The ending is rather worrying, but for now? Okay, this was fine.

Read beyond the jump for the specifics!

We begin the issue with a scene between Tony and Rhodey as they continue to tinker with their armor and discuss Tony's plan to take Korvac out with a mega-punch (which, as I noted last time, is pretty lame given Tony's established engineering genius). The spirit of said scene, I thought, was very nice. I could feel their camaraderie -- and the tension between Rhodey's concern for Tony's well-being and Tony's (possibly false) bravado.

I will say this, though: moments like the above really serve to underscore how much the earlier issues of this run were handicapped by Rhodey's absence. Tony's bro should've been here from the very beginning.

Elsewhere on the ship, meanwhile, the rest of Tony's team has a long conversation about who or what God is in the 616. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to add much to the issue and really kills the momentum -- and I say this as someone who's generally up for the occasional philosophical interlude in my comics. Here, once again, I felt that Cantwell needed some heavier editorial guidance in re: the proper use of real estate just to keep his tendency to pontificate to a minimum.

Then we switch to a conversation between Tony and Patsy in which they display all the romantic chemistry of two siblings (yeah, still not a fan of this pairing). Tony notes that Patsy's telepathic connection to Korvac can be reversed, Patsy agrees that this is worth trying -- and, through hand-wavey comic book magic, Patsy and Tony hijack Korvac's mind to probe the guy's intentions. This is where things actually get interesting for a reader (i.e., me) who's been conducting livestreams on well-known works of dystopian fiction.

Korvac, you see, wants to purge the universe of messy particularity and absorb all living things into a hyper-rational "aggregate" in which there is only sameness. This obliteration of the unique self, he believes, will end hate and suffering. Tony, rightly, finds Korvac's clean and crystalline vision of the future profoundly disturbing and says so. And the reader breathes a sigh of relief because Cantwell has finally gotten to his point and spelled out the precise nature of the conflict between our hero and the villain with the clarity and lack of pretension that this medium demands. Or, as my pal Marm would say, he's written it so an eight-year-old can understand what's at stake -- and that's good.

But as I suggested above in the TL;DR, what happens next is likely to derail this entire thing. Basically, Tony gets yeeted out of the battle with Korvac and sent to who-the-eff-knows-where:

And the description of issue #8 strongly implies that Patsy is the one who will ultimately take Korvac down in Tony's absence. To which I say: nay! This is an Iron Man comic; Tony is the one who should be given the victory. Seriously, Cantwell: if you wanted to write a Hellcat book, you should've just pitched a Hellcat book and kept your hands off my boy. It's not copacetic to delete your title character from the narrative for the sake of indulging your curious obsession with a thoroughly third-tier (at best) female hero instead.

Sigh. It's truly sad when a writer of some genuine ability fails to live up to his potential.

Edited to add: And here's my stream with Marm discussing this issue.

On to the next issue!