Friday Night Fights--Dylan Thomas Style!!

It's time for Friday Night Fights, and this time I promise--no Jim Aparo Brave & The Bold--it's an unfair advantage.

So let's instead leap forward to the early 1990s. Tony Stark is dying, the cybernetic interface with his armor having caused a degenerative nerve disease. He can only be Iron Man by remote control.

But he's still not dying fast enough for arch-enemy Justin Hammer. So, Hammer frames Stark for causing the meltdown of a Japanese nuclear reactor (!), and the plant owner hires 3 Yakuza ninja to hunt down and kill Stark.

The ninja, The Masters Of Silence, aren't your typical ninja. They have psionic powers that allow them to turn themselves invisible; they have all sorts of advanced technical armor and gear; and they are immune to normal repulsor blasts. So, they make short work of the puppet Iron Man armor.

Which means that it's time for Tony to create the War Machine armor (yup, this is its first appearance) and trick the ninja into Stark's very own holodeck (seriously).

Let the fighting commence!
















BAM!!!!

Spacebooger is compelled to note how similar that is to a scene in Kill Bill Part I...and he wonders if Quentin read this comic...

Len Kaminski, Kevin Hopgood, Bob Wiacek, and a special shout-out to colorist Mike Rockwitz bring us the classic clash of cyber-ninja versus armored arsenal in Iron Man #282 (1992)

Now is the time for you to go and vote for my fight this week. Why? Because I'm on a roll, and everyone likes to side with a winner, right? So go vote!!!!

New Rules For Marvel's Use Of Point One Issues

As Marvel continues to expand on the...uh...success(?) of their...uh...brilliant (?) "Point One" initiative...

...it's come to my attention that we now need to lay down a few laws about their use.

Attention, Marvel:

#1:
If the title already has a decimal point in it, you cannot have a point one issue.

Can you imagine going up to the counter of your local comics shoppe and having to ask for "Iron Man Two Point Oh Seven Point One??" That's just embarrassing, although I'm sure it would lead to many a "Who's On First" routines.

Your call, Marvel...change the title of the magazine to something reasonable, or no Point One issue.

#2:

If you're only six issues in, yet you need to offer a "perfect jumping on point" to your comic, you're doing something wrong. So the new rule:

No Point One issue if your comics' regular number is lower than 24,

I know, I know, what are the odds of that, when every comic is rebooting its numbering as fast as a Wall Street firm shredding its records. Still, we can hope, right?

Any more suggestions?

Friday Night Fights--Iron Man 1995 Style!!

This current bout of Friday Night Fights is Minimum Clonage--we can't re-use any fighters during these twelve rounds. So let's check my list so far:

Spider-Man
Judomaster
Marl Kincaid
T.H.E. Cat
Namor
Mr. Kotter
John Carter Of Mars
Steed and Mrs. Peel
Ant-Man (Henry Pym)
Shang-Chi
The Flying Nun

Of course, I have an additional burden on me this week: it's Marvel 1995 Week, so my fight must come from a Marvel comic with a July 1995 cover date. Whatever shall I do??

Yeah, leave it to Iron Man to provide meaningful fisticuffs in an otherwise dire month!

The scoop: Tony Stark's never-mentioned-before-or-ever-again mentor, Ted Slaght, had been working for Stark Indusrties. But the onset of Alzheimer's (Slaght's, not Tony's) forced Stark to relieve him as the head of his project. Which was a good idea, but too little to late, as the usual exploding experiment has transmuted Slaght into...SLAG!!


OUCH!! Proceed, then, to witness a complete beat-down:






Voila!! Even Spacebooger's white-hot wrath cannot match the fury of SLAG!!!

This fight was brought to you by:

And more about this issue after the jump. And, please, vote, won't you??



**That FW in the logo stands for Force Works, the worst-named superhero team EVER that rose from the ashes of West Coast Avengers. That was before Marvel decided that they must have as many Avengers books as X-Men books, obviously.

**This was the final issue of Len Kaminski's 40-odd issue run. Her got out just in time...

**When Tony Stark was in college, he went to class dressed like a total douche:

Plus, he couldn't even grow his full porn-star mustache yet...

**But in 1995...he still dressed like a douche.

Bless you, Tony Stark!

**Nothing divides Iron Man fans so much as to whether or not they think a particular set of armor is "cool" or not. In 1995:

My vote is "not."

**Oh, yes, the villain. During the inevitable re-match, Iron Man tries to freeze him...

...but that doesn't work so well:

So Shellhead uses super science to frak him up good:



BEST. SOUND. EFFECT. EVER.

And at least Tony has the decency to feel bad about it...

**A constant refrain this week has been that, as bad as July 1995 might have been in Marvel, much much worse was just around the corner. This is especially true of Iron Man. Two months later, The Crossing would begin, in which:

A) It is revealed that Tony Stark has been a hypnotized sleeper agent for Kang for a number of years, and

B) Tony goes completely off the deep end, killing several allies of the Avengers (but no actual Avengers--crazy members actually killing other Avengers would have to wait for Bendis...), and

C) The Avengers bring a 15 year-old Tony Stark over from an alternate dimension, thinking to fight super-genius with super-genius, and

D) When Stark sees his young doppelganger, he realizes what a douche he is, breaks free of Kang's control, and sacrifices his life to save all of time and space, and

E) 15 year-old Stark takes over the mag and the armor.

Dear lord, I wish I were making some of that up.

That state of affairs lasted only 6 months, before Heroes Reborn and Jim Lee took over. In this one single instance, it just might have been an improvement...nah, of course not.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of armored heroes and the Force Works family:

Here is what I have to tell you about this issue. Written by Dan Abnett, it involves a "time quake," and Jim Rhodes teams up with Captain America, Bucky, and the Howling Commandos, to prevent 1995 neo-Nazis from sending advanced armor weaponry back in time to the Third Reich.

Damn. That sounds like the most perfect comic ever...