Review: ‘Invincible Iron Man’ #18 Gets The Job Done, But It’s Hard To Care

Though the two haven’t interacted much directly through the years, Iron Man and Magneto are connected in some interesting ways. Both are children of the Silver Age. Iron Man’s powers come from wearing a metal suit, while Magneto can control metal.

Also, there’s very little iron in Iron Man’s armor, and Stan Lee had a pretty laissez-faire idea of what was and wasn’t magnetic (i.e. everything and nothing). Despite a relative dearth of on-page history, throughout his run on Invincible Iron Man writer Gerry Duggan has played up the relationship between the two. Chiefly, by establishing that Tony Stark has a great deal of fear and/or respect for Magneto and has thought up countermeasures against him.

Those seeds — as much a part of the book’s closer ties to the X-Men title in this era as anything — come to something of a culmination in Invincible Iron Man #18, which also seems to mark the end of that era of the book. 

Invincible Iron Man #18 is, essentially, a team-up between Iron Man, Magneto and Feilong to take down Nimrod. With the AI portions of Orchis having confirmed they’re targeting humans as well as mutants (as detailed in comics that aren’t this one), Tony uses Magneto to power up his Sentinel busting armor after it ran out of juice fighting Feilong in the previous two issues.

Then he has Feilong direct the trio and their giant Iron Man to secret Orchis Sentinel factories so they can shut them down. Along the way, they run afoul of Nimrod, and fight him. It’s a fairly straightforward plot, but there’s plenty of space for some interesting ideas: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, science wizard Tony Stark fighting machine intelligence, even just the rudimentary idea of a man who looks like a robot fighting a robot who looks like a man. 

Unfortunately, Duggan doesn’t really explore any of those thematic areas. Everything in Invincible Iron Man #18 is pretty basic. It’s a standard crossover tie-in issue even if there isn’t a blatant “Part X of Y!” notation on the cover. Nothing too significant can happen, because the big moments have to be held for the series telling the “main” plot.

It’s hardly a spoiler to say that, in the end, the trio manage to defeat Nimrod, but of course, it’s just one of Nimrod’s bodies, because no matter how tightly Duggan has wed Invincible Iron Man to the X-books, the end of Nimrod isn’t going to happen here. Which is fine — that’s the game, after all. But the lack of thematic exploration being hung on that basic framework means Invincible Iron Man #18 is left with little but some routine fight scenes before reaching its expected conclusion. 

Moreover, the best material in the issue comes from Magneto, not Iron Man. Whether it’s his deadpan response to meeting Feilong or the way he reacts to the Mysterium which comprises much of Tony’s giant Iron Man suit, Invincible Iron Man #18 features its title character playing second fiddle to a guest star. Duggan does give Tony a brief heroic moment, breaking off from the fight to make sure a passenger train doesn’t derail, to remind us who the protagonist of the story is. It’s appreciated, but not enough. 

It also doesn’t help that Creees Lee and Walden Wong’s art is similarly ho-hum. It’s not bad; the figures look like they should, the panel layouts support the action and the action is easy to follow. But that’s all it is. It gets the job done, but in the least exciting way possible. A big giant Iron Man fighting Sentinels, Magneto hurling metal at Nimrod, Tony Stark pouring energy into a metal spear protruding from Nimrod’s chest: these are all moments that call for big, bombastic, over-the-top art. Instead, while the art technically depicts those events as they occur, it does so in a manner that diminishes, rather than enhances, their power and impact. There’s more energy and excitement in Kael Ngu’s cover than in the rest of the pages combined. 

Again, Invincible Iron Man #18 isn’t a bad comic. It shows up, it gets the job done, and then it’s over. Maybe that’s the best one can hope for in an Iron Man comic participating in a big X-Men event that can only go so big so as not to overshadow events happening elsewhere. But there are ways to participate in a crossover and still make an impact, and there’s no shortage of such opportunities in this issue. The man of iron and the master of magnetism, fighting side by side; that alone should be worth the price of admission. But the execution of that idea is so workmanlike, it robs even that basic premise of much of its appeal.