“Yesterday’s” Comic> Iron Man vol 3 #47

“That’s not how Vision does it.”

Iron Man volume 3 #47

Marvel Comics (December, 2001)

“The Frankenstein Syndrome” part 2

WRITER: Frank Tieri

PENCILER: Keron Grant

INKERS: Stull, Perotta, & Ketchum

COLORIST: Edgar Tadeo

LETTERER: Randy Gentile

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Youngqust & Sumerak

EDITOR: Tom Brevoort

Iron Man gets pounded by the Sons Of Yinsen and manage to take Sun Tao, but not before he tells Pepper and Happy about hoping to use the sentient armor to resurrect Yinsen. However, something went wrong in the process, as Iron Man has suspected. He also learns what the sentient armor did to Jocasta, and I’ll come back to THAT in a moment. With her help Iron Man manages to break into the Sons’ ship, where he learns that Tiger Minh, the boy who killed Wong Chu for revenge after he killed a woman Minh had a crush on, is now the guy in charge. He also learns that “Yinsen” used the SKIN and grafted it to his followers, and can also control the mechanical heart the armor put in Tony’s chest. This indeed isn’t Yinsen…it’s actually Ultron!

What they got right: Using Ultron to explain why Tony’s armor went sentient works much better than blaming Y2K.

What they got wrong: Practically everything else. The art is still terrible. Tiger Minh must have aged a lot in a few months (tops) because he looked like a teen the last time we saw him and near thirty here. The SKIN being used this way is grotesque but that’s more personal preferences than a critical error. No, the real crime here is when Jocasta explains why she hid herself…because the sentient armor (and Tony even calls it this) committed the computer program version of RAPE on Jocasta. Yep, add yet another name to the Marvel heroine rape victim list. If not outright rape then some form of sexual assault or whatever equivalent Ultron did on Jocasta, who I remind you Ultron created based on Janet Van Dyne and thus is technically HIS DAUGHTER! Unless you want us to believe Ultron wasn’t the sentient armor, which would explain why it saved Tony, but that’s not really a defense. The Sentient Armor cyber-raping Jocasta instead of Ultron doesn’t change how stinking unnecessary it was to add this to her backstory! What is even the hell, Frank Tieri?

Recommendation: I can’t in good faith recommend this issue. Maybe it’s vital to the whole arc and you kind of have to but if the arc turns out to be crap anyways who cares? And if it turns out to be good I STILL can’t recommend this thing. The one thing it does right doesn’t make up for everything it did wrong. Horribly wrong!