Iron Man #22 Review

You have to hand it to Kieron Gillen. Even if he's saddled with writing another Mandarin story so soon after Matt Fraction's Mandarin epic, at least he isn't telling the same story we've seen before. And that pretty much sums up the strength of his Iron man run in general. Even if some elements don't always come together, at least Gillen is trying new things and experimenting with Tony Stark's world.

Issue #22 wraps up "Iron Metropolitan" and the first leg of Gillen's Mandarin storyline. And maybe that's the core flaw with this arc - that it reads so much like a means to a larger end. Gillen hasn't developed the idea of Troy and and the Stark brothers building a city of the future as well as he might have. Meanwhile, the idea of the Mandarin rings seeking out individual hosts sort of fizzles out as the real enemy emerges. There's an ample amount of good ideas at work here, especially pertaining to the relationship between Tony and Arno, but the ideas aren't being explored to their fullest.

On the plus side, penciller Joe Bennett and inker Scott Hanna finish out the arc in style. Bennett is given the chance to cut loose and render plenty of carnage between the various Iron Man armors and the ring-wielders. And the result in unusual in regards to Gillen's run, in that the issue is often more viscerally satisfying than intellectually. We'll see how this storyline progresses as "Rings of the Mandarin" gets underway.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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