Recently, Marvel's new War Machine title finished its first arc, and I thought I'd post some thoughts on how I think it went.Overall, very good. In this story Rhodes starts his mission to take out the worlds untouchable bad guys by "Killing the **** out of them" My first gripe was that this was a far cry from the War Machine we knew and loved who did question the ethics of killing, but Jim's been through a lot since then, and indeed there isn't much left. In fact the reason he's picked up a bloodthirsty streak was even better explained. Now that he is a cyborg he can't forget, ever, anything. Every killing, atrocity and genocide, he remembers.
There have been a few changes to the general gist set up in the War Machine: Weapon of Shield story in iron man. Suzi Endo left in disgust of Jim's killing, to be replaced in issue 1 with his old friend Parnell. He also now has a ground crew in the form of Bethany cabe. He also has a new ability, to incorporate any technology into his armour automatically. This leads to some rather bizarre armour configurations later in the story.
The story itself sees Jim head out to the nation of Aquaria, to kill the CEO of arms company Eaglestar, and rescue Parnell's wife and Jim's old school crush Glenda. On the way he runs into Ares, God of war, which actually provides some of the story's finest points, the interplay between War Machine and Ares is top stuff. Ares admires Jim's work and forces him to take a good long look at how much of his humanity he has given up. At the end of the story Ares refers to War machine as his champion, hopefully a plot thread that will be followed up.
The art was good, not fantastic but good, grimy and muted. It suited the mood of the book. A particularly nice touch was when we see things from War Machine's POV, the chaotic mass of data really gives a good impression of how he sees the world.
So, at the end Osbourne has the newly cloned body for Jim, and indeed offers everyone a reward, but Jim has other ideas. It looks like he has a nice supporting cast, with the possible love triangle between Jim, Glenda and Parnell plus Bethany Cabe, Suzi Endo (Cybermancer from Force Works, yes, I remember Force Works) and new character Jake Oh, Ex SHIELD agent and medic. I'm genuinely interested to see where this is going.
Ok, so any war machine story is a soft sell on me, and it really would have had to have been utter drivel for me to hate it, but I like the characters, enjoyed the story and want to see where it is going next. War Machine is back.*
*Unless Marvel have cancelled the book by the time this gets posted
I enjoyed this a lot. It made good use of Dark Reign with Osborn, and made Ares into a genuinely interesting character.
ReplyDeleteI did think Rhodey's new ability to assimilate technology into himself was a bit overkill in places, but I really enjoyed the character arc, with Rhodey having distanced himself from his humanity since becoming a cyborg.
Shame his big satellite bit the dust though. That was cool.
Yeah, I really liked his big satellite. It woudl have been cool for that to be his teams permenant base.
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