Captain America 17, Iron Man Annual 1

Captain America 17
Remender (w) and Klein (a) and White (c)

Dr. Mindbubble, the product of the mysterious Weapon Minus program, is loose and his old friend Ran Shen, the Iron Nail, is the first to contact him. They talk about how SHIELD has lost sight of any boundaries and how its power is too great before Mindbubble agrees to do his part to slow its growth. He finds Nick Fury, having lost Falcon, at the bottom of the cliff and quickly mindbubbles him (GET READY, I'm using this as a verb whenever I see fit). Back in New York, Cap and Jet talk about Cap's idealism and how, in Jet's opinion, he could maybe stand to have a little less. Cap does seem to recognize that occasionally his desire to capture and not kill allows greater crimes to happen later but it's not something he's willing to strike right away. He's pulled into a situation wherein a dirty bank manager is attacked by Shen's people, ready to bring him to Shen's dirty bank manager mine. Cap stops them but looks with disgust at the man he saved. He's called back to the Hub by Maria Hill, who informs him of Nuke's explosion and the deaths it caused, including the presumed deaths of Fury and Falcon. Cap blames himself but gets the slightest reprieve when Jet reveals that she can sense Falcon two miles downstream from the site, not dead. MEANWHILE, Dr. Mindbubble has so mindbubbled Fury that Fury attacks a SHIELD base, thinking it's a Hydra base, and "steals" the plans for a new and seemingly indestructible helicarrier.

There are a lot of things to really like about what's happening in this book right now. Among those things is the idea of Dr. Mindbubble. I'm not going to say yet that I think Mindbubble is a great character (though, I can't stress this enough, mindbubble is a great verb) because it's just too soon. However, the idea that Weapon Minus was a SHIELD project meant to counter Weapon Plus is very intriguing and rather goes to Iron Nail's point that SHIELD maybe does have too much power (anyone who's ever read anything with SHIELD in it, except maybe Hickman's work or Steranko's work, could have told you that). Where everything that came out of Weapon Plus (Cap before it was officially Weapon Plus, Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantomex, the Skinless Man, etc) was created for his strength and fighting prowess, Mindbubble was created for his power over the mind, where everyone of them (aside from Fantomex, who takes his own precautions) is susceptible. Actually, you know what, tangent time. In a world where like, EVERYBODY wears costumes that entail some sort of headgear, why does only Magneto, of the major characters, have the sort that blocks out telepathic communication. Sure in SOME cases it makes sense, it may be more likely that Wolverine will WANT to communicate telepathically with, say, Psylocke than that he'll be controlled telepathically but shouldn't there be like, some sort of switch or something that blocks telepathic communication? Like, your head is ALREADY covered, dude, just throw in some lead or something. ANYWAY, pretty good issue, glad Falcon's not dead (though I wouldn't have supposed he was), really like the idea of Weapon Minus to counter Weapon Plus.

Iron Man Annual 1
Two Cities: Gillen (w) and A. Martinez and R. Fernandez (a) and Sotomayor (c)
Orbital: Gillen (w) and Padilla and Hanna (a) and Staples (c)
By Moonlight: Gillen (w) and Marz (a) and Sanz (c)

Three stories in this IRON MAN ANNUAL, or IRON MANNUAL, that all focus around recent events in the IRON MAN universe. The first ties to the recent Iron Man infinite comic FATAL FRONTIER wherein, on the moon, abandoned Soviet probe Udarnik the Shockworker used a new fuel source, called Phlogistone, to build a wonderful city for anyone who would join him and Tony, to prevent the free flow of Phlogistone getting out of hand, tried to keep the peace by pitting prospective Phlogistone manipulators against one another. It ended badly and Tony realized that Phlogistone poisoned humans, driving them mad. Everyone abandoned the city and Tony neutralized the metal. "Two Cities" picks up after that as Tony pleads with Udarnik to remove the remaining Phlogistone from his system. Udarnik isn't exactly on good terms with Tony, though, after the shutdown of his own city left him alone in space again. Tony convinces him by telling him of Troy and the impact it will have in space and reaching to the moon. Udarnik doesn't like it and hates the cruel irony that Tony, who destroyed his city, wants Udarnik to save him so he can finish building his own great city but Udarnik also can't help believing that Tony is the world's greatest hope to building a city like he claims and reaching to space and so saves him, telling him to leave and bring back other people. "Orbital" finds Arno Stark reaching out to Warren Ellis Eli Warren and his New Modernist Army (from that first arc with Extremis, the guys who were in space) to man Troy's geostationary orbital platform. Warren is skeptical and doesn't want to help anything Stark-related (though he doesn't know that Arno is Stark-related, just that Troy is) but Arno makes a compelling case and they agree, though not before informing Arno that Tony had destroyed every piece of Extremis which likely would have had the power to fix Arno's physical maladies, rebuilding him from the ground up. Finally, "By Moonlight" shows us a series of double-page spreads that start nine months ago, with Pepper and Marc's first meeting, followed by one a month later with the two of them on a date, and culminate with a date in Scotland three months ago when Marc proposed marriage and Pepper proposed a business relationship between Marc and Stark Resilient.

Geez, long summary, but remember I'm summarizing three different stories in one issue and (very briefly) one four-part (maybe?) infinite comic so let's cut me some slack, okay? The best thing about this issue, hands down, is how into Tony it gets without even really placing Tony front and center for the three different stories. In fact, he's only arguably the star of one of the three stories and even then Gillen has to cover some backstory that he can't be sure the reader of this comic has actually gotten around to reading yet, even if he's promised to do it and has it somewhere. In that first story, though, Tony is hallucinating about Yinsen, his friend from the day he became Iron Man, and Yinsen pretty explicitly offers up the theme of this issue and it's a powerful one. Yinsen says, as Tony believes himself to be dying (before Udarnik reluctantly helps him), "you're always willing to ask others to sacrifice for your greater good" and it's perhaps the most compellingly true thing about Iron Man. It's hard to argue that Iron Man has done good for this world, that his genius and his, after the Iron Man-creating incident, ethics have made the world a better place. In some ways, that's a part of what can make Iron Man boring if he's not well-handled; we know he's a good guy at this point and we know how nearly unbeatable he can be given some tools. But this, the idea that his egomania and arrogance make him exactly who he is, someone willing to make people give up their dreams to further his own because he knows them to be good, is certainly a compelling take on Iron Man and it's one that I certainly can't find fault with. As if his asking Udarnik to sacrifice his city and pride to help Tony build his own isn't enough, we get the second story where Arno learns that Tony destroyed Extremis despite the good it could have brought into the world. Very neat stuff, worth checking out to get a good sense of who Iron Man is.