Comic Book Pull List: July 17th , 2024

The biggest thing I can say about Gerry Duggen’s 2023-2024 run on The Invincible Iron Man is it has been the highlight of my recent comic books experience. I came into this book with Iron Man as one of my favorite comic heroes and Duggen being at the top of my writers list, having enjoyed his runs of Savage Avengers, Uncanny X-Men and Deadpool. But I just didn’t think the Stark/Duggen combo would really work. Boy was I wrong! Even though this was an Avengers book, Duggen steered this run more into the Mutant part of the Marvel Universe, having him marry the X-Men’s Emma Frost (out of necessity for both ot them) and him fighting alongside the X-Men in the Orchis War, due to them using Sentinels based on his technology. Granted, 95% of this run was a slow buildup of Tony prepping to take back his technology, only to keep Tony out of the X-Men and Avenger fights, keeping him on his own. But from start to finish, it was one of those books that i looked forward to when it dropped.

Issue #20 is basically and epilogue to the book. The war is over and Orchis has been defeated. Now it’s time to clean up all the mess and reset the Marvel Universe to default for the next big catastrophic. Here, we see Tony wrapping up the plotlines with all the supporting characters, who have all also been reset to default just in time for the reboot of all their books. And Tony getting an influx of Billions to reclaim his company and seed funding for his next big superhero experiment. Nothing major happens in this issue. It’s just Gerry Duggan wrapping this book into a nice bow with solid writing and excellent art by Di Vito and Valenza. This is the kind of run that will be excellent in a trade paperback, and I plan on preo-rdering mine when it’s time.