Cover: Cheery!
Page 1: I quite like seeing Pepper doing Pepper-y things.
Quiet opening in many ways. Character work, bit of life being lived, re-introing Pepper/Tony.
I just find it funny that Pepper is used to Tony coming to her and saying things like this. “Of course you are, indeed.” Nice expression there too.
Pages 2-3:
Opening DPS motif repeating.
Joe does the scale of Mandarin City well. Just a big ol’ “LOOK AT THIS” sort of thing. While it’s clearly Marvel Universe, I like the mixture of that with the urbanity.
Page 4: The sort of Legal situation across the pages is complicated, but I tried to keep it stripped down. Also a really basic re-intro to the Mandarin. Most importantly, it’s the setting. This story is taking in a place, and I want to try and get the feel of it. Of course it’s all set up…
Page 5: Nice use of 3D space by Joe in the first panel, especially.
Page 6: I do like the Stealth Armour. Joe gives it a different look, which suits me fine. It’s modular armour. We can change stuff. That’s very much the point.
Page 7: The Batman-esque element nature of this came to me as I was writing it. This is totally Tony Doing Batman, and it’s worth smiling at.
Page 8: Quick take own and pressing onwards. Tony lays on the vision-man thing which…
Page 9: …and then the practicalities.
Familiar house, methinks.
Ever since I introduced P.E.P.P.E.R. I knew this was the necessary scene. The “Rumbled” expression on the last panel makes me smile a lot.
Page 10: You know, one of the quiet things in the Iron Man run is to show Tony learning about how to be better with people on a really small and basic level. Just “Oh, yeah, that was a bad word choice” level stuff, which frankly we all should be learning. I tend to do it with Robots, as it’s a way to talk about this stuff and turn it into general behaviour rather than issue-driven.
Do you buy Tony’s explanation? I think I do.
Page 11: Callback to Pepper introducing Tony to Marc in issue 17.
Page 12: The penny dropping for Pepper there. And a seven panel page. Man!
Page 13: Really loved what GuruEFX did with the colouring in this sequence. Really strong, really bold. If I ever have a big computer room, I’ll get them to do the lighting.
Shameless Robyn nod in the fembots line.
I had a last minute panic when I thought “Wait – have you got the periodic table wrong?” I hadn’t checked, and went from memory, as I knew it. And then I remembered “Kieron, you’re an idiot and your memory is a sieve.” I had to run and check, but for once, I was right.
Page 14: Little bit of a error here we’ll fix down the line (i.e. Trade). HELEN is going to have blank pupils, to sort of separate her from Pepper some more. While I’d have probably have done it anyway, the name change is at least in part to try and make it easier to read. PEPPER talking to Pepper gets a mess, quick.
Page 15: There’s a lot of basic business stuff in this issue, which I felt important to show to get the sense of… well, lived in business, y’know? We go proper full on Marvel scale soon enough, but if I’m writing a book about genius inventors and businessmen, I want a grounding of that to compare and contrast against.
Anyway – setting up for…
Page 16: Marc being a PR.
More of Marc as we progress. He’s inspired by pretty much any friend of mine who did PR and wasn’t a moral monster. We do a short story with him and Pepper in the Annual which is where we see most of him, but there’s flashes of it here.
He’s Scottish by birth, btw, which makes him and Abigail knowing each other less of a reach. Also a very specific London-centric joke there.
The Metanational was my second name for magazine/website. I made up another, googled, and realised it existed. Man! I basically see them a lot like the New Statesman, but fired through a MU filter.
Page 17: I’ve been resistant to doing stuff like the chains of dialogue in panel 4 forever. It’s really not my style. With Iron Man, I’m sort of going with it a little more. It’s one of those things where it’s a case that I’m perfectly fine with it in other people’s books – Wolverine & The X-men did it constantly and was astounding, for example – but it just sits badly in my own style.
(A back and forth like panel 3 is a little different – that characters have their backs turns mean it still works as an moment in time (not that comic panels are moments in time – more a moment of expression). If they were coming towards us, Tony’s first and second line would really need different expressions to be meaningful. Only time it really works is when the mood is a little flatter, etc.)
Anyway. Trying.
(And works fine here, I think.)
Page 18: Arno looks really sallow in the first panel.
Tony and Marc are making me want to go suit shopping.
Page 19: “Quiescent” is quite the word.
Page 20: Ah, a PR man’s outlook on any situation.
You may notice the thumb ring in question. The biggest problem with this storyline is keeping it straight in my head which ring goes on which finger. It’s the sort of thing you can typo easily, so it’s something I end up checking obsessively.
This is the Remaker ring, on the left thumb.
Gillen, Kieron (10 December 2013)
Writer Notes: Iron Man 19 Kieron Gillen's Workblog. Retrieved on 9 January 2017.
