Invincible Iron Man #294: Review

Jul 1993

Len Kaminski, Kev Hopgood

Story Name:

Orbital Resonances

Review & Comments

Rating:

Invincible Iron Man #294 Review by T Vernon (October 2, 2018)

Comments: Part one of two parts. The Goddess, who first appeared in INFINITY WAR (1992 series) #2, is Adam Warlock's feminine side, created when he had control of the Infinity Gauntlet. First appearance/origin of the Technovore whose final appearance is next issue. The dead scientists Rehnquist and Scalia bear the names of two conservative Justices on the US Supreme Court.

Review: If #237 was ALIEN; this one is ALIENS: in the former Iron Man matched wits with a monster stalking his spacecraft and now there are multiple monsters that require more weapons and tactics. And a delightful nightmare it is. The art is very effective in creating the horrid atmosphere of our hero's deadly mission and, as in all good adventure stories, everything gets worse before it gets better. Enjoyable. What throws it off is the appearance of the Goddess to connect this title to the INFINITY CRUSADE event; what's interesting is that it actually ties in to the bigger story in the next issue. More on that then....

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Invincible Iron Man #294 Synopsis by T Vernon

Tony Stark uses the remote Iron Man armor to fly up to his space station with the help of a solid rocket booster, pausing in the slow moments to think about Veronica Benning and his painful therapy. Suddenly a solar flare appears out of nowhere and envelopes the armor—and Tony finds himself facing the Goddess, trying to recruit him to her cause of cleansing the universe of evil. Tony rejects her and her religious philosophy in favor of rationalism but she warns him he is about to face something that will destroy his faith in science....

Remote Iron Man boards the station, currently leased to Cauwfield Chemical for their experiments. At this point he thinks back to the public revelation that he was still alive and the barrage of press questions that followed. Tony used an LMD for the meeting to keep the extent of his injuries secret. While chatting with Felix Alvarez, he received a call from Abe Zimmer, who picked up a distress call from the space station that the nanotech project has created a technological parasite that is killing the staff. Tony contacted Winston Cauwfield who denied there was a problem or any unauthorized projects. So Tony volunteered Iron Man to go up and investigate....

Now Iron Man confronts the enemy: the parasites have absorbed the crew and evolved themselves into nightmarish tech monsters. He shoots them down but to his horror they absorb the material from the floor and evolve into a larger more monstrous one that seizes the Golden Avenger and begins to absorb him. He destroys it but his right arm has been stripped down to the exoskeleton. Shellhead escapes from the monsters to construct an arm cannon that fires molecular acid and uses it to blast all the monsters into goo. But again, the nanites recombine and reorganize the tech to become a single giant monster called the Technovore....