Invincible Iron Man #77: Review

Apr 2004

John Jackson Miller, Jorge Lucas

Story Name:

The Best Defense Part 5: Unsuited

Review & Comments

Rating:

Invincible Iron Man #77 Review by T Vernon (April 2, 2021)

Comments: Several deceased cast members from Iron Man’s history are named: Kevin O’Brien (died vol. 1 #46), Abraham Klein (#107), Morley Erwin (#199), and Abe Zimmer (#330). The movie AIRPORT ’75 is mentioned as it centers on a small private plane that hits an airliner’s cockpit and disables the pilots as in this comic. The Vietnam era Operation: Babylift, cited by a soldier, was a real mission to evacuate children from the war-torn nation.

Review: Everything goes to hell in this issue, as all of the shady dealings with Stark Technology come back to bite Sonny Burch in the butt. And the sequence with his meltdown is utterly terrifying, selling the coming disaster the way nothing else could. And, not to be outdone, Tony’s leap through the Senate chamber (unlikely) is amazing and his take off in the final panel, inspiring. And the next issue is better.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Invincible Iron Man #77 Synopsis by Rob Johnson

Note that this was written by T Vernon, not Rob Johnson.

Under-Secretary of Defense Sonny Burch is busy loading his Iron Man prototype suits onto a transport plane for shipping to the manufacturers while his aide Commander John Rayburn is more concerned about the missing Kestrel aircraft with the dummy bomb….

Having been rejected for Secretary of Defense by the Senate Sub-Committee, Tony Stark is determined to be present for the full Senate vote so they can look him in the eye as they shoot him down for playing by the rules. The Senators makes speeches pointing out Tony’s unfitness for the job while he fumes. Then he gets a call from Commander Rayburn informing him of the defense systems deployed by Burch and the problems with them...but Rayburn is caught by Burch. Burch demands that the traitor be placed under arrest when word comes through that the missing Kestrel has turned up again. It crashes into the cockpit of the transport plane, killing the pilots and sending the ship into a crash dive toward Washington. Then the automatic defense system targets the incoming plane and the F-16 fighters sent to intercept it. Burch, driven to panic by the news, seizes a soldier’s automatic and shoots himself. Rumiko Fujikawa, aboard an airliner nearby, sees the crash and calls Tony. As the roll call goes against Tony’s appointment, he dives into the Senate chamber and races to recover his briefcase. Suiting up as Iron Man, he takes off but doesn’t know what he’ll be able to do to prevent a disaster….