Invincible Iron Man #307: Review

Aug 1994

Len Kaminski, Tom Morgan

Story Name:

Wired!

Review & Comments

Rating:

Invincible Iron Man #307 Review by T Vernon (January 15, 2019)

Comments: Part one of three parts. First direct appearance of VOR/TEX. X-Men featured in the simulation were Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Gambit, Bishop, and Nightcrawler. Mandarin has been bedridden and amnesiac since issue #275. Abe Zimmer mentions the $64 question, a reference to a 1940s quiz show; Philip Grant counters with STAR TREK: “to boldly go....”.

Review: Another electronic villain, another odd environment to draw...that's the fun Iron Man artists get with these adventures but this one has its troubles. The art is a bit too heavy with black lines and cluttered panels and the eerie backgrounds just looking like poor photocopies of swirls. The story is okay but seems a bit overly familiar just a few issues past the Technovore. Not bad but a cut below recent issues.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Invincible Iron Man #307 Synopsis by T Vernon

Iron Man is battling the X-Men and he takes them down easily, even felling Wolverine with a single punch to the face; this is how Tony Stark knows his combat simulator has been cleared of all the bugs left by the hacking in Annual #15. Tony explains to Bethany Cabe that the next step is to find the culprit. Abe Zimmer and Philip Grant have devised a means whereby Tony's mind can be downloaded into cyberspace. When the machine activates, Tony is literally dropped into a new world of vibrant grayscale swirls; he gives himself a virtual adventure suit and goes off on his quest. He soon uncovers a series of data trails that link all of the sinister happening in his life lately and they lead to...VOR/TEX (short for the Virtual ORganism/Turing EXperiment), an AI that rebelled against its creators and is now here looking like a giant scary eye. It wants Tony as an intellect to fight against, hoping he will be a challenge. Tony finds it rough going against an enemy that controls the environment but then he realizes he can affect things too so he dons virtual Iron Man armor and fights back. Iron Man hammers at the villain until VOR/TEX levels up and strikes back, causing Tony to regret the expedition....

In a remote area of China, the Mandarin has finally recovered his lost memories and his burned hands have now grown back as dragon's claws....

Tony finally thinks he has figured out how to win this video game; he sends a massive power surge to crash the whole sub-routine and then blows apart the giant eye. That's when he discovers that the VOR/TEX monster battle was just a distraction. He races to the access point only to have the interface shut down as VOR/TEX downloads itself into Tony's waiting body....