Iron Man #23: Review

Sep 2022

Christopher Cantwell, Angel Unzueta

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Iron Man #23 Review by Rob Johnson (September 16, 2022)

Bethany Cabe is a long-time associate of Tony Stark. This is the 1st time she's appeared in this series but she featured heavily in the Tony Stark: Iron Man series and the Iron Man 2020 event which followed it.

There were 3 versions of Iron Man's foe Spymaster, all of whom died. But the latest 1 Sinclair Abbott, like several other chars, turned up alive again in the post-Secret Wars universe without any explanation in TS:IM#14.

Cobalt Man (Ralph Roberts) began his career way back in the original X-Men #31. After a few more apps he died in the Stamford disaster that started the 1st Civil War event. He was seen in Hades in Incredible Hercules #129-130. But he too made a miraculous post-SW recovery in Deadpool & The Mercs For Money vol 2.

From Our Blog:

Gwen Stacy, beauty queen of Standard High School, was Peter Parker's (alias Spider-Man) first great love.

Gwen Stacy: Classic Beauty

Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Iron Man #23 Synopsis by Rob Johnson

Source Control are acquiring and selling high-tech weaponry including Mandarin's Rings. Tony Stark, James Rhodes and Carl Walker (better known as the wearer of the Force armour) teamed up to deal with them. Walker acts as front man to buy the weapons they put on sale. He uses Stark's money and a variety of dummy companies. Meanwhile Iron Man and War Machine fought SC's agent Titanium Man when they investigated the death of Vic Martinelli, and Tony pretended to have been put in a coma. But instead he donned his stealth armour to infiltrate SC's Macau base, with Rhodey as backup.

Carl is pretending to be a high-stakes gambler in a Macau casino, but it's just to impress Source Control when he goes for a meeting to buy 4 time displacement blasters. But the villainous minions have sussed out that he's behind all the other buys and they use a time displacer on him. Rhodey's been keeping tabs on him and alerts Tony who busts in as stealth Iron Man and downs the baddies. They will be temporarily stashed in a rendition site Stark's done a deal with. And the blasters go to Bethany Cabe in a Long Island storage facility where Tony will reverse engineer everything (to prepare defences against any spares) before destroying it all. Tony promises Rhodey that they will rescue Carl from whenever he's been sent. But 1st there's 1 remaining item they must get out of Source Control's hands - the Rings.

They have to wait, but eventually the Rings go on sale. This time Tony himself will have to be the buyer. But when he gets there with a briefcase he finds that SC is run by his old foe Spymaster. The villain is suspicious even after the money is electronically transferred. The briefcase contains the stealth armour in case things went wrong. When the Rings are handed over Stark doesn't let them know he sees that they are fakes. Spymaster demands the armour too - and that of stealth-mode War Machine they know is there too. So Rhodey decloaks and threatens them ...

... until he's attacked by another armoured figure who turns out to be Walker in his Force suit. It turns out the baddies had only sent him a week in the past and then they picked him up and showed him how Stark was just using him as bait. So Carl joined the enemy. They take Tony's armour and then Spymaster reveals that he's already sold the Rings to the Cobalt Man, who steps into view.

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