Iron Man: Virus [Paperback]

I have read most of Irvine's work and with the exception of Batman: Inferno I have enjoyed each and every novel. Iron Man 2 is too erratic to enjoy 100% especially considering John Favreau butchered the screenplay but Irvine's book is nonetheless worthy of praise. Iron Man: Virus is from beginning to end funny, exciting, endearing and entertaining. Normally I dislike these Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Spiderman novels when they focus too much on new characters/villains and not enough on Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne for example. Irvine nicely blends the characters together into one entertaining and rich novel. For casual Iron Man readers I strongly recommend this book as a nice getway for a few hours of entertainment and pleasure reading. For comic book die-hards I can certainly understand your disappointment but in my opinion there is no denying how fun this book is.

Alex Irvine delivers the next Iron Man novel, which like _Femme Fatales_ deals with Hydra's conflict with SHIELD and Iron Man stuck under a rock due to his duties to that agency while Tony Stark is constrained by his many government contracts.

It took me a while to realize what it was about the characters in this novel that bothered me. Irvine never describes them. Sure, to comic readers the characters are well-known and the mere mention of Arnim Zola conjures the image of a muscular, headless man whose chest contains a large screen with Zola's face. While you get some minor descriptions, there are no colors. Madame Hydra appears early on, but nothing is mentioned of her green hair, so unless the reader also read _Femme Fatales_ or the comics, they would never know this. The same goes for all the well-known comic characters: Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Rhodey, and Pepper Potts. While these characters have appeared in the movies, this novel series is not set in the same version of the Marvel Universe. In this novel, we don't know which version of Nick Fury we have, the original version or the Ultimate Universe version. We don't know how to picture Rhodey, since two actors played him in the movies and nothing about his physical appearance is mentioned. Same for Stark, his date, Happy Hogan (which is really important given that Zola clones Hogan at one point), and others. That's a major failing in a medium relying so completely on visualization based on the printed words.

Also, each chapter opens with either an exhortation of Zola to his Hydra drones or a "provisional patent application" readout. While the former are OK as representing the telepathic messages Zola relays to his minions, the latter fall flat. As someone who has actually filed scientific patents, these read terribly falsely. While the Marvel Universe might differ enough to render this argument moot, these read much more like executive summaries or press releases than actual patent documents. Consider: unit types are mixed, sometimes in the same paragraph, between SI/metric and US Customary/English units (pascals and psi in one paragraph, when both are units of pressure for the different systems -- very sloppy in this engineer/scientist's view), the "claims" are not enumerated as they should be and instead appear as a narrative paragraph. Sure, the lack of legalspeak is nice, but it's inaccurate in the extreme. Also, one mentions that the work is incomplete and that further research is proceeding to prove one of the claims! Claims have to be something demonstrated, not just a prediction, to hold up.

The story, however, is very reminiscent of what one might find in a comic. While not lasting in any sense, Irvine does tie in some of the consequences from the prior novel while also alluding to events which occurred in the intervening months between the two books. The plot is terribly comic-booky, with the cardboard villain making poor decisions, allowing insubordination and poor performance to perpetuate in his many followers, the hero alienating his companions but still getting the job done, and the faceless (based on the lack of descriptions) government people trying to fight the enemy and Stark's inertia. It's an OK read, but not really worth the cover price.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see both reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars