Marvel Comics Legacy and Secret Empire Spoilers for Generations: Iron Man & Ironheart #1, The Iron, follows.
Four (4) covers for the book with the two (2) prime one showing Tony Stark in classic Iron Man armor alongside Riri Williams as Ironheart fighting alongside one another NEVER happens in the book.
That is because Riri Williams was flung into the future and not the past by Kobik, the sentient Cosmic Cube, in the pages of Secret Empire #10. So that part initial time travel story mechanism is consistent with Secret Empire #10, but there was a scene latter in this book that I thought was a big inconsistency that caused me to take a second look at Secret Empire #10. More on that later.
The book opens with the usual Vanishing Point poem and creative team credits page.
Then we get into the meat of the story. Riri Williams ends up in the sky somewhere and somewhen after Secret Empire #10 with…
…powerless Ironheart armor. She rights herself and lands safely to discover…
…she’s in the far flung future of…
…the NEXT Avengers who…
…have been brought into Marvel canon in recent years, most recently in Avengers World, from…
…their animated Blu-ray / DVD origins.
Riri is exhausted and collapses waking up in the Sanctum Sanctorum of Dr. Strange Dr. Stranger…
…who is a 126 year old very-much alive Tony Stark.
We don’t get answers to Riri’s important questions, like how is he even alive since he’s not been seemingly alive since Secret Wars I believe. However, considering the name of the first Invincible Iron Man arc in Marvel Legacy, we may learn more of Tony Stark’s true fate soon in enough in modern day.
Anyhow, we learn how Dr. Stranger has brought peace to the world, but shunning technology and replacing the internet with “something better“. Dr. Stranger allows Ironheart to use her armor that was caught in the field created by Dr. Stranger nullifying technology.
Dr. Stranger tours the future Earth with Ironheart and explains that he convinced the world to invest their military spending on projects top advance the future and it worked… just… like… that.
However, the world is not bereft of violence – since it needs the NEXT Avenger as an example – as Margan Lafay attacks! Sr. Stranger stops here with a strange crystal; that I assume was a big shared of a big ole furistic Cosmic Cube, but it is really…
…a Norse crystal with Odin’s name used in its spelling that is never explained to readers.
However, google tells me that the Odinsdottir is a big deal in Marvel’s Contest of Champions video game with still no explanation of its powers.
Dr. Stranger and Ironheart travel to the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building to see if there is a time travel device their to help Riri Williams return to the past. The Fantastic Four has been MIA for decades, but Franklin Richards is there, the son of Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman, who as a grown-up is drawn like Brad Pitt.
Turns out he doesn’t have a time travel device as Riri Williams is again pulled by the Vanishing Point and Kobik back to…
…the present, but not (??) the present depicted in…
…Secret Empire #10 or so I thought. If you look closely at the pages in Secret Empire #10, Ironhearty vanishes in the Vanishing Point like the others, but…
…doesn’t return to Secret Empire #10 with them in that scene. Interesting? I wonder how Secret Empire Omega #1 will touch on Ironheart?
Anyhow, the book ends with Riri Williams the next day being inspired and creates her own mini-Iron-Man as depicted in the future as helpers to Dr. Stranger.
Then we get a tease to the big Marvel Legacy story arc starting in October 2017’s Invincible Iron Man #593…
…the Search for Tony Stark.
This was a jumbled, confusing mess of a story with inconsistent art by different artists; Marco Rudy’s cover art and interior pages being the exception. One of the weakest Generations one-shots of the bunch yet I like the idea of a travel to the future which no Generations book has depicted yet. Was also nice to see he NEXT Avengers who could have been utilized more in the story.
