Australia’s own superstar writer Tom Taylor has been announced as the scribe on the brand-new Superior Iron Man. He and artist Yildiray Cinar will move Tony Stark from New York to San Francisco this “fall”, says IGN. It’s part of the new Avengers NOW! initiative from Marvel, which will be a Avengers line-wide series of high-profile relaunches similar to the Marvel NOW! promotion last year.
This is Taylor’s first book for Marvel, having already made a name for himself on Gestalt’s all-ages books The Deep, a chunk of Star Wars books for Dark Horse and Injustice and Earth 2 for DC Comics. We interviewed him last week for the 100th episode of our podcast.
Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso told Entertainment Weekly, “The newly-transformed Superior Iron Man has very ambitious plans for the city that some of its residents embrace, but not all.” He won’t be the equivalent of Doctor Octopus in a Spider-Man suit, but “is a character that’s hard to root for”. Alonso clearly forgot that Taylor was Australian when using the phrase “root for”.
“He’s self-obsessed. Cunning. Superficial. Superior,” explains Taylor. “He has given Extremis to the people. Extremis can now be downloaded as a mobile app through any smart device in San Francisco and this creates Tony’s idea of a Utopia, which he is very happy to be at the heart of. But not everyone is buying Tony’s Paradise.
With a new silver costume, Iron Man joins Matt Murdoch as the most recent character to move out to the West Coast, in a storyline that leads up to Marvel’s recently announced “AXIS” event. “Daredevil may be blind but he can see the cracks in Stark’s Brave New World,” says Taylor. “In a way this is all an allegory for the technology that now rules our lives. The corruption that comes from this technology and the dependence we each have on it.”
Other characters on display in the promotional artwork include Medusa, Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, The Winter Soldier, Angela, Thor, Captain America, Inferno and Deathlok. It comes as no surprise that many of these characters have already been spotted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., or have recently been announced as making an appearance on screen soon.
It’s been a massive week of announcements from Marvel, who have also revealed major character changes for Thor and Captain America.
