Iron Patriot #3

By: Ales Kot (story), Garry Brown (art), Jim Charalampidis (colors)

The Story: James must decide whether the enemy of his enemy is his friend or another enemy.

The Review: There’s no denying that the cost-benefit value of comic books aren’t terrific. When you consider that movies can cost as little as little as a dollar to watch in theaters (and even less to rent or stream) and that watching a TV show is free, shelling out three to four bucks per comic is hardly making the most of your money. I can usually look past this with most comics, but every now and then I run across an issue that makes me question my entire devotion to the medium.

Iron Patriot #3 is one of those issues. At $3.99 (plus tax), it leans towards the higher end of the pricing scale, yet there’s barely a dollar’s worth of substance in the issue. Sure, the plot does take a step forward for the entire Rhodes family, but this is still rather slim material for the money you put in. At least, it leaves me with little to talk about.

Our antagonist, he who has no name but wears a sentai-like power suit, even goes so far as to say, “This is not the point where I tell you why I’m doing this. There is no point.” Well, fine—be that way. Our mystery villain does give us a little insight into his motivations with his rant about “war profiteers, sending men and women to certain death so they can suck our country dry,” revealing an extensively scarred face in the process. You can understand why he’d want to take down—or, rather, coerce James into taking down—the people he claims responsible for these evils (“…Who doesn’t want to kill the previous commander-in-chief, really?”), but why start a civil war? Why these multi-pronged attacks across the country?

Besides these somewhat diverting questions, the issue offers little else to mull on, except maybe the revelation that one of Terrence’s captors has some bad history with him (“You think this is about you dumping me so I could rot in prison because of your $%!!*# ethics?“). The rest of the issue seems to be an exercise for Brown to show how long he can stretch out any one scene, though it’s hard to tell if it’s because Kot gave him so little to work with or if it’s because he’s such an inefficient storyteller that Kot was obliged to shorten his material. Looking at the sequence of Lila fleeing her captors, it’s remarkable how even with all that space, the level of detail doesn’t improve any, with whole panels looking like rough outlines Charalampidis was obliged to just fill in. To be sure, Brown’s pacing is quite good, but you’d prefer more activity, honestly.

Conclusion: What’s here is appreciable, though there’s not much of it. Not enough for what you’re paying, at any rate.

Grade: C

- Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: - As reluctant as I’d be to lend a bloodied girl in handcuffs my laptop, it’s not as if there’s much risk of her running off with it, is there?

- Sawbuck Coffee. Oh, brother…