Invincible Iron Man #8

Fraction, you fucking genius.

The short version: Tony gets to be a proper hero again. I can't be any happier than I am now.

After having to suffer through the slow destruction of the integrity of the character that brought me into comics, Matt Fraction's run on this book is slowly beginning to repair all of that massive character damage inflicted by Civil War.

Bringing in a new kind of "anti-Stark" after the Zeke Stane arc is great as well. Osborn represents the absolute dark side of Tony, so it's amazing that it's taken this long to pit the two of them against each other so directly.

The Pepper-as-the-new-Extremis stuff is a little odd and out of place, I feel, especially with Tony now drastically depowered with the loss of his Ellis-given nanotech whatever technology magic wand.

The art's Larroca tracing famous actors and the fact that Sawyer from Lost is every main character he draws is starting to get really fucking annoying. There are plenty of Robert Downey Jr. images out there, do a fucking Google search if you're going to go this route. Better than his "everyone has big hair and looks like NextWave approach."

I know he drew NextWave. I'm one of two people who loved that book. I'm just saying that he draws one of two ways and "Greg Land emulator" Larroca is better than "Ultimate Spider-Man" Larroca in this book, so I can support it.

Also, he draws the armor beautifully. They'll likely be slapping the damned classic suit on him AGAIN for fanwanking stupidity, but for now Extremis-era Iron Man hasn't been rendered so well in Stark's own book since Granov's original artwork in the arc that introduced it.