IRON MAN #6: Inside The Issue

It's all been building up to this: The Insurgent Iron Man. I beg you to read the issue before this FOREVER WARS edition

Edited by Sam Thielman

THERE IS A LOT that I want to address that this edition of FOREVER WARS will not. Most importantly, the ongoing five-alarm fire that is the seizure, caging and potential deportation of political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil, as well as the coalescing legal challenges to it. By the time you read this edition,  you can hear me address Khalil's case and its implications with pals Danny Bessner and Derek Davison on a special edition of their American Prestige podcast. You'll hear me react to this stuff off the top of my head, which this newsletter does not do. The AP boys are usually good about getting their episodes out fast, so depending on when you open this edition, it may already be available. 

Also important: Earlier this week in Syria, right after Ahmed al-Sharaa's troops and aligned militias killed hundreds of Alawites following Assad holdouts ambushing interim government forces, Sharaa signed a mostly-unpublished accord with Mazloum Kobane, the military commander and political leader of the U.S.-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces. Read Amberin Zaman of al-Monitor on that, as she covers the bases on what this will mean for the stability of Sharaa's interim government, the ongoing Turkey-SDF conflict and the presence of U.S. troops on SDF-controlled territory. But also check out Derek's AP episode with Gönül Tol and Djene Bajalan on the other seismic development in Kurdish/Turkish politics: Recep Tayyip Erdogan's seemingly table-running deal to disband the PKK, the Kurdish militant group whose Syrian affiliate is the core of the SDF. I have a lot more questions than I do answers. But I wonder if imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who appears to have traded the PKK for absolutely nothing, made this deal so Turkey spares the Kurdish quasi-state in Syria that al-Sharaa appears (again, the text of their accord isn't public!) to be accepting, in one form or another.

Also President Trump declared that vandalizing Teslas is terrorism. REIGN OF TERROR did not get that weird. That's JUDGE DREDD shit. 

But we're not going into any of that here, because today IRON MAN #6 is out, and IRON MAN #6 is the most important issue of the run thus far. 

This issue will be controversial. It will very likely cause many IRON MAN readers to throw their comic across the room and curse my name. It will not be the only moment such things happen during the arc that begins with issue #6. The arc is titled "The Insurgent Iron Man." That was my initial pitch for what the series would be called during my entire run. Instead, it will be on the cover for the five issues of the arc. The inaugural issue #6 is titled something I've wanted to use for fiction for years and years and years. I won't spoil it here, because that title tells you exactly what we're doing with these five issues, and how not-fucking-around we are. 

That paywall is coming real soon, so before we hit it—and paying subscribers get to hear me discuss/spoil the entire controversial issue after it—I'll say the following. Look at the panels above. They don't seem like they're the most important panels of the entire issue. Tony Stark taking a silent moment to close his eyes and think about something, before he asks his question, wouldn't appear to be a fateful moment. But like Charles Xavier sitting down on a lovely park bench beside Moira MacTaggert in POWERS OF X #1, it absolutely is, and they absolutely are. You'll find out why in issue #7. 

Before we ask you to pay to read the rest of this, don't forget that on Monday, March 17, at Noon Eastern, I'll be on a virtual panel called "Iron Man and the Military-Industrial Complex," so that'll be fun for you to check out.