Pre-Order IRON MAN VOL. 1 By Friday And Save 25 Percent!

Our first collected edition, out in June, has been selected for a three-day sale for Barnes & Noble members! Here's a code—as well as another offer for you! 

Edited by Sam Thielman

NO, FRIENDS, I haven’t cut my vacation short. But I was just told about a way for you to save a whole lot on the first collected edition of IRON MAN through Barnes & Noble's Premium and Rewards program. And since it only lasts from today through Friday, April 25th, I had to get it to your inbox ASAP. 

For the next three days, members of the B&N premium program—who, apparently, typically get 10 percent off their print preorders anyway—can get 25 percent off on IRON MAN Vol 1: The Stark-Roxxon War by using the code PREORDER25 at checkout! [I do this to support my Blu-ray habit: The membership discount stacks with the sale, so you get 25 percent off the list price because of the sale and then 10 percent off that.—Sam] That's the first five issues, compiling not only our "Stark-Roxxon War" opening arc but the two-issue follow-up, "The Machinery of Order!" If you've been waiting for the trade paperback to pick up the series, here's your chance to save big ahead of the collection's June 24th release date. 

 I reiterate that you have to be a Barnes & Noble Premium Member to take advantage of these savings. Now, if for some reason you're not a B&N member, I don't want you to come away with nothing. So while I don't have the power to negotiate discounts with other booksellers, if you pre-order IRON MAN Vol. 1 outside of the B&N ecosystem, or even inside of it after Friday, and you email proof of purchase to foreverwars.bullpen@gmail.com WITH A MAILING ADDRESS, I will reactivate our exclusive sticker giveaway for you! 

With pre-order sales so crucial in publishing, what we're not going to do, FOREVER WARS militants, is let IRON MAN Vol. 1: The Stark-Roxxon War flop. An individual issue of a comic book series is on the stands for a month. A collection, however, becomes part of a publisher's valuable backline, available for purchase perpetually as long as the print run lasts! That's not only good news for discerning comics readers who value thrilling stories and tremendous artwork, but it's great news for me, artists Julius Ohta, Jethro Morales, Javier Pina and Alex Sinclair, and letterer Joe Caramagna, who get to keep earning off our creation! 

So preorder IRON MAN Vol. 1 from Barnes & Noble Premium today through Friday and save at checkout with the code PREORDER25! While to be honest I have been told nothing about the packaging of the collection, these trade paperbacks usually have cool behind-the-scenes treats like sketches, variant covers, and otherwise unpublished artwork. And we'll probably do more sticker giveaways for the next collected edition or as long as supplies last.

AND SPEAKING OF IRON MAN, it's been a long time since I did an in-store signing. So come to Taylor & Co., a great independent and black-owned books/comics store on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn, on Saturday May 3—which just happens to be Free Comic Book Day! Not only will you walk out with free comic books, you can get (or bring) IRON MAN, I'll sign it for you, and we can talk about anything you like. While you do that, check out all the other fine books that Andrew has for sale at Taylor and support one of Brooklyn's finest indie (and family-friendly) bookstores! Also, next door is Burger Bhai, which IMO deserves to be in the conversation about Brooklyn's finest burger joints. See you on Free Comic Book Day! 

FINALLY, to make up for the lack of journalism in this edition, here are a few links to pieces that caught my eye over this past week-and-a-half during the limited screen time I've had:

Thomas Piketty on a world after American hegemony

David Austin Walsh reviews Alex Karp from Palantir's blood-and-data treatise about why the redistribution of public wealth to his company is actually what's necessary to defend western civilization something something. The review makes Karp sound somewhere between delusional and cynical - something like a more-farcical Alfred Thayer Mahan or a less-farcical Erik Prince—so I may have to read and review this book for myself. Very FOREVER WARS/REIGN OF TERROR in any event. 

DOGE is engaging in class war in very specific ways, as Jenna McLaughlin reports for NPR.

Rumeysa Ozturk, kidnapped off the street by agents of the state, did nothing wrong and the State Department knows it. And I'm going to write about this more fulsomely when I'm back next week, but this memo on hollowing out the State Department reflects MAGA foreign policy far more fulsomely than the typical "isolationist" shorthand.  

My friend Nancy Youssef and her Wall Street Journal colleagues report that the U.S. bomb-to-nowhere campaign in Yemen may expand to include an on-the-ground proxy effort for regime change. What could go wrong? 

Part of my vacation reading has been Anthony Kaldellis' epic new history The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. If you want a mostly-highly-readable 900-page narrative of the Eastern Roman Empire's 1100 years, this is it. Kaldellis often has some polemical points he wants to score with the historical record, and often quite successfully, as with his compelling argument that the Latin Empire of the 13th century should be considered a pre-modern forerunner of western imperialism. He's less successful when he portrays the Ottoman Empire as a savage disruption from the Eastern Roman Empire, as opposed to a supremely civilized Islamic counterpart that often outcompeted Constantinople—martially, socially and geostrategically. Those parts of the book read a little like the Reds being bitter at losing a home game to the Greens, if you'll pardon me. But they're marginal compared with the pleasure of reading a master historian tackle his core competency.