Spite Fucking & Karen Connelly.

I just picked up the much anticipated Orson Scott Card (of Ender’s Game fame) reworking of the iconic marvel classic, Iron Man. At first I was blown away by the concepts introduced by OSC, but then I took a step back, reassessed, and came to another conclusion:

This is fucking ludicrous.

A good comic book, as a rule for many true believers (thank you Stan Lee), has to walk that tight rope between fantasy and reality, reality and fiction. Ultimate Iron Man #1 had me going, until I saw there were strings attached. OSC, if you don’t know who he is, is this famous sci-fi writer. You’d expect him to come in here with some respect for the readers of this genre, but what he does instead is come in here, all swagger and panache, and shits right on your palette expects you, the reader, to swallow it.

Here’s the plot of Ultimate Iron Man #1:

Howard Stark, Tony Stark's father, is brilliant man who works in the biotech development field for the government. He is married to an inexplicably greedy woman who married him for his money. She is this way for absolutely no reason other than "she is". Anyways, Howard has just invented this blue kinda organism that one can paint on their skin which will render them invulnerable to all forms of hand-to-hand combat. That means you can hit one of those blue men with a baseball bat and they won't feel a thing. Really. I'm serious. You can. They won't feel shit.* The problem with the blue paint is that if one were to keep it on their skin for more than 15 minutes the organism would eat through all the levels of dermis. Sexy.

To solve the “eats your flesh” problem Howard enlists the help of a famous bio-chemist. During the less than amicable divorce between Howard and his gold-digger first wife, Howard and the bio-chemist fall in love. She also, by the way, solves the flesh eating problem by attempting to create a virus that enables the human body to regenerate skin many times faster than usual. I see serious dandruff issues with this, but I wouldn’t have minded having that virus shit when Karen Connelly came into my Prose workshop to look at the stories from those of us who had the great misfortune to have signed up for that week. I could’ve used the extra layers of dead, calloused skin since she was vicious and loved every minute of it. I could’ve also really have gone for a few rounds of spite fucking with her. I would've made her booty go da-da da-da. (Sisqo's Thong Song, if you didn't know.)

BACK TO ULTIMATE IRON MAN.

So yes, Howard’s new lover, Maria, creates a virus that allows the human body to regenerate skin faster than normal. Well, as you would expect, something goes horribly wrong. Maria’s face is nearly scratched off by a supposedly sedated monkey – Insert cheers by PETA supporters *here*. During the struggle Jimmy’s arm, that is the monkey’s name (there’s a dick joke here, but I’ll leave you to follow my train of thought on your own), is severed by a shard of glass. Don’t ask me how that is even physically possible, let’s just assume the monkey’s arm is made of Jell-O. Invariably someone of the monkey blood gets in Maria’s mouth. The worst part is, she’s pregnant.

Since the monkey was used as a test subject for the virus Maria created, she now has the virus. While the virus enables the monkey to grow back its arm, there is another unexpected side effect: “The brain regenerates constantly. New nerve tissues growing everywhere. His [Jimmy the monkey] brain is growing too big for his skull. And he’s in constant pain.” OH NO! What does this mean for Maria the good doctor? Well, put it this way, she’s more fucked than a woman who shows up at a porn audition and puts a check beside the boxes labelled V, A, DV, DA, DVDA**. What does this mean for the forth coming child? OSC offers this up for our consumption: “The virus affects embryonic tissue differently. The baby’s brain won’t outgrow his skull. He’ll… look normal. Undifferentiated neural tissue will grow all through his body. As if his whole body is brain. Great mental capacity. Quicker. Like no human in history… But his skin. Constant pain. Like third degree burns. Everywhere. Always.”

My first reaction was. WELL HOLY SHIT. THAT’S GOOOOOOOD. I was actually excited by this idea of a child whose whole body was brain. That came to a screeching hault when my wealth of useless facts came rushing back.

Firstly, having a whole body as brain alone would not make you smart. The density or weight of one person’s brain in contrast to another person’s brain makes no difference in terms of intelligence. People often equate, falsely of course, largeness of the brain with smarts, i.e. chickens to humans. Not true. What makes us more intelligent than your family dog Matilda (whom all of you assume is retarded) are the specialized areas of the brain, the various lobes and shit. This is first year psychology people. Geez.

Secondly, when we have headache it isn’t the brain that actually aches, it’s something on the scalp that’s irritating the skull. Even though the brain is surrounded by a membrane containing veins, and arteries which are filled with nerves, the brain itself has no feeling. So, the postulation that Maria’s child will suffer constant pain because of the “undifferentiated neural tissue” that’s growing all through his body is some truly great cop-out sci-fi bullshit.

While it always seemed a little wonky to me that Tony Stark was just so fucking smart for no apparent reason, the idea of making him inhuman, or as OSC would probably prefer, more than human, robs the character of something integral: Humanity.

Yes, he looks like a human, he will surely talk like a human, but inside he won’t be. Tony Stark, the original character, was emblematic of what the human mind to aspire to, he was also the depths to which humanity could sink. Tony Stark was a brilliant alcoholic, now he’s just an over-sensitive walking brain.

Great.

*Any physical harm that comes to the bluemen from the commercials is purely coincidental and I take no responsibility for any pain inflicted upon then by someone who has read this article.

** Do you really want to know? Okay... Vaginal, Anal, Double Vaginal, Double... You get the point.