Iron Man versus Villainy to the Tenth Power!
The Mandarin is Tony Stark’s greatest enemy. What happens when the super villain’s ten rings of power into the hands of ten different bad guys?
It’s all part of writer Kieron Gillen’s plan to test Tony like never before starting with Iron Man #23.Now. and a new arc: Rings of the Mandarin.
Tony learned he’s adopted, has a half-brother and now one of Thor’s greatest enemies is armed with one of Mandarin’s alien power rings! Malekith (played by Christopher Eccleston in Thor: The Dark World) is just one of the new villains the Iron Avenger has never faced before. Gillen explains what fans need to know about the Mandarin as the new chapter begins on Marvel.com.
“The Mandarin is probably Iron Man’s greatest villain, and he was used repeatedly in the big arcs. He was the main villain in Matt Fraction’s run.
For “Iron Metropolitan” we were thinking about what areas we’d want to explore and basically I’ve done completely new stuff for the first 18 issues. I wanted to do something a bit more familiar, playing with some parts of the Iron Man iconography. The idea that this is a book about essentially coming from the idea that this is Mandarin City, let’s play with the concept of legacy. And we’ve got these rings.
Matt did little things about the rings being alien [entities], I thought I could build on that enormously and then I thought “What would happen if you just gave the rings to 10 different people?” And then we could have each one of these people have a grudge against Tony Stark and they all have different motivations that don’t all agree with each other. The bearers don’t get on at all. It’s like a war of the rings. I’m completely mashing up my references, but obviously there’s a bit of playfulness with a certain ring-based choosing bearer theme.
I also always thought this scenario would be creepy, an alien dropping a powerful weapon on our planet and saying, “Right now you have to protect this place.” That’s weird. I thought that this is basically an alien culture interfering with the native culture for reasons of their own interest.
That is the logic of these really creepy alien weapons being delivered to a people on a planet being told now you’ve got this mission. So who’d they give it to, why do they give it to; who could have an oversight on that? I thought I’d play with that. I’ve given out these rings, and it’s immediately a really fun mystery: who gets the rings? And a lot of these characters are as we’ve seen so far all in our “Iron Metropolitan” arc, all-new characters. I gave one to Abigail Burns, who got the fire ring, the incandescence ring. She’s like a liberal political journalist loosely based on Laurie Penny, a British politician, political journalist friend of mine. Because you know, a radical journalist is going to hate Tony Stark.”
The new epic begins with Iron Man #19 out now.
By Editor