After all the chess moves, terror acts, and pirated technology, the endgame has begun.  Debuting in Fraction's Order series, Ezekiel Stane has finally reached the fruition of his plans: one on one with Tony Stark.  After presenting himself as a new type of super-terrorist, Zeke has slipped further and further into the trappings of the classic villain archetype: bald head, flashy and vengeful rhetoric, your standard "anti-Iron Man" suit, the corruption of adversary's work, etc.  From his morbid taste in T-shirts to his Ledger Joker-ish ambivalence to mass casualties, Stane's descent into super-villain madness is surely going to be his undoing.

This issue feels in many ways like Director of Shield #28 where Tony went face to face with the Mandarin for the first time since his return.  Here, we see the first fist-to-fist smackdown between Zeke and Tony.  The action itself is pretty well done by Larrocca who manages to showcase his A-level stuff on this book, the big mecha fights.  The scale of the repulsor blasts and the metal-on-metal hits serve to make this issue very exciting indeed.  The only downside to this fight is the completely hollow cliffhanger.  We know Tony wasn't in the suit.  The voice even goes into binary code as it "dies".  Nevertheless, that last page is a wonderfully drawn one.

Between an opener that further demonstrated the great dichotomy of Tony Stark (using the destructive to amass the resources for the constructive) in Stark Industries to a yet another truly horrific terrorist attack worthy of the Dark Knight to a blistering armor fight, this team has made Iron Man a must-read character again and I, for one, am loving it.