As someone who had to sit through years of unfathomably awful Iron Man comics (I’m looking at you, father-son writing team of Knauf and Knauf, not to mention the whole making him the villain of Civil War line of bullshit), I’ve been more than happy to ride the wave of great new work featuring the Golden Avenger that the likes of Fraction and Ellis have been putting out recently. Ultimate Armor Wars #4 slots into that group of great comics quite nicely.

While this hits many of the familiar points I’ve come to expect from one of my favorite comic authors, Warren Ellis can still write most Iron Man writers under the table. I loved his Extremis work and was sad to see him go, but these Ultimate Iron Man comics he’s been writing have more than made up for it. No one writes nanofleets and high-tech corporate-versus-government espionage like Ellis and it’s great to see him back at the helm. I also love his Tony Stark to bits.

Someone remind me again why Orson Scott Card got to write the Ultimate Iron Man minis (the ones where they turned Tony blue, I remind you).

The art was as good as I’ve come to expect from Steve Kurth and makes me long for some more newuniversal work from this team. Fingers crossed I guess.