IRON MAN #8: Inside The Issue

Just in time for the NBA conference finals, we're bringing you basketball, labor militancy and capitalist violence. Stark Unlimited will never be the same. Read the comic before this edition! 

Edited by Sam Thielman

TONIGHT, THE KNICKS host the Eastern Conference finals. I was a teenager the last time this happened and today I'm a middle-aged man. Throughout the second round of the playoffs, I assured my eldest that my erratic emotional state had nothing to do with her.

Perhaps you've seen the videos from Friday, of 7th and 8th Avenues shut down for a quarter-mile around Madison Square Garden, and wondered how thousands of feral people could celebrate advancing out of the semifinals like it was a championship. Jaylen Brown hinted at the answer in his post-elimination press conference. The Celtics, defending NBA champions and every day of this season the presumptive repeat champs, lost a series every NBA analyst, journalist, podcaster and loudmouth expected them to win effortlessly. They lost to a team they manhandled during the regular season and, understandably, did not respect. "Losing to the Knicks," Brown said, "feels like death." 

Beating the Celtics, accordingly, feels like resurrection. New York professional men's basketball, for an entire generation the laughingstock of the league, is back. (The Liberty, don't you forget, are the defending WNBA champs.) Whatever the Celtics' uncertain future holds—get well soon, Jayson Tatum—they will not disrespect the Knicks next year. If you're a New Yorker, particularly one whose Knicks fandom is a family inheritance, I don't need to explain the feeling of these past five days to you. We're just passing that thing back and forth while we cackle, dedicating these wins to Ron Baker, Lou Amundson, Langston Galloway, Lance Thomas, Jose Calderon… 

Obviously, a fanbase that's been running on cokedreams and nostalgia for 25 years wants to beat the Pacers and make the Finals. There's a picture of me holding my aforementioned daughter up to the TV in the hospital where she was born because they were showing the Reggie Miller vs. The Knicks 30-for-30. and I wanted Pat and Mase to bless her before we saw how the 1995 semifinals ended. 

But whatever happens in the Eastern Conference Finals, we're playing with house money. We weren't supposed to be here and we are. Trading all the homegrown guys, except for Mitch and Deuce, worked. The KAT/Randle-Divo trade has proven to be a win-win. It really has been orange and blue skies for the past five days, except for the Mexican Navy sailboat's disastrous collision with the Brooklyn Bridge. 

I say that to say this. IRON MAN #8, titled "The Deadly Rhythm of The Production Line," is one of the most pivotal of the entire series. Tony Stark makes major decisions in this one, fateful ones, some of which he doesn't even realize he's making. In order to get him there, the issue spotlights two supporting characters, both of them created by me and Julius Ohta. We needed the scenes spotlighting them to be action-packed. For reasons we'll go into after the paywall, that wasn't going to be a problem for the scenes with union organizer Ramon Vicente. 

But the other character we're spotlighting is the young Latverian refugee and novice mage Vishte Taru, whom Iron Man rescues from certain death in #6. He and Iron Man forge a bond in this issue. When I sat down to draft it, I didn't have any good ideas for how I was going to forge that bond and still be visually dramatic. 

Then it occurred to me that #8 was the May issue. We were going to drop right in the thick of the NBA postseason. There would never be a better time in the series to borrow an X-Men trope and have Tony Stark and Vishte Taru bond by hooping. Distinguished Iron Man alum Gerry Duggan ended INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #20 with a basketball court installed in Tony's Los Angeles airfield. There Vishte can talk his shit and take Tony's measure—although I want to be clear, I want zero smoke with Nicola Jokic's brothers and we are absolutely not disrespecting them. We're invoking them so Vishte can talk his shit to Tony. 

After the paywall, I'll talk through every aspect of this shocking, status-quo-rearranging issue, and I won't talk about basketball anymore. LFGK though!