Iron Patriot #5

Iron Patriot #5 was the the end of line for the series. It is too bad. Because though the story by Ales Kot never in the main rose above the level of filler, the art by Garry Brown and the colors by Jim Charalampidis jumped out at you. Brown's work on Iron Patriot was truly alive, a combination of Primitivism and classic Kirby from his Silver Age heyday. When in the future I look back on 2014 Garry Brown's five-issue run on Iron Patriot will sparkle like a Zeitgeist diamond.

Kot acknowledged in a Tweet that Iron Patriot was not his best work: "I believe Iron Patriot is my weakest work, but I managed to find a way to make it personally relevant through what I feel amounts to sheer will and a firm refusal to give up on anything I ever put out into the world." 

Bravo! Very Nietzschean. And Kot strikes a Nietzschean chord that ends the series with strength and depth when a comatose Rhodey dreams of seeing his father, who just sacrificed his life to save him, as a boy. Make sure to see the last scan at the bottom of the page. The text reads:

I don't remember much of the next few days.

Just fragments of dreams. 

People stopping by. 

Being immersed in Tony's meditank.

I had a dream about you. 

You were fishing, alone. 

You were a boy. 

You smiled at me. 

I realized that I was myself, as I am now, and you were that boy again. 

You said something but I couldn't remember what it was.

Previously I have opined that nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. The father leads the way into the abyss and the son dutifully follows along behind. In the process, a reversal takes place. The father becomes the idealized son, "the youth of eternal summers" that Van Morrison sings about in No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986), and which Kot and Brown capture so well. And we are back in the garden.

This is "the tain of the mirror" to the ceaseless striving and constant suffering of the eternal recurrence: We are always already -- here, now -- back in the garden.