Well... it has been a while. For those of you who have visited the original Iron
Works, welcome back! To all the new folks surfing in, greetings! The manager of the Ring
of Iron( mst12 ) e-mailed me recently and asked what brought me back to Iron Man comics
and my old web site. I guess every now and then, no matter how old you get you have to
re-establish that link to the fun days of your childhood and nothing does that better
for me than a good Iron Man yarn. I had been feeling the stresses of work getting to me
and just had to “decompress” my mind a little. Sat down at my computer and did a search
on Iron Man comics. Got the usual “billions and billions” of hits, but the first one I
recognized from the days of the original Iron Works was Advanced Iron. Now I have to
give it to those people they are some kind of serious fans. They have quite the site,
equipment, and staff. Just surfing around Advanced Iron got me thinking about my old
Iron Works and how much fun it was (also how much of a pain at times). I also went out
and bought about 20 Iron Man comics but I will touch on that later.
So... I checked out the Works and found that not much was working anymore. I had
used a lot of Sun Java code on the site and it does not translate at all on the new
versions of IE (thank you very much Microsoft for being so greedy that you have to have
your special version of Java). I dug around the hard way and found that there actually
was quite a bit left in the dust bin of the Tripod drives. I checked out how much space
is offered for free and signed up for a site and started moving stuff out and over. I
have spent most of the last week picking through the ruins and what you see here is what
is usable from the old site (plus some new stuff too).
When I was moving the pages from the library I read in the last Rattle I wrote
in 98 that I was thinking about branching Iron Works out to cover other armored comic
heros, and I still think that is a good idea. There are many sites dedicated strictly to
Iron Man and many people running them that know much more than I. It would be redundant
for me to re-hash the same information that you have seen a hundred times before on
other sites. With that in mind I have started to put together something on Malibu comics
Prototype. After 5 or so years I think it is about time. I am also starting something on
my favorite Iron Man bad guy.
Now that I am on the subject of the future of Iron Works, you are probably
wondering why I am still using such a weird and antique navigation method on the site.
There are a lot of folks out there now that are starting to use pocket PCs (PPC) to do a
major part of their computing. Lots of surfers now on the little machines. I have
decided to make the Works as PPC friendly as possible. The thing is pocket Internet
Explorer (PIE) does not yet do Java and flash navigation panels take up too much page
room on a PPC so for the time being that limits me to html links and gif animations. So
I am sticking with the weird way the old Works was set up until something better comes
along. If you are here on a PPC please read the short page I did concerning them HERE.
Now about those Iron Man comics I bought... While I was surfing around, I read a
few reviews of the new Iron Man stuff coming out. They were not good. So, I thought I
should check this out. Hope they are not killing off my favorite hero with bad stories
or art! The issues that I picked up started with 57, part two of Sympathy for the Devil.
All I can say is I am glad I missed part 1. The story was thrown together, that is the
feeling that I walked away with. Poor Rumiko! Grell threw her away like burnt toast!
Going to take some good writing to get her back in the story correctly. The art work is
good and I like the new armor. I read a lot of reviews that complained about the way it
looks. Tony has a XO Armor, Heros Reborn, Transformers thing going on that actually is
not over done but has enough drama to make it interesting.
I did not get all of the In Shining Iron or You Can’t Always Get... issues so I
won’t comment on them. (Does Mike Grell have a thing for the Stones or what!?) Manhunt
cheered me up. A good old Mandarin story (OK, OK, Temugin). By the way, is it just me or
has anyone noticed that the armor keeps changing from issue to issue. He has the cable
look, it’s gone, no...it’s back again. What’s up with that?
The Best Defense, well if a beer company can use the up coming elections to sell
their product I guess Marvel can use it to sell comics. If they are going to stick with
this story line I hope that Grell throws some meat on the bones and does something good
with it.
Well I am going to wrap it up for now. Have to shine up the armor a little more.
Glad you stopped by and hope you enjoy the new Iron Works!
