1 out of 5

I can only find one interview about this book, dating back to its time of release – 2003 – and it at least confirms (or supports) a guess that Chuck Austen was too busy to continue as both writer and artist for this sequel to the 2001 maxi-series, hence bringing in Christian Moore to mimic / followup that book’s CG art; but I was hoping there’d be some mention of the series originally being more than three issues or something – anything that could explain… why. Just: why.

I am a Chuck Austen fan. The first War Machine series was maybe notable for some cringey reasons back in the day – its patriotism and violence-against-foreigners (if we sub in HYDRA for foreigners) struck a chord when the book came out right after 9/11 – but I do sincerely believe its study / criticism of exactly that kind of nationalism, and some of its pokes at racism, have well outlasted that initial snap take, and that the read holds up well nowadays. And in general, I’ve always thought Chuck got a bad rap, and have found a lot of good and a selection of great across his comic oeuvre.

But he was also a busy man in the early 90s, and he definitely has his writerly habits and beliefs that, when allowed to run rampant, can make for some not so great stuff. With this sequel, though, just… why. I always want to try to understand how things turn out the way they do, and you can generally find an “I see what they were going for” throughline, or acknowledge when something was a money grab, or when editorial fussed with it, or there were time constraints, or something. Right from the outset, though, this book is really hard to squint at and see value, and even if it was always planned for three issues, I still swear something must’ve happened after book two that caused some kind of swerve / rush for the ending, because christ it is indecipherably dumb.

As to the art, I don’t think CG comic art ever really looked good – yes, that’s how I felt at the time as well – but we’ll allow that that’s subjective. At least with the first series, even if I think hand-drawn still would’ve been best, the black and white vibe and the CG art arguably fit some of the vibe, and perhaps Chuck, arting his own writing, had a better sense of staging the 3D models. I absolutely believe that Christian Moore may have been a good 3D modeler – in theory, the war machine suits look alright – but whether it was a script to page problem, or just a lack of good storytelling chops from Moore, or the wrong decision to go color (in this era of 3D, colors are flat, and “metal” and “skin” don’t have any textural difference), none of these issues are visually readable. Background characters are all cut and paste; there are no backgrounds in most cases; and when the action kicks up – which is, unfortunately, often, with the m.o. of 2.0 apparently being to cut out all the dialogue and just do fisticuffs – there’s firstly zero sense of motion, but then also zero sense of geography, which absolutely means you cannot tell what is even supposed to be happening. Add in fire “effects” that weren’t up to the job in 2003, and it is just one of the worst looking books, ever. I’m sorry. Again: I’m sure Moore was doing what he could with his tools and the time he had. The technology just wasn’t there, alongside whatever other scripting issues.

Like, primarily: what script? Rhodey, a capable leader in series one with a kind of eye-rolling crush on Sheva, just goes all in on being a jealous lil’ boy in this one, when Sheva dares to talk to Captain America. Tony Stark shows up, demanding his suits back, and there’s a bit of an interesting pitch of him being kind of mission driven above all else, but we lose any of that thread when we skip an entire plot beat between book 2 and 3. This… sort of fits Chuck’s method of doing en media res for the start of his series, but it really feels like something was cut here. Tony is built up as wanting revenge for his stolen War Machine suits (Nick Fury made copies of them – this was the premise of the first series), and then we wholly skip the outcome of his confronting Rhodey / Fury (and Cap), and jump to all of them fighting some terrorists in issue 3, which is plagued with the above-mentioned fire effects.

This is too many words to talk about this book. Nothing about it ever feels necessary. Hence… why, where even asking that as a question supposes that a reason could justify it, but even allowing for time and editorial and all the usuals, I can’t really get there.