ultimate iron man

So after a blitz of reading heavyweight books like "Who Wrote the Bible?" and poems like "The Song of Hiawatha," I turned my attention this weekend to the first "Ultimate Iron Man" trade paperback, written by Orson Scott Card.

Despite his multiple Hugos and Nebulas, I haven't really been able to get into Card's work. Because it was so highly rated, I gave "Ender's Game" a try, and then read "Speaker for the Dead" and "Xenocide," but it never really clicked for me. Still, when I saw that he had tackled Iron Man for Marvel's Ultimates line, I was intrigued enough to give it a try, once I could find a copy that I could read for free.
 
Most of the actual origin was the standard throwaway stuff you find in superhero comics: A prenatal Tony Stark inadvertantly was genetically altered so that every neuron in his body functions as brain tissue, making him unnaturally intelligent and regenerating his body  from any injury. He also has a subcutaneous bioarmor that makes him impervious to blunt force trauma. The downside is that he suffers chronic pain because the armor eats his body tissues, which are constantly regrowing. Yada yada yada.

The comic depicts the initial meeting between Stark and James Rhodes, and shows their relationship growing from mildly adversarial to actual friendship as equals. It also provides a reasonable explanation for Stark's alcoholism. Because he's always in some moderate pain from that bioarmor, alcohol when he discovers it at a cocktail party provides him with the first meaningful release from that pain in his life.

I really enjoyed Obadiah Stane.

If you're a comics geek like me, you will remember Obadiah Stane from what is probably the greatest Iron Man story arc ever told, back in the early to mid-1980s. Stane was a ruthless businessman determined to complete a hostile takeover of Stark Industries, which he accomplished by driving Tony Stark, a recovering alcoholic, to the bottle through a series of orchestrated personal disasters.

As the story arc unfolded, Stark gave the Iron Man identity to James Rhodes and ended up drinking himself from being the millionaire CEO and principal owner of a major industrial firm to a wino out on the street who nearly froze to death in a blizzard.

Card brought Stane into the story right from the start, even before Tony was born. In his treatment, Stane's parents are Zebediah Stane and the first wife of Howard Stark, Tony's father. Obadiah Stane and Tony Stark are born around the same time, to parents who had been married, and make natural dramatic foils for one another while they are still young. I've no idea how this has played out since in the Ultimate universe, but the storytelling potential is tremendous.

The Iron Man comic went back to the library today. But if I see some time that they have a second volume, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to pick it up for a light read too.

I need something to do between the heavier tomes I've been reading.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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staff devotions

I've never been a big fan of daily devotions when it comes to matters of faith, especially when we're expected to lead them with one another.

Devotions more typically are shallow readings of Scripture or similarly light stories intended more to make us feel good than they are intended to challenge us to think more deeply about God or a life of holiness. Poems like "Footprints" are popular material for devotions. They reassure us that God is in control of things, and no matter how it seems to get, everything will turn out all right in the end.

We had daily devotions at Central Christian Academy in Bethlehem, Pa., when I taught there, and man the other teachers hated when it was my turn. I've always felt that the purpose of reading the Bible is to discover something new about holiness and our pursuit of God; and that we should share what we've been learning, rather than repeating the same homilies everyone knows and shares all the time.

In other words, I couldn't just be normal and light and fluffy, no, I had to do something different and sometimes even downright bizarre.

So one time I shared Orson Scott Card's different versions of the woman caught in adultery. In one the teacher spares the woman's life because he is corrupt, and sees an advantage in sparing her life; and in the other telling he kills her to uphold justice. That got a horrified gasp from one teacher, but I enjoyed Card's point that Christ strikes the perfect balance between justice and mercy, and that's why we strive to follow him and his example.

Another time I shared a passage from Don Richardson's "Eternity in their Hearts" about the redemptive analogies found in pre-Christian cultures, that missionaries connected to the gospel story so that Christianity would grow organically in the culture rather than being imposed from outside with its Western baggage. I was a former missionary and found this sort of thing fascinating; the other teachers found it tedious and pointed out how long it was taking.

These were not normal fare for devotions, I guess, but then it was my turn to lead devotions, and I found them both more interesing and inspiring that hearing that damn "Footprints" poem again.

Then of course there was the other school, Cradle of Life Christian School in Haiti. We had staff devotions there only twice a week, as I recall, and when I shared "what God was teaching me," it was about the obligation we have to the poor. I offered no answers, only the questions I was asking, and what I was seeing in Scripture and in literature.

No one in the staff objected to my knowledge, but the administration really didn't like that. I was put on probation the next day, and at the end of a month I was fired.

I'm not a fan of devotions, but I'm pretty confident I did that one right.


Copyright © 2003 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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