It’s amazing how quickly Brian Bendis tanked this series - after a promising first book, just three books in and he managed to thoroughly kill any interest in Riri Williams/Ironheart!
This is a larger than average book - it collects eight issues but issue #600 is a bumper issue so that it’s more like ten issues long - and yet Bendis does his usual, equally amazing trick of having almost no story to tell for that many pages.
As you can tell from the title, Tony Stark is missing so Riri and co. go searching for him. As you can also tell from the title - he’s “invincible” so don’t worry about getting to him in time (even though nobody else is looking for him therefore ZERO stakes), he’ll be fine. Because he’s invincible!
Riri has almost nothing to do here. There’s some rubbish about Stark’s company wanting her tech back (which didn’t last long) and her getting into MIT (zzz…) and that’s it. Bendis can write origin stories beautifully but his more successful titles, like Ultimate Spider-Man: Miles Morales, also have a story to go with it - Miles’ uncle Aaron, etc. Riri has nothing. No story, no nemesis, no goal. She’s just a genius who gets everything handed to her on a plate. It’s beyond dull.
Mary Jane and Tony’s mom fight the Stark board for control of his company - even though Tony’s not had control of it the whole time he’s been away convalescing with no consequences. Great. More nothing.
Worse, Bendis ties his terrible “Doom as Iron Man” series into this title. What’s Doom up to? Pretending to be Iron Man for no real reason and getting his ass handed to him by nobodies who shouldn’t really have the jump on him at all. I’ve already forgotten what the nobodies wanted from Doom anyway - something crap.
The lengthy summaries that open each issue were probably fine for those reading the monthlies but reading them one after the other in a collected edition like this was tedious, horribly repetitive and worthless.
I was mildly curious as to what the real Leonardo da Vinci was doing in this book (a callback to Architects of Forever?) but Bendis literally goes nowhere with that storyline. Da Vinci’s introduced, everyone (readers included) went “whaa…??” and that was it.
A massive book for a non-story that only accomplished a return to the status quo before Bendis jumped the title and Marvel - The Invincible Iron Man, Volume 3: The Search for Tony Stark is a pitiful exit to the series.
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