Where the Heck III: What should have been our armor becomes a sharp and angry sword (Still No Credit Where Credit Is Due)

Well, Armor Wars, the five-issue Secret Wars miniseries is done and dusted (and bagged and boarded and marked down for the quarter issue bin at your local comic book store). Yep, quite a few of of the 49 Secret Wars miniseries are starting to wrap up, leaving us looking longfully at the finish line a few miles ahead and hoping everybody remembers that to get Johnny Storm down from hanging on the firmament where he's been stuck since Doom hung him up there like some Doomsmas tree ornament made out of flamy unstable molecules. As for Armor Wars, it's as good a time as any to tally up and point out that Marvel went and unbroken 0-5 on giving Don Heck and Larry Lieber proper credit for co-co-creating Iron Man. As you may remember (go ahead! remember!) I pointed out here that Marvel gave incorrect creator credits in the first two issues here, and that they deleted the creator credits entirely in the following two following issues here. For the record, here's the page of Armor Wars #5 where they managed to squeeze in practically everybody's name short of Robert Downey Jr. and Irving Forbush:


Credits page of Armor Wars #5 (November 2015)
Let me just show you what ya shoulda added there, Marvel:

Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Don Heck,
Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby

Well, let's see if it gets fixed in the inevitable trade paperback (I'll be checking!) or on the credits page for October 7th's Invisible Iron Man volume 7, #1. Or is that volume 8? Doesn't matter. I'll be checking. (shaking my hoof warningly at Marvel)

As for Armor Wars itself, it died pretty much as it lived: big and explodey. It's far from one of my favorite Secret Wars tie-ins at all, and issue #5 didn't redeem it, being pretty much a couple dozen pages of exposition shouted over a big-ass fight sequence. F'r example:


Panels from Armor Wars #5 (November 2015), script by James Robinson, pencils and inks by Marcio Takara,colors by Esther Sanz, letters by Travels Lanham
Followed by more explosions and explanations...


And then even more destruction and deconstruction...


Before everybody gets back on stage for the big-summing up, hosted, as far as I can tell, by the Earth-Battleworld's dimensional counterpart of Natasha Irons:


…and a coda mock-flooded with the promise for adventures and excitement to come in that crazy little world of Armor Wars City, until of course Marvel-Earth gets put back together next month, like a hastily-assembled jigsaw puzzle, just to get it off the table so you've got room for dinner.


Armor Wars, everyone! Armor Wars. Armor Wars, won't you?

(BTW:)

Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Don Heck,
Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby