The past few years have given birth to a new way of experiencing our favorite comic book series along with giving newcomers an easy window into experiencing comic book series: The Motion Comic. Not exactly fully animated (nor is it fully still), Motion Comics add flare and voice acting to existing comic book titles out there. Recently we’ve been seeing more and more of these pop up, especially as mini web series that various comic book companies put out in episodic bits. Watchmen, Astonishing X-Men and even Batman: Mad Love have all been adapted into this new format, and now it is Iron Man’s turn with Warren Ellis’s Extremis storyline, which is now available on DVD.
Meant to be a “rebirth” for Iron Man, Extremis updated Tony Stark’s origin story for modern day and a lot of the concepts have most recently been reused for the live action Iron Man movies. The story deals with the advent of a new super soldier serum called “Extremis” which, once in someone’s body, has the power to rebuild and reconfigure humans using nanomachines to turn them into super weapons. The serum is hijacked and given to a militia intent to use it for all the wrong reasons. Tony is then dragged into a fight that leaves him close to death and has no other choice than to take the Extremis serum for himself thus setting the stage for a newly powered Iron Man to rise up and deal with this new threat.
Warren Ellis’s tale being brought to life as a motion comic may not have exactly been the best choice for the motion comic format. Ellis’s dialog is very heavy and lenghty with constant monologues back and forth from and between several characters in key scenes. This works out fine in comic book form, but when spoken it sounds and feels very unwieldy and slowly paced. The voice acting is also very poor with little to no emotion given for any of the characters. It all feels very wooden and hollow with no real life to any of it. Finally, the story itself is not exactly the best fit due to the lack of action all together in the story aside from a few small bits. Instead we are left focusing on the awkward semi-animated faces as we are stuck watching talking heads go back and forth.
Granted the look of the motion comic at least stays true to Adi Granov’s work on the comic, showing off the very much realistic and less cartoony approach he took with this new storyline and the change in direction for Iron Man as a character altogether.
Special DVD Bonus Features include:
- A Conversation With Adi Granov
- Behind-The-Scenes Look At Marvel Knights Animation
- Marvel Super Heroes: What The —? Starring Iron Man
- Visual History Of Iron Man
- Exclusive Music Video
- Trailers
Overall:
When compared to Marvel’s previous Motion Comic efforts with Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, Iron Man- Extremis feels lacking in several regards. Not every comic storyline is exactly adaptable as is into the Motion Comic format, and Extremis shows this in many ways. Originally released as a online webseries, the whole story is split up into episodes each with their own opening title and ending credits sequence that bookends each one much like on Marvel’s previous efforts. These only serve to slow the pacing down even moreso on what already is a slow and plodding watch. One can only hope that on Marvel’s next efforts into the motion comic territory that they would package it together as a whole movie than keeping all the artifacts from the original web based format intact.
ComicsOnline gives Iron Man- Extremis on DVD 2.5 newly animated comic book pages out of 5.
Get your copy of Iron Man – Extremis at Amazon.
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