Iron Man 2.0 #5

Meh... I really don't care much for the banners at the top with the same look for Fear Itself.  It makes it all uniform, but I just really don't care about them; plus, they hide half the art, which is what should be on a cover.

We're back to an actual story about War Machine.  The writings is better than it was in previous issues, though it was a little hard to follow.  The tie-in aspect of it is pretty cool, actually.  As Fraction mentioned, you don't have to pick up this issue to get important story for Fear Itself.  Instead, it is related to the characters illustrated in the cover and how the events of Fear Itself affect them, in particular with regards to the Worthy.  Things are shaping up for what I hope is a pretty cool subsequent issue or two, which would really be a breath of fresh air to a series that was quickly becoming stale.

What the hell happened to the previous story arc?  We're thrown into this without any real explanation as to how this will tie-in to the previous story-arc, which was of course left without an end of some sort.  In addition, as I mentioned above, the intro panels in this issue really confused me as a reader and I wasn't sure where the story was headed.  While the end results was sort of worth it, I didn't care much for the way this plot device was handled here.

Not a bad issue, but definitely a borrow as it has no relevance to either of the story arcs happening in both Fear Itself and the previous 4 issues of Iron Man 2.0.  I really hope this series gets better, but I just feel that Spencer was forced to tie something in with Fear Itself and the results may or may not be too successful in the end.