Review by Ian Keogh

Puzzlingly, Dragon Seed Saga doesn’t continue directly from the previous trade collecting John Byrne’s Iron Man. Separating Armor Wars II and this were three issues looking back to Iron Man and the Mandarin’s earliest days, not available in book form until both Byrne’s trades were combined as the Epic Collection War Games.

In story terms not much has changed since the end of Armor Wars II. The Mandarin has taken over much of China, able to threaten the government with monstrous dragon Fin Fang Foom, but he has greater ambitions. More positively, Tony Stark has conceived the technology returning control of his body, and therefore the Iron Man armour. The biggest change is Paul Ryan replacing John Romita Jr. as artist. Ryan is neat and a good storyteller, but provides nowhere near the power or imagination of Romita. Iron Man constantly resembles a posed action figure. It’s very noticeable how much better everything looks when M.D. Bright draws a single chapter.

Having spent so long building up the Mandarin in the previous book, Byrne now reveals we perhaps ought to have been paying more attention to his elderly companion. What develops from him is a couple of smart ideas, one tying into the Mandarin’s origin and the other explaining both Fin Fang Foom’s presence and the volume title.

There’s rather a strange ending to the main story, but it’s explained in a very good epilogue that might have been stronger if Tony DeZuniga had invested the art with greater emotion.

Some space is given over to the Black Widow concerned about a threat that doesn’t manifest here. Again, see War Games to discover what that’s about.

Byrne’s ideas are good, if stretched a little too far, but the full potential of Dragon Seed Saga needed an artist more capable of delivering the spectacle.