War Machine in the 2000s
War Machine was a character born out of the 90’s and the desperate attempts to chase trends of the time. It asked the question: What if Iron Man, but with real guns? The character had become popular enough to feature in the tail end of Avengers West Coast until it was cancelled, and his own solo series which also ended up getting canceled. The nail in coffin for the character at the time was replacing his War Machine armor with some symbiotic alien technology that was basically what would happen if you dumped Iron Man, Venom, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, and the endless supply of 90’s cyborg characters into a blender and hit puree.
After going into bankruptcy protection, Marvel sloughed off the money bleeding titles and characters like War Machine simply ended up in the background if they weren’t ignored outright. Jim Rhodes was previously well established Iron Man supporting character prior to his becoming War Machine. But still, Marvel was busy rebuilding the Avengers and Iron Man brands, Jim Rhodes remained little seen in the early 2000s. He would become a supporting character in Chris Priest’s team book The Crew, sans much War Machine tech. That series would also end up on the chopping block.
Rhodey ended up being a minor player for a time until the Iron Man films came into prominence. With Jim Rhodes being a back-up character in those films, and appearing as War Machine in Iron Man 2, Marvel got to work bringing the character back into prominence in the late 2000s. He started reappearing in the Civil War event and became a supporting cast member in Avengers: The Initiative. In that time, Jim Rhodes went from being a guy in a suit to a cyborg whose armor was a part of him. How he got into this state was left a mystery for the time being, threading interest in a revival of the character.
Rhodey got his chance to shine in the Secret Invasion event, when the book Iron Man: Director of SHIELD was briefly retitled War Machine: Weapon of SHIELD for a few issues at the tail end of its run. This was the backdoor pilot for a new series that kicked off during the Dark Reign era of Marvel publications.
Helming this book was Greg Pak, who had already dazzled readers with his work on the Hulk (both with Planet Hulk and World War Hulk) and was also writing Incredible Hercules at the time. How would he handle War Machine? Well, how about a 12 issue anti-war book. This was probably the closest that Marvel ever got to any harsh criticism of the Bush administration. It’s not a perfect allegory, but its baked in there.
You have to remember that the United States was well into its “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This led to invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq and while the public initially supported the war, after a few years the patriotic blinders were starting to come off. Stories about what was going on were becoming public and suddenly, things weren’t looking so great. Some of what was going on was shady as fuck. Backroom weapons and oil deals, actual war crimes, friendly fire incidents, and a death toll on both sides that eclipsed the 3000 dead during the inciting terrorist attack. With the proliferation of mass media the ugly side of war was being writ large right on our TV screens in the 24-hour news cycle.
In the early 2000s, Marvel (like many American companies) were caught up in the Post-9/11 patriot fervor as pretty much everyone else at the time. There were only a few dissenting voices to start. Your Michael Moore’s, your Dixie Chicks and so on. To do anything but blindly support the “War on Terror” was an insult to the victims of 9/11 and not showing support for the troops. Over time, right around the 10 year mark, the grumbling voices became louder as the uglier sides of the war became more common knowledge. Soldiers come back ruined, the abuse of prisoners, actions that were in violation of the Geneva convention, politicians getting immunity for their complicity and so on. Yet despite the growing public dislike of this pointless forever war, it didn’t really come to an end until the 2020s when America’s worst lame-duck President, Donald Trump, impotently pulled troops out of Afghanistan and leaving the people there to fend for themselves as the Taliban came waltzing back in and took over the place. The War on Terror went from being “Mission Accomplished” to a huge embarrassment the likes of which had not been seen since the Vietnam War.
On the surface, this looks like they were just making War Machine into a global scale Punisher character, but that’s just painting a wider brush. Whereas the Punisher was the product of a knee jerk reaction to another pointless war (the War on Drugs) and trying to make a superhero version of Death Wish and Dirty Harry, the conflict that War Machine was tackling was more nuanced that “Organized Crime and Drugs are Bad”.
But, this direction wasn’t meant to last, as I said above, Marvel was revitalizing the character and priming him to appear in the Iron Man films. Having a killer cyborg that kills with virtual impunity didn’t really fit the pro-military squeaky clean MCU characters, so after 12 issues they reset the status quo so they could pump out War Machine action figures without parents having a hairy fit about how violent the character is (Like modern day Fredrick Werthams, but I digress).
Still, I kind of wish they kept some of the elements of this series intact, I really liked the idea of how War Machine went from being top of the line Starktech and being able to assimilate parts from any machine he comes into contact with. This led to some really wild redesigns of the War Machine armor and I wish that stuck around. You’d figure some coked out guy in marketing would have seen how toyetic such a feature was, but not everyone is the stunning genius I am, I suppose.
I also liked how Pak dug into some Iron Man and War Machine lore for this series. Namely pulling out characters that had faded from the limelight. Particularly Parnell Jacobs, Bethany Cabe, and Suzi Endo. Particularly Parnell, since they were shaping him up to be a villainous War Machine a few years earlier only for that plot to be quickly dumped before it could get its sea legs.
The second volume of War Machine is a good read like many of the post-Marvel bankruptcy experimentations that the company tried in the 2000s. This is something you don’t get to see a lot of these days where most drastic changes to a character only last a handful of issues before the status quo is restored. I wish current Marvel would take a few more risks like this, but it is what it is.
Into the next decade, they will continue to do some wildly different things with Jim Rhodes at least for a little bit before shuffling him back into the role of War Machine, but that is a tale for another time.
