Iron Man: The Armor Wars
Written by David Michelinie, art by Mark Bright, Bob Layton and Barry Windsor-Smith, published by Marvel Comics
Overview
Very much an 80s story, with all that entails. The comics themselves refer to this as the “Stark Wars”, but the trade collection calls it the “Armor Wars”, and it’s commonly referred to that way by fans. The Armor Wars story (and title) was apparently popular enough that there was later an Armor Wars II, a young readers retelling of the story in 2007 (as Iron Man & The Armor Wars) and an Ultimate version. It was also adapted into both the Iron Man and Iron Man: Armored Adventures cartoons.
Art
Mark Bright does the art chores on the majority of the book. His artwork is great but typical for the time period, where splash pages were a rarity and use of the 9-panel grid for page layouts was fairly common. Even the few times he breaks this mold, it’s still in the grid format.
The epilogue is done by Barry Windsor-Smith, whose art is a dramatic departure from the rest of the book, with much larger panels and an abundance of splash pages, and a complete departure from the 9-panel grid noted before. It’s a very different feel, stylistically.