There's been a lot of discussion on tumblr about this (as I'm sure most people who follow the tags have seen and/or participated in, lol), some of which I agree on, some of which I disagree on, and a lot that I initially agree/disagree on and then somebody comes up with another point and I'm like 'oh that's true...'.
As a penultimate issue, I think it failed. As the beginning of the climax which will (hopefully) be realized in Secret Wars, I'm... still hopeful. The buildup with Steve and Tony fighting was very epic, yes, with shots zooming out, and I imagine that if I'd been reading it while listening to Two Steps From Hell or something like that, I'd have been cheering at the end! But overall I think there are still problems.
The lack of clarity on 'is Tony inverted or not' continues to be the biggest problem I have with it. At first it was useful for ratcheting up the tension - what choice would he make? - but now it's really just confusing. I suppose it might get clarified in SIM when that ends next issue, but I have a hard time reconciling SIM and A/NA to taking place in the same continuity in the first place, since SIM feels an awful lot like one of those random side-quests that take place at the end of a videogame, where the main plot has progressed to the point where the world is about to end but you have time to breed fifty million chocobos and explore all the bonus dungeons, and oh, then maybe you'll save the world when you've finally run out of side-quests to complete. So even if that gets clarified there, it may remain unclear here. It also really undercuts whatever parallels Hickman is trying to draw that involve Tony's character, because we don't know if it's actually Tony. The whole story between him and Steve is completely different depending on which it is.
If we could get a clear-cut answer from SIM that Tony is uninverted, well, there are still some things that I take issue with, on a narrative 'eh, what?' sense as well as a 'I wish they'd done something else; I didn't like it' sense. The former are being debated enough on tumblr that I don't really want to go into it myself here, but for the latter I'm mostly 'Aww I wish the date had been more drawn out' because that ended way too quickly and I didn't get out of it what I wanted. (That might also go a bit into narrative 'eh what?' issues, though.)
Overall, I was reminded strongly of Star Wars Ep III (...take that as you will), where you've got grand universal destruction and then two people fighting and maybe one does not make a whole lot of sense. But it was extremely epic. I generally found the art likeable but not superb, until those last scenes, which were very good at conveying that sense of building up to something.
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As a penultimate issue, I think it failed. As the beginning of the climax which will (hopefully) be realized in Secret Wars, I'm... still hopeful. The buildup with Steve and Tony fighting was very epic, yes, with shots zooming out, and I imagine that if I'd been reading it while listening to Two Steps From Hell or something like that, I'd have been cheering at the end! But overall I think there are still problems.
The lack of clarity on 'is Tony inverted or not' continues to be the biggest problem I have with it. At first it was useful for ratcheting up the tension - what choice would he make? - but now it's really just confusing. I suppose it might get clarified in SIM when that ends next issue, but I have a hard time reconciling SIM and A/NA to taking place in the same continuity in the first place, since SIM feels an awful lot like one of those random side-quests that take place at the end of a videogame, where the main plot has progressed to the point where the world is about to end but you have time to breed fifty million chocobos and explore all the bonus dungeons, and oh, then maybe you'll save the world when you've finally run out of side-quests to complete. So even if that gets clarified there, it may remain unclear here. It also really undercuts whatever parallels Hickman is trying to draw that involve Tony's character, because we don't know if it's actually Tony. The whole story between him and Steve is completely different depending on which it is.
If we could get a clear-cut answer from SIM that Tony is uninverted, well, there are still some things that I take issue with, on a narrative 'eh, what?' sense as well as a 'I wish they'd done something else; I didn't like it' sense. The former are being debated enough on tumblr that I don't really want to go into it myself here, but for the latter I'm mostly 'Aww I wish the date had been more drawn out' because that ended way too quickly and I didn't get out of it what I wanted. (That might also go a bit into narrative 'eh what?' issues, though.)
Overall, I was reminded strongly of Star Wars Ep III (...take that as you will), where you've got grand universal destruction and then two people fighting and maybe one does not make a whole lot of sense. But it was extremely epic. I generally found the art likeable but not superb, until those last scenes, which were very good at conveying that sense of building up to something.