Saturday, November 26, 2016

Invincible Iron Man #7

Marvel - March 2016

Key Issue Notes
First cameo appearance of Riri Williams
First appearance of Tomoe

It seems that every superhero nowadays, like Thor and Spider-Man, is getting a female counterpart, and Iron Man is no exception. I'm assuming that the reason for this is to expand the readership and get more girls intrested in comics by giving them characters that they can relate to. 

Whatever the reason,this comic holds the first appearance of Riri Williams, a 15 year old genius  M.I.T. student, that created her own Iron Man armor from parts she scavenged and stole around campus.

I labeled this the first cameo appearance of Riri simply because that's how CGC/CBCS recognize it. I'm not sure what the requirements are of a cameo appearance are compared to a brief appearance is, but Ms. Williams does show up in two panels at the end of the comic.

Tomoe and James Rhodes
Invincible Iron Man #7 also has the first appearance of Tomoe, who also goes by the alias of Techno Golem. She is an Inhuman, that has the ability to control technology with only her thoughts. She gained her abilities from the Terrigen Mists that activated her latent Inhuman genes.

It's also noted on Marvel Wiki that Mary Jane Watson joins Stark Industries. When I read through this issue, I never saw where MJ actually agreed to become a member of the team. By the end of the comic, she was still debating on whether she was going to join, so I didn't mention it in the key issue notes.

Tony Stark sends his good pal James Rhodes (War Machine) to Japan to look into a security breach, while Stark stays behind to offer Mary Jane Watson a job

Riri Williams
While Tony is doing his best to convince MJ, War Machine runs into a mysterious woman who is inexplicably able to remove his armor from him. This mysterious woman winds up being Tomoe. She ties up Rhodes and uses him a bait to lure Stark to her. This is a three part story that concludes in issue #10, so this is left as a cliffhanger.

As I mentioned, the last page of this issue introduces us to Riri Williams. In the last panel, we see her constructing her own armor in her dorm room.

This wasn't a overly mass produced comic, but it still won't he hard to find a copy. There were and estimated 51,748 copies produced. Now, I have no idea if that includes the variant covers at all. If it doesn't, then the actual number of copies could be much higher.

Printings 1-3
However, to my knowledge, there is only one variant cover to this issue. Welcome to the modern age of collecting where every comic has a variant. I'm not a huge fan of variants, but there are a lot of people out there that are. Ok, let's stay focused here. The one variant is the "Women of Power" cover. I'm not sure what the print run of this copy is.

There were also a total of three printings. They are easily recognizable by the color of the title and the print number is clearly listed under the issue number.

Since this is a fairly new comic, the CGC census isn't very high. This could be because people are holding onto their copies to see where the value of this book is going, or they are already at the grading company, sitting on the shelf, waiting for there turn in the grading room. I'm thinking it's probably the latter.

So far, there have only been 143 copies of the first print graded by CGC. As you can probably guess, most of them are graded a 9.8 NM/M. 105 of them to be exact. This happens a lot with new comics. A lot people go to their local comic shop, snag a few copies of the latest issue and immediately send them in to be graded. These are the people that are in it purely for the money, not for the enjoyment of reading comics.

Values for Invincible Iron Man #7 on GoCollect
As far as sales go, I'm only going to talk about 9.8 NM/M copies. If you're looking to invest in a copy, I wouldn't get anything lower than that. Auctions on eBay are a little scattered for this comic. The latest sale only went for $79.99 via auction. The sale before that dropped for $129.95 via Buy it Now. That's seems to be how things are shaping up over there right now. In fact, the hammer dropped at under $100 for all of the auctions so far, and all of the Buy it Now sales have gone for well over $100, some even closing in on the $200 mark. If it were me, I'd probably wait for an auction to pop up and try and snag a copy on the cheap.

So, if you're looking for a copy, don't look for anything under a 9.8 NM/M. If you can find a copy higher than 9.8, I say go for it, but only if the price is right. This could be the next NYX #3 type comic, but it might not be either, you never can tell. If it does end up being that, you might be kicking yourself in the ass for not snagging this up while it's still affordable.

Find a copy here
eBay - ComicLink - MyComicShop - ComicConnect

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