Warhammer 40,000: Will Of Iron #4 - Titan Comics

WARHAMMER 40,000: WILL OF IRON No. 4, February 2017

There is arguably a good deal of enjoyment to be found within Issue Four of “Warhammer 40,000: Will Of Iron”, as George Mann’s script brings this mini-series to a cataclysmic conclusion by hurling endless waves of Iron Warriors against the increasingly outnumbered Dark Angels, and Lion El'Jonson’s legion resultantly relying upon “nought but decrepit antiques” from Tintaroth as back-up. Indeed, at one point the battle seems to be flowing so much in the favour of the Chaos Space Marines that their gore-spattered Lord even jokes with Rendix that his loyal lieutenant is so successfully swatting his foes “like so many flies drawn to the bounty of a rotting corpse” that he needs to slow down and “save some for the rest of us” to massacre.

However, any publication which relies solely upon its foreword in order to significantly progress its plot lacks more than a little credibility, and unfortunately for this twenty-four-page finale, the Darlington-born author does just that by first stating in it that the Titans of Tintaroth have already clashed “with a speartip of Iron Warriors on the surface of Exyrion”, and then adding that Baltus’ squad has suffered such heavy casualties that it has “only four Marines left to hold off the Iron Warriors pursuing them into the caverns”. Worse, at no point in this story-arc's previous instalments has it ever been made clear that Korus’ troops knew the precise location of “the ancient, buried weapon”, nor that they were pushing “ever-closer” towards it’s subterranean lair.

These disconcerting ‘event leaps’ genuinely grate and subsequently cause the sudden appearance of heavily-armoured Iron Warriors at Baltus’ precise position to feel particularly manufactured and lazily orchestrated, rather than being simply an unhappy coincidence within the narrative. Unhappily though, it is at this point that the Locus Award-nominee’s previously competent writing appears to completely de-rail, with Baron Kastor suddenly notifying Altheous that “a [mysterious] fellow brother of the Dark Angels” has inconveniently informed his fellow noblemen that the Interrogator-Chaplin is “a renegade spinning a web of deceit”, and thus put an end to any reinforcements, and Baltus unbelievably detonating the mysterious weapon he's tried so hard to protect, even though it means “the Dark Gods [can] gorge themselves on a million unworthy souls.”

Presumably flabbergasted by this absurd outcome Tazio Bettin’s artwork also deplorably deteriorates as the comic continues, with his stunningly dynamic drawings of Sergeant Kalidius bravely fending off Beoth’s bestial attack, ultimately being replaced with some distinctly indifferent doodles of a blasted landscape, and the partially disintegrated remains of a Space Marine clawing his way to the planet’s featureless surface…

The regular cover art of "WARHAMMER 40,000: WILL OF IRON" No. 4 by Nick Percival