Polite Dissent

After looking at the Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2008 earlier, now I’m going to celebrate the Best Comic Book Medicine of 2008.

Best Depiction of Medicine:
The hospital scenes in Blue Beetle #31.link

Best Doctor:
Doctor Mid-Nite finally got the chance to strut his stuff as the preeminent physician of the DC universe, showing up not just in the Justice Society of America, but also having medical assistance roles in Detective Comics, Blue Beetle, and Terra.

Best Single Medical or Scientific Concept:
Slim pickings again this year, but I’d say the best and most realistic medically-driven storyline this year was Sadie’s marked personality changes after suffering brain damage, as seen in David Lapham’s Young Liars series. link

Best Imaginary Medicine or Treatment:
Warren Ellis’s fascination with super-heroes and polyploidy (additional sets of chromosomes), as seen in both Ultimate Human and his run on Astonishing X-Men. link

Special Mention:
Best New Doctor: Dr. Faiza Hussain, the Excalibur-wielding physician from Captain Britain and M.I. 13.
Best Medically Accurate Art: Rags Morales in Nightwing #148.
Best Technobabble: Mandarin’s scientist in Iron Man #24, when he tried to explain how Maya had disguised the Extremis code by hiding it binarily in protein complexes in the genetic structure..

Previous “Best of the Year”: The Best Comic Book Medicine of 2007 The Best Comic Book Medicine of 2006 The Best Comic Book Medicine of 2005 The Best Comic Book Medicine of 2004

Iron Man #28 “Haunted”
Daniel and Charles Knauf, writers
Roberto de la Torre, penciler

I’ve picked on the Knaufs more than a few times during their run on Iron Man, but this time, they have it right — or at least mostly right

Tony Stark: Target pencil-laser to bisect calcaneus diagonally from tendo calcaneus to tibialis posterior tendon.

In order to remove the device around his ankle that’s stopping him from accessing his Extremis suit, Tony Stark has decided to cut off his heel.
The calcaneus is the large bone that makes up the heel.
The tendo calcaneus is an older term for the Calcaneal Tendon, better known as the Achilles Tendon.
The tibialis posterior tendon comes off the (wait for it) tibialis posterior muscle — one of the deep muscles of the lower leg. It wraps around the calcaneus on the inside of the ankle before inserting on the navicular bone (wih smaller insertions on some of the other foot bones).

Based on the art, it looks like Tony is cutting the calcaneus from the point where the Achilles Tendon first meets the calcaneus to the point where the posterior tibial tendon inserts on the navicular, which more or less matches what he is saying — though if I were cutting part of my anatomy with a laser I’d be very specific about where to cut so mistakes weren’t made.

(I meant to post this a while back, but it somehow got lost in the ether. It’s a follow-up to January’s posts on Tony Stark’s heart.)

So what’s the status of Tony’s heart now? Good question.
In Iron Man #30 (1998 series), Tony suffers (yet another) heart attack while fighting a sentient version of his armor. Instead of kicking him while he was down, the armor rips out its own heart and implants it into Tony’s chest (that’s what the second panel shows, though the action is far from clear).

The fact that Tony now has a purely mechanical heart was confirmed in the following issue:

This was the status quo as Iron Man, Volume 3 continued for 58 more issues. As Iron Man, Volume 4 — the one initially written by Warren Ellis — begins, the story changes. In this version, the shrapnel never actually penetrated or injured the heart, but would have if the magnetic fields of the Iron Man armor hadn’t kept it trapped 2 cm from the heart. Tony then goes on to say that medical science was finally able to remove the shrapnel. So in current continuity, until his recent takeover by Ultron, Tony never had an injured heart.

One last scene, which may or may not be relevant, occurs in Iron Man #5. After being injected with Extremis to save his life after a severe beating, fellow scientist Maya mentions his damaged internal organs. “Grew new ones,” is Stark’s reply.

I like the idea of Extremis, but the more the Knaufs try to explain it, the more nonsensical technobabble we get. Technobabble always catches my eye, but since this is biologically-based technobabble (technobiobabble?), it’s gets special attention.

And then to top it off, our bad guy scientist throws in an outlandish metaphor to explain it all:

Scenes from Iron Man #24. Script by Daniel and Charles Knauf, pencils by Butch Guice.