IRON MAN WEEK #9--Iron Man 3 (2013)

 The good news is it's much better than Iron Man 2, which was a muddled mess that pretended most of the first movie never happened. The plot's clearer and easier to follow, the action is actually pretty well-realized, and while I dreaded having three Iron Man comic refs in the movie that I utterly hate (Extremis! The Mandarin! The woefully stupid Iron Patriot!) it didn't grate on me too bad.

 The bad news is, it's not very good, and indeed, barely an Iron Man film.  Trying to build a movie around the importance of Tony Stark and Pepper's Potts' relationship is never going to work, because they have the phoniest love affair in a movie brimming with phony shit (I believed in the notion of the genetic whatever stuff they injected you with that let you grow back limbs and burn people or whatever more than any of their scenes together) and despite the movie trying mightily to sell me on how theirs is a True Love, I didn't buy it any more here than I did in the other movies they've been in.

 I'd be willing to let that slide if the movie moved along a little more briskly, but then there's that interlude in Tennessee with the cute kid, which stops the movie totally dead and it never quite gets its momentum back. The movie seems to want to have this come across as very emotional even if it's kidding it at every opportunity, but since it never commits one way or another, it feels more like they're just killing time.Plus, the kid is pretty much just a ball of "cute kid" cliches and never really becomes his own character.

 The villains are a mixed bag. I know a lot of people have whined about the twist with the Mandarin, but in all honesty, I loved that part--the Mandarin totally sucks and was used appropriately. The other two bad guys don't make much of an impression (mostly because the movie is too busy trying to set up a big third-act reveal to give them the requisite amount of character for it to be the SHOCKING SWERVE it's supposed to be) but I'm sure the brief for the third movie was "look, do whatever, just make sure it's not another guy in an Iron man-like suit again this time," and in that, it succeeded.

 The final battle with the multiple armour suits is OK in theory, but it never quite opens up and becomes as awesome as it should be and soon devolved into "Stark fights a guy, suit gets damaged, he hops into another suit, lather, rinse, repeat." The out of armour action sequences are actually pretty good and have some really clever bits in there, but the movie doesn't seem all that determined to apply the same sort of imagination to the armour combat sequences.

 So in all, it doesn't make the mistakes Iron Man 2 did, but makes a whole bunch of new ones instead, plus it's an Iron Man movie which is trying really hard to be something other than an Iron Man movie, so while it wasn't wrong footed enough for me to hate it, I can;t say I'm any any hurry to re-watch it again.

IRON MAN WEEK #8--IRON MAN 2 (2010)

Well, seeing as how I am the Internet's pre-eminent loudmouth on all things Iron Man (seriously! Even War Rocket Ajax said so) it behooves (behooven? does behoove?) me to weigh in my thoughts on Iron Man 2, as I am two hours fresh from the theatre having just seeing it on opening day and I can tell the Four Readers out there are dying to know what I thought of it. Spoilers ahoy--we doin' this.

Iron Man 2 picks up six months after the first movie, and Tony Stark is kicking ass and taking names. He has, as he says in the movie "privatised world peace"--an interesting concept I would rather have seen rather than be told about--as it would have been an interesting flipside to his previous monopoly on arming the world. With his fantastic suit or armor he's invincible (as people are years away from duplicating the process that created the suit), overconfident, utterly cheeky, and proves that one can indeed have balls so big that bullets do nothing as he owns the US Senate, arch-rival Justin Hammer (played by Sam Rockwell as a being that exhales sleaze the way you and I exhale carbon dioxide) in one fell swoop.

He's also dying. The arc reactor in his chest is poisoning his blood in a mostly well-thought out subplot that I was eternally grateful was not the Extremis plot as previously speculated (There are people who think the Extremis plotline in the comic was a brilliant spin on Iron Man. These people are completely, absolutely, catastrophically, objectively wrong.) The resolution is a little creaky (a lot, actually) but I'll get to that in a minute, but the way it drives Stark into more risky and alienating behaviour is actually well done and drives the story in a rather Empire Strikes Back "just keeps getting worse for the gang" kinda way.

The crisis point comes when Ivan Vanko, whose father worked with Tony's father (who, in an eternally amusing bit is played by Roger Sterling from Mad Men as Roger Sterling, pretty much) on the arc reactor thing and Swears Revenge on him. The whole attempt to set Vanko and Stark up as products of their fathers and their pasts falls flat here, mostly because Mickey Rourke hunger-dunger-dangs his way through his dialogue in a way that the word "unintelligible" doesn't even begin to cover. But he's effective physically as Whiplash and manages to make the whole "guy with a whip against the guy wearing a walking tank" thing work in a way the comics sure as hell never did.

Insofar as any of his plan was understandable without subtitles, it's pretty smart--Vanko just wants to demonstrate that Stark isn't invincible, and trusts that his many rivals will pounce him at this sign of weakness--he just plans to demonstrate it in public. But things develop that Hammer sees an opportunity to finally crack Stark's design and frees Vanko, who agrees to design an army of drones for him (though he has his Own Reasons, naturally--Hammer never once comes off as the sharpest knife in the drawer in the film. Obadiah "IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS! Stane, he ain't.) and bides his time for his final revenge with Stark.

Meanwhile, Stark seems to be taking care of the whole destroying himself thing pretty ably--alienating himself from Pepper Potts (who at least doesn't kill the Big Boss by throwing a switch this time) and finally forcing Jim Rhodes to steal one of his older suits and smack some sense into him in a pretty damn good fight that is pretty damn physical and has some decent fight choreography for something that was sure quite a lot of CGI. Credit where it's due--there's some real heft in the fights and the camera isn't all juddering around and stuff so you can't really make out what's going on. I do call bullshit on the "speed ramping" stuff though: Stop that. It's two thousand god damned ten. You know better.

Anyways, Rhodey delivers the Mark II two the government, which Hammer refits into War Machine, the Drones get built and Stark, with a little help from Nick Fury and The Most Plot-Convenient Box In The World figures out a way to upgrade the arc reactor in such a way as to where it won't kill him.

This bit is actually one of my biggest problems with the movie. Stark works out after seeing a filmed message from his father that he hid the plans for an entirely new element in the design of his expo's grounds. I know what the point of the scene was--Stark never knew his father and never knew how proud he was of him and how he'd bequeathed the future to him--I got all that without the utterly obvious & damn silly device of him hiding the new element on his fucking fairgrounds.

This is a great excuse for a new suit of armour (now with Big Triangle) and a final showdown with War Machine and the Drones on the Expo's grounds. Y'see, Vanko having figured out how to seize control of them all in an effort to . . .y'know I'm not sure what the whole point of having Hammer's Drones shoot up Stark's expo really was, and as Vanko spent more time learning hacking than he did elocution, so I can only speculate it was a general "blow up his spot" kinda thing. He was very upset about his bird maybe--I really couldn't tell you.

The fight between War Machine, Iron Man, and the Drones is a good bit of business and plays a lot better than the Iron Monger fight from the first movie did, as the multiple Drones allow for a little variety and a good long fight wherein none of the principals takes their mask off just in case the people watching are too dumb to remember who's who (I really hate this cliche, and it took me out of the fight at the end of the first movie) which has a good Crowning Moment of Awesome for Iron Man (You'll know it when you see it) and culminates with a big fight with Whiplash in his new upgraded armor.

That part I'm not so crazy about. Having read some ancillary stuff about the making of the movie, the creators of the film were anxious to avoid a fight that looked too much like the Iron Monger fight, but that's pretty much what they ended up doing. It's not bad (and has a pretty cool resolution) it's just . . .a little disappointing.

You may have noticed I haven't talked much about Nick Fury or the Black Widow being in this movie. That's because they don't really do that much--the Widow gets to kick a little ass in an ultimately futile (but amusing) bit in the third act and Nick Fury shows up to nudge the plot along, shoehorn some stuff about the Avengers movie to come, and generally be Samuel L. Jedi for a little bit.

I know everyone's nerded out about the Avengers teases that were in the movie, and . . .yeah, wonderful. It's great they're trying to link a bunch of movies together and I hope it works, but trying to do all that within Iron Man 2 meant there were a lot of bits that didn't really work for this movie that just called attention to themselves. I laud them for what they're trying to do, but really . . .it needs to be a bit more invisible to be more enjoyable, and I'm looking right at that damn post-credits bit.

Anyhow, thankfully the movie finishes on a nice callback to the Senate stuff from the beginning of the movie and we're off until Iron Man 3 hits in 2012 or whenever.

A major quibble (for me, anyways)--the score is atrocious compared to the first one. I liked how the Iron Man theme gradually "built" through every iteration of the armour was a cool little extra touch and I missed that this time out, John Debney's score is generic, obvious and too damn loud in the bits of the score that aren't AC/DC's greatest hits collection (and seriously--given how obviously mercenary having AC/DCs song jammed willy-nilly on the soundtrack, y'all didn't even try to get "War Machine?" How hard could it have been--I mean, KISS will come to my house for $100.) and it really lets the movie down when it should be at a more epic pitch. I know we're well past the days of good purpose-built scores, but when done properly, they add a lot to the movie.

It may sound like I didn't like the movie as much as the first one and . . .well, I didn't. But only narrowly so--I've told people it's an A to the first movie's A+--The armor battles are suitably epic, the suitcase armour was awesome as hell, and the movie's weaker bits are fortunately eased by Robert Downey Jr's considerable charm and amused cheekiness in the face of . . .er, everything. The rest of the cast mostly acquits themselves well--no one really stands out, but no surprise there--Downey pretty much owned the first movie also, didn't he?

In short, it's pretty good, and doesn't suffer from a dramatic slide in quality as sequels often do (and before you bring up Spider-Man 2, I remind you that people who believe Spider-Man 2 was a great movie are also utterly, tragically and catastrophically wrong) and advances the first story in some interesting ways without having to leech off of "iconic" stories from the comics (not least of which because there aren't any). The idea of Stark's Iron Man tech touching off an arms race (or an Armour War?) is a good one, and hopefully it'll be carried through to a logical conclusion in the third movie.

It's not what it was, but it'll do.

IRON MAN WEEK #7--Wherein We Sock It To Shellhead, One Last Time

It has been argued--not least by the illustrious Diana Kingston-Gabai--that Iron Man Week, while judged a success by any measure for the Prattle, it lacked a proper cap wherein I stopped being a passive observer of Iron Man's vast and mostly dull history and said something about my feelings on the character and how he should ideally be presented.

They also reminded me a week was seven days, so there's that as well. Thus, only a little late, and for your further delectation, I present the final installment of Iron Man Week:

There's a scene in an Iron Man issue (from the first Layton/Michelenie run, round the #150s I want to say) wherein Iron Man's trussed up in front of a laser cannon by the Living Laser. He finds out in short order that his hands are bundled up in aviation tape, and thus firing his repulsors would only blow his own hands off. If he tried to yank the cables restraining his arms, the cannon behind him would fire and probably vaporize him.

He seems utterly trapped.

Fortunately, he gets the Laser monologuing, and as anyone who saw The Incredibles can tell you (when they're not spinning a line of bullshit about an alleged Ayn Rand subtext in the movie) monologuing will get you in trouble every time. Iron Man burns through the tape on his hands, repulsors the cables, and tucks and rolls just before the cannon fires.

This, to me, is Iron man's Crowning Moment of Awesome. The subsequent fight afterwards isn't bad either, as Iron Man breaks out his jet-powered roller skates which are basically his version of Kuribo's Shoe.

Now, why this moment?

Because it plays to Iron Man's strengths as a character--he's physically able to go toe to toe with an enemy, but he also has the added advantage of being able to out-think them. And it's the way that he out-thinks people that sets him apart from Marvel's other scientist heroes.

Tony Stark isn't Reed Richards. He will never build a portal to the Negative Zone or invent cloth that never tears or looks like stuff from Dave Cockrum's old sketchbooks, he works in a more practical arena.

Moreover, his gift is more reactive science than proactive science. Richards comes up with wacky Grant Morrison-style inventions because he's an explorer. Stark developed the Iron Man suit (as I said in my post about the movie) to provide a means to keep himself alive and to escape.

So Tony Stark's gift is that he can innovate under pressure and, once he's got the bit in his teeth (so to speak) he won't stop improving something until it's perfect. Layton has mentioned in interviews that Stark suffers from a kind of obsessive-compulsion, and there's certainly something to that--witness the constant evolution of the Iron Man armour as only the most obvious example.

More than that--and this is a flaw only hinted at and largely ignored because it's easier to write stories about a bad heart or falling off the wagon--there's an element of being Iron Man that for Stark is an escape. As Iron Man, he's no longer Tony Stark, multimillionaire industrialist, or ladies' man, or what have you, but at the same time he is. One of the things seldom explored (and now that it's been written in stone that Secret Identities Are Bullshit, sadly lost) was the idea that in a way, as Iron Man, Tony Stark went incognito at his own company as just another employee, and thus Iron Man became in it's own way, another secret identity. No one ever did anything with it to any great extent, but the potential was certainly there.

Moreover, since we seem to be on a somewhat psychological kick here, as O'Neil elucidated in his Iron Man run, the armour was initially a means of escape for Stark, a way to escape inner pain. The exact nature of that inner pain's never really fully explored, but it's easy enough to draw a line through the character's history and connect some dots. Stark loses his parents at an early age, but is a child prodigy and finds early success in innovating existing technology. He grows up a child of privilege, but lacks a family and thus is further isolated by the demands of running a company, maintaining his family fortune, and the constant pressure in the technology line to forever innovate and never stand still. It leaves little time for friends, even less for a social life of any consequence. If he's connected to the rest of humanity at all, it's through a wall of money and isolation.

Ironic, then, that locking himself in a suit of armour is itself an escape from a very locked-in life.

On the technical end of things, as we've mentioned before, Stark has a tremendous sense of responsibility when it comes to his inventions. The idea that he things he builds may be used to kill people is ultimately not something that sits well with him. The Armor Wars is an concrete example of that--the Iron Man armor is a deadly weapon on the order of a loose nuke, should its secrets get out. There's plenty of stories that can be told there that reflect our own feelings about the advance of technology and is it moving too fast and can you really ever keep it out of the "wrong hands" in a world where information runs around the globe at the speed of light and can be accessed almost anywhere at any time?

It would behoove, however, to do those stories in a way that doesn't make them immediately dated by the next presidential election. Just sayin'.

It's that sense of responsibility that keeps Stark connected to the larger world, in a sense. Rather than being a distant, remote, technocrat, convinced he knows better than anyone how to run the world in an orderly fashion (i.e. "douchebag") Stark should, motivated as he is by his past career as an arms dealer, the responsibiliy for what he's done and what was done in his name should, ideally, motivate him to focus both his corporate and intellectual gifts toward improving the human condition and generally making the world a better place, not unlike how Gilded Age robber barons like Carnegie and Flagler became humanitarians in the twlight of their lives or how Nobel became known more for lauding great acheivement in the humanities and sciences rather than, y'know, "that asshole who invented dynamite." Stark's quest to improve himself (psychologically and, through the Iron Man armour, physically) expands to the macro level of trying to improve the entire world.

To boil it down to the most visceral and basic, level (and I'm borrowing from he damn movie again) Iron Man stories should never forget Rhodes' reaction to seeing the Iron Man suit for the first time: "That's the coolest thing I ever seen."

Iron Man should always--always--be really damn cool.

IRON MAN WEEK #6--In Which Movies Succeed Where Comics Fail

It's occurred to me, looking over the previous installments of Iron Man Week, that you would never guess that Iron Man is actually my favourite character, considering the amount of bitching and whinging I've been doing over the course of these. I began to ponder that if I were to wrap things up with today's entry, I damn well better end things on, well, if not a high note, then at least something vaguely positive.

Like, say, a particular favourite Iron Man issue or something.

Trouble is, they're a bit thin on the ground. Good Iron Man stories, like the defining moments of his canon, aren't as many as you'd think, considering he's been in constant publication for 40 years and all that. And, as DC fans can attest, all too often, one finds that they like their favourite comics characters in any format except the comics they're actually appearing in, which is as sad a commentary on anything as you're likely to find.

That said, today's topic is Iron Man. The movie. Otherwise known as the one time in the last 10 years Iron Man hasn't totally sucked wind. Very much the Goldfinger to The Dark Knight's Casino Royale, Iron Man is a film that exemplifies the best of and revels in the conventions of the superhero movie and treats the whole thing as the coolest thing ever (Compare with Dark Knight, which blew up the superhero movie as we knew it and showed us heretofore unexplored potential)

It didn't always look like it was going to work--It was an origin story, which in most cases (and in Iron Man's case in particular) origin stories are usually the dreariest and least interesting parts of a superhero's makeup--the best ones usually get it over with as soon as possible and get on with the whammo blammo action as well. Moreover, once again we're stuck with Tony Stark=wounded heart trope, but the movie ears some points by justifying it with probably-bullshit-but-gets-the-job-done-science and getting a little metaphorical weight out of it, and Pepper Potts is in the movie as well. Couple that with the fact that the powers that be had been doing everything in their power to make the character obnoxious and unlikeable for so very long . . .well, it didn't look good.

And, if I'm honest, there are parts that don't work. Pepper Potts is a nonentity, Jim Rhodes is annoying and generally useless (Terence Howard's performance doesn't help matters--he's fussy and awfully lacking in gravitas for someone who's supposed to be a military man) Pepper Potts is her usual ciphery self and the whole fight with Stane and the Iron Monger feels a bit . . .perfunctory.

But it also does two things very right, an this helps paper over the less successful bits.

For one thing, Favreau and company have an excellent handle on Tony Stark's character. The slight but very beneficial change to his origin (that one of his own fragmentation bombs is what nearly kills him) adds a certain thematic unity to his story that, surprisingly, no one had really exploited up to now--having been a victim of what he's been selling to everyone opens his eyes and reawakens his conscience.

But more than that, the film posits that Stark is brilliant . . .but lacks a natural focus for his talents. When we first meet him he's successful, but a little rudderless. Everything's come so easy to him that he seems almost bored with his life.

But he soon gets the kick in the pants he needs. To save his life, he miniaturizes the Arc Reactor and creates and artificial heart--a feat so amazing that Stane's people can't replicate it later. He's compelled to be brilliant to save his life, and that structure of action and Stark's reaction to it defines the shape of the movie.

The need to escape his captors without building weapons for them leads to the creation of the Iron Man armour. And it's his assumption of the responsibility for the weapons he's built that leads him to refine and improve the Iron Man armour. Now that his eyes are opened, and the weapons that he though were making the world safer are having the opposite effect, he is resolved to take responsibility (we're back in Armour Wars territory again) whatever the cost to his life.

"I shouldn't be alive," Stark says in a justification for what he's doing. "Unless it was for a reason."

The other success the movie pulls off is by picking the right guy to play Stark. I made the comparison to Goldfinger above (basically because it's universally considered to be the "perfect" Bond movie for how it hits every detail of the formula) and surely as Sean Connery holds that movie together with a relaxed sense of cool, so too does Downey as Stark. That he makes such a compelling hero without the obvious "badass" tics we've grown so used to (and actually, in several moments plays the fool) without losing the audience's sympathy is actually quite an amazing trick, when you think about it. The tone he sets, actually, keeps the movie fun without degenerating into Batman & Robin-esque camp.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the film score (I'm kind of a soundtrack geek) I'm a sucker for the whole motif of "have various tracks foreshadow the main theme here and there and when the time comes for the Crowning Moment of Awesome, bang in the full theme in as loud and triumphant as possible," which works to great effect here when Iron Man takes off in the Mark II the first time & again when he takes out the terrorists in Gulmira in the Mark III.

The film managed to be more than the sum of its parts, and if it ultimately doesn't measure up to Dark Knight it's because it's a bit conventional by comparison isn't it. But, when weighed against the fact that getting an even passable Iron Man story in the comics in which he originated takes something on the order of a Herculean labour, it's quite an achievement on its own.

IRON MAN WEEK #5--Not Quite as Invincible as Advertised

Last time, we finally completed out long recounting of the often torturous publication history of Iron Man, and it's from that point we start off today, considering, as we do, the new "core" Iron Man book, Invincible Iron Man.

Matt Fraction is a writer with quite the high pedigree. Coming off collaborating with Ed Brubaker on Immortal Iron Fist, and having cut his teeth on the little read but highly regarded book The Order, he seemed to be due for high-visibility assignments.

And so, it was announced in 2008 that he would not only be taking over the writing on Uncanny X-Men and, perhaps more prestigious in light of the movie, Invincible Iron Man.

And didn't Iron Man need some help, at least in comics. Bad as the Extremis nonsense had damaged his character, being hijacked as the public face (and, if you're to believe the people who wrote Civil War) of government-run superheroing. This set the seal on Iron Man as manque for Bush-era politics, or, to put it another way, made him come off as a right prick.

So, Iron Man was ripe for a new start, preferably one that actually got him in the business of being Iron Man again and doing superhero things rather than furrowing his brow at monitors and acting prickish and Fraction, it seemed, was the right guy to do it. Added to that, Marvel had retained the services of Salvador Larocca, a talented artist used to doing good work under less than idea circumstances, so it was widely felt that even if the book was shite, it'd look good.

Alas, this was not to be. It took less than 5 issues for the whole thing to be revealed as an incredibly half-baked, ill-conceived mess, and Fraction became much less "promising new writer" and more "disappointment delivery system."

Initially, by soft-pedaling the Civil War nonsense and focusing Iron Man not being a jackass kind of worked. The first few issues take up Star's conflict with Ezekiel Stane, son of Obadiah Stane, who had been taking and modifying Stark's technology to create suicide bombers. Moreover, Stane the Younger has modified his own body to generate powers comparable to Iron Man's.

The stage was set for an interesting conflict and the concretising of the metaphor--was Iron Man obsolete? Both in terms of his technology and worldview? Was Stane--and people like him--part of a new generation of super-criminals who, if not play rougher (there's that pesky realism, again) play a different and more involved game than the traditional "Spy vs. Spy" style shenanigans of of hero and villain.

That would have been an interesting story, but that's not what we got.

What we got was Stane shouting a bunch of cool sounding buzzwords at Stark and never really making much of an impression as a villain. Meanwhile, Iron Man behaved completely passively for most of the storyline until he twigged it all out in the last issue (the comic equivalent of Five Minutes to the End Syndrome) and set up a fistfight between himself and Stane that he won, and which I'm sure was supposed to be positively dripping with symbolic weight, but came off more as perfunctory and more than a little stupid.

Oh yes, and Pepper Potts got a cool glowy heart thing because . . .uh . . .well, that's what happened in the movie. More on that later.

Worse yet, it wasn't even visually impressive, as Larocca had changed his style to some uninspired attempt a photo realism that, when combined by the absolutely ugly colouring made everyone's face look ruddy and burnished as though they'd all been shellacked. Reading it is like a brutally ugly journey into the Uncanny Valley and the worst kind of Greg Land inspired crap art I have ever seen, doubly so because Larocca can do so much better than this and, for some reason, chooses not to.

But the proverbial "fix" is in--time and again in Invincible, Fraction raises interesting questions and fails to do anything with them. Or resolve his plots with anything like the appropriate cathartic moment. Or write Tony Stark as anything like a compelling characters. Or very little good at all, actually.

Unfortunately, things only get worse from here. After an utterly pointless detour with Spider-Man, we leap ahead a little and, in the wake of the latest crossover, Tony Stark has Screwed Up Big Time. His technology's been ruined, and the Extremis armour doesn't work anymore (good riddance) oh, and a guy who once tried to sacrifice people to actual goblins is in charge of everything.

This took a bit of work to figure out, as none of it is laid out in the proper detail in the book's recap page, nor is it laid out in any of the book's many enervating dialogue scenes. However, consulting Wikipedia (which costs nothing for me, and therefore sort of negates the need to buy the book at all) leads me to conclude that Tony Stark has some vital information in his brain, and to make sure it's completely lost he's . . .lobotomised himself. Or something. Meanwhile, with the Extremis armour useless, he has to refurbish older Iron Man suits (of which there are a lot, despite the fact that frequently, Iron Man features Stark destroying his old or purloined technology to keep it from falling into the wrong hands) all of which fall apart so he can use another one next issue and somehow, Norman Osborn finds an Iron Man suit (Despite many stories of the past explicitly showing Iron Man's willingness to destroy his technology rather than see it fall into the wrong hands--I mean Armour Wars is basically about that very thing, and it just came out in trade again you could just read the damn thing) and Stark builds Pepper Potts an Iron Man suit of her own, which has no weapons and has boobs (because obviously, giving a complete neophyte something as sophisticated and potentially destructive as Iron Man armour is exactly what the Armour Wars was . . .y'know what? Screw it.)

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is when I quit the book. Got tired of it, got pissed at it, got tired of being pissed at it. Tired of Fraction half-assing his way through things, tired of Larocca's ghastly art, tired of the book constantly reacting to crossover bullshit they couldn't bother to coherently explain, tired of Pepper Potts and the effort to convince me that Pepper Potts is anything but useless, and most of all, unwilling to pay $4 for a book so slapdash that even the paid ads disappointed me on some deeply felt but undefinable level.

In short, I would rather I had not read this book.

IRON MAN WEEK #4--Look Back In Armor, Part 3

When last we passed this way, we'd just finished an accounting of John Byrne's "run" (such as it was) on Iron Man and how sorry a state he'd left things in. By the time he left, the book was meandering without any real vision, save the fairly obvious plot point that, due to his neural degradation, Tony Stark was going to die. Dead dead dead. Couldn't un-ring that bell, couldn't pretend it had never happened--he'd pursued a cure on several occasions and it was proverbial elephant in the room--how do you do a book with Iron Man wherein the titular Iron Man is fated to die?

Len Kaminski, the new writer, was faced with this as he began his run and decided to finesse it into a virtue. But first, he inadvertently extended the franchise. As Tony Stark battled his last opponents he created the War Machine armour, which, bristling with guns as it does, is derided as some of the worst excesses of the 1990s as relates to comics--grim hyper-violent versions of existing characters (or characters mutant into ultra-grim parodies of same) and guns guns guns.

Yet War Machine works well in Iron Man's milieu. It makes for a much more visceral connection to Tony Stark's past as an arms dealer, and in certain elements of its design presages an occasionally seen (if not particularly interesting) evil future version of Iron Man. Having such a visceral connection to Stark's past and future makes him a much more tangible "evil opposite" character than . . .well, most of Iron Man's rogue's gallery is replete with evil opposite characters. . .

But War Machine wasn't a baddie (well, not yet) Jim Rhodes once again took over as Iron man while Stark "died"--in actuality he was rebuilding his neural system and rewriting the "code" for his brain, and man, explaining this kind of pseudo-science only plays up how silly it is--suffice it to say it was just plausible enough to get on with it, and that's really all it needed to be.

Stark returned as Iron Man a few issues later (death being as easy to shake off as a stomach virus) and generally, the book was at a much higher standard of quality than it had been under the Byrne run, if I'm honest, it wasn't all it needed to be to fully right the ship. Too often the book was stunt-casting and using guest stars to boost sales (believe it or not guys, there was a time when Omega Red guest-starring in a book would actually do that) or hijacking it to tie into the latest crossover, OR--and this, as it turned out, was the worst, building its own franchise.

See, sometime in the early 90's Marvel decided to subdivide a lot of their related titles into what amounted, more or less, to self-contained group. The ones that immediately spring to mind now are the Avengers, Iron Man/Force Works, X-Men, Spider-Man and the Ghost Rider books. They all had their own trade dress and they all crossed over with one another in an effort to get you to buy three middling-to-crap books instead of one good one.

Iron Man led the pack, flanked as it was by War Machine (who'd now spun off into his own book and deservedly earned its stripes as a ghastly 90s book) and Force Works, of which I will now give you a two word review of: "shit sandwich." This "line" lasted maybe half a year, ground through a dreadful crossover featuring the Mandarin. You may be getting the idea from reading these epic screeds that I don't like the Mandarin and, in fact am of the opinion in the entire 40-year publication history of Iron Man, there has never been a good Mandarin story, and I am continually exasperated that creators insist on dragging him back into the spotlight. You would be right on all counts--the Mandarin sucks, and trying to position him as a counterpart to Stark/Iron Man never works. Ever.

Kaminski left while the Iron Man "line" was collapsing. Bad as things were at the time, and as bad as things had been. In an effort to shake things up (it's always a danger sign when you hear people talking like this) it was decided that Iron Man and his line would be folded back into the Avengers line just in time for an epic story called "The Crossing."

"The Crossing" has no Wikipedia link. Hasn't for years. In the various links to Avengers publication history it's usually glossed over as quickly as possible. There is an excellent reason for this--"The Crossing" --in addition to being one of the worst things ever made by human hands (It is so terrible it makes Youngblood look like Watchmen in comparison)--is also, despite being written in English, completely and utterly incomprehensible. It reads very much like someone took the script, fed it into Babelish, translated it into Portuguese, translated it back to English, then to German, then back to English, and whatever garbled mess was left at the end of it was what ended up in the books.

Here's a thumbnail sketch for you--Iron Man went nuts and killed a lot of scrub Avengers (that's how you knew this story was IMPORTANT). It turned out that he'd been going nuts for some time, manipulated by longtime Avengers bad guy Kang the Conqueror (for what reason is never made plain) and also the Avengers got their asses kicked for several issue by a naked blue Smurf with a Q-Tip.

(Later this would all be explained away as a deliberate attempt to confuse everyone. In this, they succeeded metatextually in ways Grant Morrison will never approach)

Eventually it was decided to travel back in time and bring back a teenage version of Tony Stark, who would then fight Iron Man and receive some sort of grievous but non-specific heart injury (because the key to good Iron Man stories is, of course, antiquated plot contrivances) Tony Stark the Elder all of a sudden realises "Hey, I know I'm meant to be crazy and homicidal and all, but screw this, this story sucks and I want out." and kills himself in a "redeeming heroic sacrifice," Tony Stark the Younger then becomes Iron Man and takes over the book (which in no way, shape or form had anything to do with the fact that DC had done something similar with the new Green Lantern. Nuh-uh. No connection at all) setting up a run of six issues that are so dreadful, so wrongheaded, so brain-punishingly stupid that even those who never read them (you lucky people, you) would know that a teenage Iron Man was a bitterly stupid idea and no one would ever shove anything so stupid out for public consumption ever again.

Except not.

When the book finally got cancelled after issues involving Tony trying to bang one of his college professors and getting drunk and somehow setting his dorm on fire while building his armour out of a table lamp, it was a mercy killing. Crappy as Onslaught was as a story, it spared us more of this.

A few words on what happened next. Late in 1996, Marvel decided to loan out some of its longer-lived characters (Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and the Avengers) out to Image Comics, who proceeded to unleash Heroes Reborn--12 issues wherein the characters were taken back to basics and given a new take which, it was hoped, would lead to bigger sales and higher visibility.

In practice they ranged from the absolutely ghastly (Captain America) to the inoffensive (Iron Man) Whether it was because the issues previous had been so godawful that competent but fairly stock Iron Man stories, I'm not really sure. Looking back more than a decade later, the best I can say is that they were certainly 12 issues of Iron Man.

When it came time to integrate these character back into the main Marvel Universe, it was decided that Marvel would get top-flight talent to work on the books and get people with a genuine affection for the characters. You know--what they should have been doing in the first place.

Iron Man returned, written by Kurt Busiek, who had an obvious affection for the character. proceeded to turn in 20 issues that were . . .better than what had come before, but never quite as good as they should have been, Maybe it was so much of his run seemed diverted to storyline eddies that never really worked or paid off as well as they should--an ongoing storyline wherein Tony Stark would have been Carol Danvers' AA sponsor basically stuttered through the book to no great payoff, save to remind us that Tony Stark used to drink a lot and he was terribly worried about her.

Also, the Mandarin returned again, to even lesser effect, as he spent two issues pounding Iron Man was a big metal barrel. Whiplash returned in a gimp mask, and now that I remember it, Iron Man seemed to spend a lot of time getting the snot beat out of him by just about everyone.

On the plus side of things, Busiek did make War Machine a bad guy, which was as it always should have been. However, he didn't do very much with him afterwards and it eventually fizzled away and is all but forgotten today.

Some of these problems I had with Busiek's run can apparently be put down to editorial interference, and ill health the writer was in at the time. I don't fault him for his efforts to right the book's ship, especially with all that he had going against him, and while I didn't agree with the direction the book was taking at points, his enthusiasm and affection for the character was obvious, and given the slow chain of disasters that had come before his run, it was better that it had been in some time.

However, it sometimes seems that Iron Man exists in some kind of pendulum--whenever, it swings too far to being "good," it will inevitably swing back to being unbearably stupid, and, as the millennium turned, that's just what it did.

A new writer took over the book, and decided to shake things up. Thanks to the combination of being struck by lightning and the Y2K bug (no, really! They tried to cover their asses later, but it was the y2K bug. Mind you, this story was published in 2000, long after we all found out y2K was bullshit) Tony Stark's armour came to life, and after a couple issues of the usual Star Trek crap, starts killing people and Has To Be Stopped. The sentient armour nearly kills Tony Stark, then says "Hey, I know I was trying to kill you and all, but rather than do that, I'm going to make you an artificial heart, because the retarded chimp who writes this drivel is stuck in the early 1970s and he doesn't have any way to write his way out of this," gives him an artificial heart, and then promptly "dies."

Oh yes, and the chimp who wrote this caca gets to run Marvel comics. People, don't come bitching to me about the damage done--as early as 2000, he was pulling this crap. Too late to complain now.

Tony Stark spends the next few issues creating a new identity for himself and wearing his older armour because he's all technophobic now and the book becomes, both in terms of the writing (which is godawful) and the art (Keron Grant distinguishes himself by doing with a pencil what someone throwing bleach in your eyes will do for your eyesight) and the book becomes so godawful I stop reading.

Meanwhile, the character derailment continues. Stark reveals his identity to save a puppy (no, really! The writer who did this wanted to because it was "unexpected," or as the layman would have it, "extremely stupid.") becomes Secretary of Defense, and gradually moves back to his original conception as a Howard Hughes-esque arms dealer, or, to make this shorter, an insufferable asshole. Pepper Potts comes back and icky, strained romance gets crammed down our throat, written by people who quite possible have never been within 100 yards of a woman in their lives (as per restraining order, I suspect)

Surprisingly, people don't want to read this. So it was decided to shake things up. Again.

Warren Ellis, a writer who is lauded for having big adventurous ideas involving acerbic chain-smoking men in black trench coats, takes over writing Iron Man, and, in collaboration with the artist, proceed to give Iron Man superpowers, thanks to a bit of Whatever Science called Extremis.

Extremis is a handy thing, as it does whatever the plot requires of it, and aparrently allows the user to "see through satellites" and other things Ellis probably cribbed from Phillip K. Dick or William Gibson. The upshot of all of this turgid, dreary, storytelling, parched as it is from anything that might be fun or engaging, is that Tony Stark can store the Iron Man armour in his bone marrow now, rather than, y'know, bone marrow.

The reason for this is, by their own testimony, the writer and the artist found it foolish and "unrealistic" that Iron Man could carry his armour around in a briefcase. Putting aside that the idea of "realism" in comics is a peculiar fallacy anyway (people sticking to walls or having knives pop out of their hands is fine, but carrying a suit of armour in a briefcase is one suspension bridge of disbelief too far? Really?) this is an incredibly destructive notion as applied to this character.

Because Tony Stark as a character works most when his intellect is his superpower. It's his genius that creates the Iron Man suit, his genius that continually improves its design, and his genius and ability to solve problems that make him a compelling character. While physically able to meet a threat, Iron Man offers the perceptive writer a chance to play with a character who can out-fight but also out-think an opponent. Rather than being a limiting character, the best Iron Man writers have been able to see a myriad of story potential in the character and his milieu.

The ones who write him nowadays, however, seem to see him only as a facile manque for Bush-era paranoia politics, a role that the character is neither suited for, nor particularly interesting in.

That concludes our look at Iron Man's history up to now. Join us tomorrow when we look at the newest, best-reviewed, and best-received Iron Man book on the stands today, Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man.

IRON MAN WEEK #3--Look Back In Armor, Part 2

Yesterday, we waded--quickly--through the morass of Iron Man continuity up to about 1979. By the turn of the decade, the book was pretty much damaged goods, and the powers that be saw no harm in handing creative control of the book to Bob Layton and David Michelenie. Neither had really done anything major up until that point, but that didn't much matter.

Not least because this was the perfect marriage of creator and character. Layton and Michelnie completely rebuilt Iron Man. For one thing, they added some scope to the idea that, y'know, Tony Stark had a multi-national corporation and all that. The supporting cast was greatly expanded, and built on what had been done before, but geared the tropes to better suit a month-in month-out audience. Perennial hostage and Happy Hogan blueballer Pepper Potts had been put on the bus, and was replaces with Mrs. Arbogast, a tough as nails secretary who didn't fancy Stark at all. Cipher, occasional radiation-addled villain, and blueball victim Happy Hogan got put on the bus and was replaced with Jim Rhodes, Stark's old buddy from Vietnam who went from merely filling the role of "pilot" to . . .well, we'll get to that in a moment.

Also, readers finally got a love interest who wasn't a wet blanket. Bethany Cabe exemplified Iron Man's new direction, and that was very much in the James Bond school of action--Stark travelled all over the globe, looking for trouble or being found by trouble, suits up as Iron Man, action ensues. It was all done with a certain balance of tongue-in-cheek and breakneck action that may not have had a lot of substance, but was done with enough energy that you didn't really mind. All of a sudden, the book and the character had some life to it.

And then they made Iron Man a drunk.

Which was fine, and for the most part it still holds up as a self-contained story, but my God in heaven did it ever doom us to story after story that just ploughed over the same damn ground, not because of anything Layton and Michelenie did or didn't do, but more because, as I've said before, comic fans who become creators love freezing time exactly where they started reading and, well, there aren't that many Iron Man stories to reference besides this one. That it took twenty years for there to be one . . .well, that certainly says something, doesn't it?

As the 80s began in earnest, Layton and Michelenie left the book and were replaced by Denny O' Neil. O'Neil had cut his teeth on DC books, primarily Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which had struggled mightily to achieve relevance and was in fact, so relevant that reading it was like being hit by every after-school special ever made, taped to a falling meteor.

Thankfully O'Neil was planning something a bit more subtle to drive his run on the book. O'Neil's focus over most of his thirty-plus issues on the book was addiction--and not just to alcohol this time. Tony Stark faced an enemy who, even as awesome as the Iron Man armour was, easily defeat, as Obadiah Stane came on to the scene and instigated a long-term plan to destroy Tony Stark utterly.

Unlike his past nemeses, Stane wasn't a physical threat, so a direct physical confrontation wasn't a solution. Stane instead broke Stark down bit by bit--freezing his assets, stealing his company, breaking his will, and sending Stark back to the bottle. Ten issues in, Tony Stark is on the streets of New York City, homeless, hopeless, and ready to die.

Whereas the first go-round of this story had been recent enough to make this initially feel a little redundant, O'Neil is more focused on the "why" of Stark's journey into self-destruction (and it's quite a journey--even the jokey "Assistant Editor's Month" story ends on a down note) Stark, it seems has used both alcohol and his career as Iron Man to protect himself from parts of his life and himself he wasn't prepared to deal with. Over the course of about 30 issues (eat it decompression) we follow Stark as he's torn down and rebuilt again.

But the name of the book is Iron Man, and while all of this stuff with Stark is going on, someone's got to wear the tin suit. Jim Rhodes takes over as Iron Man, initially just as a stop-gap replacement for Stark. However, as time goes on, Rhodes begins to resent Stark's improvement, and fears that he will reclaim the armour for himself (Stark has no intention of this, initially) Rhodes' addition to the rush of being Iron Man (and his beleif that being Iron Man elevates him above his origins) parallel's Stark's addiction to alcohol and his need to escape, both through alcohol and being Iron Man.

The tension continues to mount (with brief breaks, including what must be the funniest Mandarin story ever, wherein he unmasks Rhodes and is all like, "Huh. I thought you'd be a white dude.") until finally Stark reluctantly dons another suit of armour to bring down Rhodes, who has become more erratic and unstable. No sooner has that rift been patched, however, when Stane returns, resolved to finish off Stark and leave him a psychological wreck for good.

But Stark is a different man, now. Recognising that so much of what has happened was his refusal to take responsibility. This time, he does, and fully becomes Iron Man once again for the final showdown with Stane.

With stories where the main plot is dragged through so many issues, the real danger is that the moment the writer's built up won't justify the investment of time and energy on the part of the reader when it comes time to pay it off. Thankfully, that's not the case, here--if this had been made as a movie, the audience would have been cheering when Stark and Stane finally throw down. Maybe it's because the initial beatdown of Stark was so depressing and following his slow climb back up gives the reader a certain sympathy with him that by the time this moment has come, we really want him to succeed, because this is an earned triumph.

The end of O'Niel's run left us with a new status quo for the book, which was promptly squandered by a bunch of lame fill-in issues until Layton and Michelenie returned to the book, introduced a compelling new villain in The Ghost, and launched the Armor Wars, one of the much homaged (and, given the quality of the homages, least understood) Iron Man stories.

After discovering that his Iron Man technology has been stolen and used to power criminals, Iron Man goes on a crusade to destroy all his stolen technology in ways that stupid "Don't copy that floppy" video that made us watch in high school could never conceive of. It nearly costs Stark everything (including his life) but it's a price he's willing to pay, as his conscience won't allow him to live with the idea that his inventions are killing people (again--there is an unspoken but tangible connection to his former career as a weapons manufacturer) Later homages mangle this concept into Stark asserting that "no one should have my cool stuff but me," and totally miss the role that being a man of conscience plays in his decision.

Layton and Micheleine's second run ends with a story that doesn't quite work so well--Stark is shot by an obsessive lover and loses the use of his legs, only to regain them a few issues later in something that would have paid off when Layton returned as writer and inker to series and started something called Armor Wars II.

But Layton instead went to Valiant comics , which was bad for all involved (and Valiant's a whole other article, anyways) Layton was replaced by John Byrne and John Romita Jr.. The former was his usual petulant, backward-looking self, and the latter, formerly a penciler during the first Layton/Micheline run had changed his style to such a degree that he was no longer ideally suited for the book.

And the book became a dreadful, unreadable, mess. Armor Wars II managed to feature nothing of the sort, shoehorning in two of Byrne's characters from another title who were the power behind the throne for Kearson DeWitt, a character so thrown together that the explanation for this story wasn't revealed until an annual that came out a full two years after this story finished.

And because Origin Artifacts never die, they just lie in wait for some fool to dredge them up again, Stark once again needs the armor to live--thanks to DeWitt, his nervous system is consuming his body and even in the armor, he's only a hair's breadth away from inevitable death (Don't ask. Just . . .don't ask) and so it's the 1960s all over again, more or less.

Things go rapidly downhill from here. There's an interminable run of stories where the Mandarin and Fin Fang Foom team up to fight Iron Man in China, and they're the kind of stories where you kind of want to apologise to every Asian and every human being for. Despite the fact that this was now 1990, comics creators still thought the Mandarin could work and totally wasn't a blinged-out Yellow Peril stereotype best left in the bin.

Worse yet, this was followed up by a tense and completely incomprehensible spy thriller thick with Soviet-era intrigue with perennial favourite recurring femme fatale the Black Widow, which would have been fine except the damned Soviet Union collapsed two years before the story saw print. The only consolation prize in this whole parade of creative atrocity was that Byrne left the book, and good riddance. His tenure was deservedly forgotten (and occasionally misremembered as being good, which it wasn't) and if it's remembered at all, it should be as a backwards-looking muddled mess that damaged the character to no great purpose.

Byrne being Byrne, he naturally left things in a unworkable state in terms of moving the book forward. The nerve damage thing hung over the character and the book, and it had been stated so many times that Tony Stark was going to die that to not have him die would have been a sudden, jarring act of Character Derailment, and lord knows we couldn't have that, even if it was a stupid idea that never should have been mooted in the first place.

But stupid or not, it's what happened, so join us tomorrow for a look at the 1990s and the 2000s, where we begin with Iron Man being killed off. Believe it or not, things get worse from there. Very worse.

IRON MAN WEEK #2--Look Back In Armor, Part 1

Continuing from yesterday, we take a quick trip through Iron Man continuity from its start in the 60s and 70s.

Staring off, Tony Stark was a fairly uncomplicated character--He was based on Howard Hughes and in the early can-do New Frontier days, he was an exemplar of a certain admired breed of man. That he made his money dealing in arms made no difference--Stark made his money defending America and apple pie from the godless communist hordes (and oh lord, weren't there a lot of them) so where was the harm?

So, your average Iron Man story went something like this--Godless Communist/alien challenges Iron Man or screws up the debut of Stark's latest invention, Stark changes into Iron Man, fights Godless Commie/alien, has heart trouble, but just manages to thwart the Godless Commie/alien Before It's Too Late.

It's not a storytelling engine with a lot of meat on its bones--it's a functional action delivery system, but that's pretty much it. It's not helped by the fact that the characters aren't terribly endearing. Tony Stark is, at best a cipher, and comes off as something a jerk who spends a lot of time whining about his heart trouble or being terribly impressed with himself that he can plug himself into the wall "just like your electric shaver," and the threats he faces are more threats to his business than the kind of nemesis that have a personal relationship with the villain.

Worse still, Stark is flanked by an equally colorless supporting cast, featuring Pepper Potts, a drearily unexciting cipher of a character who endures today basically because no one read Iron Man enough to know he had other and more interesting girlfriends later in the run and also because comic fan-creators worship the recursive. She was there in the early days to get held hostage and moon over Stark. Happy Hogan, a stock palooka with a heart of gold from Central Casting, was there to get taken hostage, moon over Pepper, and occasionally get doused with plot-convenient radioactivity and turn into The Freak (who, while having a personal relationship to Stark, was neither interesting or particularly engaging)

So, despite this inauspicious start, things ground on. Reading them now, they're very workmanlike--competent enough, but not very engaging or exciting. The innovations that were happening in other Marvel titles weren't happening here, nor really, was the energy. While Spider-Man was humanising the superhero, Iron Man was fighting the Mafia, who changed their name and wore tights for some weird reason.

As Iron Man moved into his own book, things . . .didn't really improve. They tried a lot of things--Star quit as Iron Man, only for the guy who replaced him to wash out because of a weak organ--his brain instead of his heart this time. Happy and Pepper got married off and put on the bus. Tony got two girlfriends, one of whom was a complete milquetoast who managed not to be interesting even after she was killed (for frighteningly little reason) the second girlfriend went psychic and then went insane. As you do, I guess. Women in Refrigerators: The 1970s Edition.

Oh, and his recurring heart trouble? Cured by a transplant. Oh, wait, no--it didn't take. Wait--he needed an artificial heart. Nope, he needs the pacemaker again. Nope, he doesn't need it any more. Oh, hang on, maybe he does. Seriously--every five issues, it was one or the other of these.

Also, because it was in the air around that time Iron Man grappled with relevancy. With younger creators coming on board, creators more in tune with the counterculture, the old Howard Hughes style paradigm didn't sit well with them, and as such, it was addressed, and as this was the 1970s, it was done in the most anvilicious way possible--by students marching against Stark International, in an obvious Kent State parallel. The upshot of this was to erase the "Stark as weapons-maker" thing from the book and move his business more into something best termed "increase the Flash Gordon noise and put more science stuff around."

Oh, and in-between all that, he fought an evil Gerald Ford from a parallel Earth and added a nosepiece to his armour.

I would never lie to you.

Oh, and there was this one issue Bill Mantlo wrote wherein Iron Man befriends a blind Vietnamese boy who gets killed and angers Iron Man so much he writes "WHY?" in repulsor beams in a book so anvilicious that it could have doubled for an actual anvil.

These things worked so successfully, I should add, that Iron Man became a bi-monthly book and came dangerously close to being cancelled.

It was a pretty bleak time for the book, and the character. Oh, he seemed to be getting on in Avengers, but Avengers, being a team book, had to parcel the focus over many characters, so it wasn't necessary to struggle with one character inasmuch as it was necessary to balance the focus between multiple characters, so character fatigue was less of an issue.

But that didn't help Iron Man any. For the title to endure into the 1980s, it was going to take someone with a fresh take on things, and willing to see what was of value in the original concept and storytelling engine and extrapolate from that starting point into to the innate potential of the character.

Thankfully, that was just around the corner.

And we'll pick up on that tomorrow, wherein we look at the Layton/Micheline run, the O'Neil run, the other Layton/Micheline run and, if there's time, witness John Byrne nearly irrevocably screwing the title and the character up. Join us, won't you?

IRON MAN WEEK #1--Another Twist In My Sobriety

So last week in this podcast here, the estimable Graeme McMillan of the superlative Savage Critics website made the case than Matt Fraction's run on the new Invincible Iron Man title was not unlike Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America, in the sense that both are about "tearing down and rebuilding the character."

And to an extent he's right--both comics are printed by he same company, both are printed on slick paper, but beyond that I don't see many similarities, as I'm not sure "tearing down and rebuilding the character" is the ultimate goal of Brubaker's Captain America, and while I am sure that's what Fraction's aiming for on Invincible Iron Man, well . . .it's not terribly good, nor a terribly new thing for the character.

If I had a nickel for every time Iron Man had been torn down and re-built, I would have many nickels. Arranged in a pile on my desk.

Iron Man has always been a tricky character for writers to get their head around. There are all sorts of sticking points--Making a hero out of an arms dealer, trying to make a rich playboy type relatable to a blue-collar readership, and most of all, getting around what is a commonly heard complaint--that Anyone Can Wear The Suit, So Why This Guy?"

Even John Seavey admits in his article on Iron Man's storytelling engine that once the device of Tony Stark's heart trouble was removed from the character there was no clear idea of what to do with him for long stretches of his history and he's absolutely right. The usual answer to that was to either reinstate the heart injury or create a similar affliction and kind of default back to the standard, because that was easier than trying to push things in a new direction.

However, even in a system so ready to default to the familiar, on occasion, certain creators have found time to innovate and create a workable storytelling engine for Iron Man that doesn't involve artificial jeopardy or complete inversions of everything that makes the character work.

Iron Man is a strange character. Like his contemporaries the Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, and the Hulk, he began as a sort of middle ground between the ironic twist-ending SF stuff Marvel was doing before their superhero era began in earnest. The Fantastic Four were monster hunters, Ant-Man had been taken by SCIENCE down an ant hill, the Hulk had been turned into a monster also by SCIENCE and Iron man (explicitly stated, in his first story) is trapped in his armor because of his damaged heart, and is thus saved by SCIENCE but at the cost of his life.

You can see the evolution in Iron Man's early appearances. He's initially a grey armored colossus (and scares the hell out of the people he's trying to save), and then as he begins his career as a superhero proper, paints his armor gold. This armor lasts a few more issues until the familiar red and gold suit first appears. More than finally finding a visual hook that seemed to work, this actually completed Iron Man's evolution from a pre-Marvel character to a Marvel superhero.

While Iron Man may have finally evolved into a superhero, it didn't necessarily make for interesting stories. Despite what nostalgic remembrances tell us about the early Marvel Age, the hit-to-miss ratio on creating memorable villains for these characters wasn't the greatest. Even the more enduring members of Iron Man's rogue's gallery are fairly redolent of the times. By that I mean, they're pretty much all communists. Well, all except for the Mandarin who (in the best traditions of the genteel racism of bygone days) is basically the off-brand Fu Manchu.

But surely the early Bullpen could be forgiven for naff villains--after all, they were making this stuff up as they went along and timeliness of publication probably won out more often than not over pre-planning. But fortunately, built into his storytelling engine was an equalizer:

Iron Man's chestplate, if it lost its charge, would cause a heart attack, and so, not unlike Ultraman (the Japanese hero's, not the Crime Syndicate guy) three-minute power-limit, the artificial cap created a sense of jeopardy that, usually, a sufficiently dangerous villain would create on their own.

There were a couple reasons for this. For one, as stated above, Iron Man's villain's aren't terribly exciting on their own and sometimes the story needed a leg up that only an imminent heart attack could provide. For another, Iron Man only ever had half the book for his stories up until 1968. Tales of Suspense was a split-book for most of Iron Man's tenure, most famously sharing the book with Captain America, but also for "The Saga of the Sneepers" and stories like that. With half the book given over to other stories, the creators tended to get their bang out as quickly as possible.

At least at first. Before the switch to Iron Man's regular title, a new generation of writer (primarily Archie Goodwin) had taken over writing tales of Suspense, and in an effort to escape the rather limiting split-book format, began playing out plot points over multiple issues. In an environment like this, continuity became a larger part of the Marvel Universe (as things had to hold together to plausibly pay off multiple-month plot points) and thus began the new paradigm that, for better or worse, would point the way ahead.

And we'll have a look at that next week, as we cover quite a lot of Iron Man continuity in one go. That's not because I am great at writing these as much as it's possible to leap forward over a lot of Iron Man history owing to the fact that most of it is boring and rather disposable.