Iron Spring's the perfect time to hang out with the cool exec with a heart of. . .damn it, Stark, your song's not fitting the aesthetic I'm going for here! Why's your name even Iron Man?
Like Incredible Hulk a few weeks ago, Iron Man is not a title I've ever bought regularly, and it didn't seem to end up in those grocery-store 5-packs as much as Hulk's book, either, so I encountered it even more sporadically. The earliest Iron Man comic I had was 203, when he gets Hank Pym to shrink him down so he can sneak into Obadiah Stane's computer files via the power of the Internet to figure out where Stane hid all his money. Which might explain my fondness for the "Silver Centurion" armor, though it also has the advantage of looking very different from almost every armor before or since. it also looks a lot better when the Bright/Layton art team are drawing it than when Al Milgrom's handling it in West Coast Avengers.
After that, there was an issue of Armor Wars II, some stuff from the "modular armor" era post-#300, which followed the "remote piloted armor" era.
None of that stuff is still in my collection. What is includes the original Armor Wars (although the comics themselves call the storyline "Stark Wars"), the big 150th issue trip to King Arthur's time with Dr. Doom, the Acts of Vengeance tie-ins (which include the sequel to the King Arthur story), and a couple random issues from further on.
I don't know why Iron Man didn't appeal to me more when I was a kid. Powered armor should have been pretty cool. I watched the early-90s cartoon, although that didn't do a great job selling the character. Especially the second season, where the armor could morph between different looks. . .when that effect actually worked. Made the armor look kind of shoddy, how often he'd try to use "Hydro-Armor" and the suit just shut down instead.
These days, it's easier to know where the problem lies: Civil War. I suppose the fact Stark went from, "I'm going to shut down all these armors even if it means fighting SHIELD and the government," to, "Everybody follow the stupid law, or else!" can be chalked up less to inconsistency than to Stark's defining trait being his apparent conviction that he's always right. Which could probably be chalked up to Bendis deciding Stark was a "futurist" who could anticipate not only market trends, but larger socio-political trends.
It's hard for me to take that seriously when Tony Stark - apparently always correct Tony Stark - is also the guy who got his entire company swiped from under him by a Lex Luthor knock-off because he decided to crawl inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker. The utter lack of self-reflection or self-awareness is off-putting. I really shouldn't enjoy seeing the ostensible hero get his ass kicked nearly as much as I did with Iron Man from 2006 through, well, at least 2010.
Hell, Matt Fraction tried to reboot Stark's mind to before all that (and before Warren Ellis' Extremis thingamabop) to make Stark not a toxic asshole. He managed to undercut the attempt by having Tony leave a recording for his friends - who he was relying on to save his life - where he said he'd do everything exactly the same. Keep in mind, one of the people he's asking for help is Thor, so this apparently means Stark thought making a cyborg murder-clone of Thor without his consent was a brilliant decision, actually.
As far as I can tell since then, he alternates between building new Stark companies up, with some bold-new initiative like interactive A.I. (which end up being sentient beings who feel enslaved), and losing all his money and starting from scratch. At least Danny Rand has the excuse he knows nothing about business and doesn't particularly care. Stark is ostensibly trying to be good at business, he simply apparently sucks at it.
2 comments:
Every Iron Man comic since Civil War should just be various people kicking Stark up the rear for what he did. Forever.
I feel like the last several years, it's mostly been Stark kicking his own rear with one dumb idea or another blowing up in his face.
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