Why I have some issues with Tony Stark

[jerrygoodman]

From the Marvel Heroes MMO.  C'mon Tony...haven't you figured out that keeping secrets always backfires on you?

For a really intelligent guy, you sure can do some boneheaded things.

[Matt Bellamy]

That's why I tend to prefer "Iron Man" to Stark himself... Stark likes to keep things hidden and play dumb. Sure, there are guys like Reed Richards, Dr.Doom who are similar and can call him out on them... But only when it suits their own purpose.

 

I remember way back, just after Annihilation, Nova returns to Earth, and has a sit down talk with Stark about the war, who denies hearing anything about it. Nova notes that he sent a message to Reed Richards regarding it. My guess? Richards did not bother to tell anyone, and just assumed everything would work out. Besides, they were in the middle of a Civil War.

 

There is a great little "What If..." story regarding that wit the Annihilation Wave reaching Earth just as Cap has Iron Man pinned. It's just nice to see something that could have happened when the call was ignored.

[Salkafar]

If only you knew how badly Tony Stark has been shafted over the last ten years, often by the writers of his own magazine.

 

...I guess it all started with Mike Grell. He had had rough patches before, most infamously with Terry Kavanagh, around the Crossing, but that was long ago and squarely in the Nineties, which, as everybody knows, don't really count.

 

But Mike Grell... in retrospect, he wasn't even that bad. But at the time, it seemed like the frickin' apocalypse. If only we'd known.

 

Anyway... after Grell left, we got a fill-in guy, and then John Jackson Miller who wrote quite entertainingly... until he would leave again. His run was followed by a truly abysmal story by Mark Ricketts. We were sad... until we heard who was going to be the new writer... Warren frickin' Ellis!!

 

Well... he wrote six issues... the famous, game-changing story 'Extremis'... and then he was gone again. But it took... eighteen months.

 

And after that... 'Civil War'. That was when it really was going to go downhill, that was the blow from which Iron Man would never recover (He didn't). He was set up to play the designated villain role in the event, which involved the heroic community being divided over legislation. Oh, nominally either side was as right, or as wrong, as the other, but Iron Man was universally derided as a fascist. Thanks in no part to a highly tendentious depiction in the comic itself.

And at the end, Captain America was killed, conveniently martyring him, making Iron Man look even worse.

 

And he just never really came back from that. From that time on, Tony Stark was this snarky, stuck-up shifty guy who thought he was smarter than everybody else and who always was planning stuff in secret, probably planning to take your rights and freedom away in the name of some abstract cause.

 

Except in his own book, of course. After a laudable effort by the Knaufs, and some fairly solid fill-in work by Gage and Moore, volume 5 was written entirely by one writer, the longest consecutive run any writer has ever had on 'Iron Man'... his name: Matt Fraction.

Matt Fraction is Satan. Imagine your favorite book and superhero being in the hands of a man who hates every character in it and wants them to suffer. That was my life. For four-and-a-half years and sixty-one issues. I literally opened a bottle of champagne over his final issue. Almost everything he wrote for Marvel was subsequently ignored by everybody. A great example of this is the major crossover 'Fear Itself'.

 

The only writer at Marvel who ratified his stuff even a little bit was Kieron Gillen, and that's because he is a gentleman. He got to write Iron Man after Fraction left; and when Gillen is good, he is really good. But even he petered out, leaving early to go write 'Ãœber' and 'The wicked and the divine'. Despair.

 

So then Marvel made the final logical step: they simply turned Tony Stark into a villain, for real. That is the premise of the comic 'the Superior Iron Man'. Tony was inverted by a mystical spell during 'Axis', meaning his alignment was basically switched, and he never de-inverted. Iron Man is a supervillain, and he was never restored - because the Marvel Universe was destroyed, less than an hour after Iron Man and Captain America fought to the death in the streets, until a Helicarrier crashed on top of them. As of this writing, Iron Man is missing, presumed dead.

 

So you can understand I am a little bummed-out on the Iron Man front.

[Matt Bellamy]

Oh believe me.

 

I KNOW.

 

I was collecting Iron Man for many years before "The Crossing", and pretty much up until the Heroic Age started... Of which now I just kind of keep track of what they are doing. He was always my favorite character... Despite how much of a dick he could be, or how shafted he got in the story side.

 

Extremis, by far, being the best thing that ever happened to Tony, both in terms of story and artwork. Ellis made him out to be a lot more sympathetic, as a man who admits he made mistakes, but only because he was trying to make things better. And Granov's artwork was simply amazing... Even if it took a long time.

 

I've always had issues with Marvel's canon, and inconsistant use of any of their characters... But Tony is one whose personality shifts not only from different books ( Avengers, cameo's etc...) to different arcs of his OWN books.

 

Not to mention my biggest personal beef that maybe 1 out of 10 cameo uses of Iron Man, actually get his current armor correct. The majority of Comics during the time he had Extremis used his older, pre-extremis armor. And we're talking many months after Extremis was complete.

 

*Edit* Oh yeah, and Fraction can go to hell.

[*PrimalNemesis]

I have not read any Marvel comics for many years, especially Iron Man. I've read a little bit of Civil War, but then went on to other things. Eventually I picked up all of the issues to the main Spider-Verse mini series and fell in love with it. I really like Iron Man, but have not read any issues since the 90's.

 

I totally agree that Tony Stark/Iron Man has been shafted for many years. Marvel has always had a bad issue with consistency. The only thing that I really like about the current Iron Man is the white and blue armor. I think the idea of a symbiote based armor is really fascinating. I really want a figure of that armor honestly.

 

Hopefully the total reboot of the Marvel universe will have some positive outcomes for several of our favorite heroes and villains.

[durendal]

With the Secret Wars, maybe there's hope yet for Stark.  Since we've seen the end of the Ultimate universe, perhaps after battle world, Superior Iron Man will be replaced by Ultimate Iron Man as the main Iron Man.  Well, I've not read much of the Ultimates, but I've heard people praising it.

[H222G981]

With as much popularity as Iron Man has now....I wonder how people would take him as a villain. It just wouldn't seem so...Robert Downey Jr. 

[durendal]

Perhaps Captain America:Civil War can show us that.  

[H222G981]

Perhaps Captain America:Civil War can show us that.  

 

True. I think we'll be getting to see another side to Tony in this coming film. I'm very curious to see that.