Irony Man
The Stiftung is right: the Grady Hendrix piece on Iron Man the icon in Slate is almost cosmically bad. It’s like, if you uttered the words "state capitalism" at Hendrix he would gape like anal porn. Wha-? State Wha-?
Reed Richards might have been the Objectivist avatar five-minutes’ web surfing has deceived Hendrix into thinking Stark was, except that Richards’ creators were not Objectivists. As for Tony Stark, the military-industrial complex was just not a Randian enterprise. And the anachronism of not just Hendrix’s comics history but his American history is farcical. The Vietnam War was not unpopular in 1963. Marvel’s "young-people demographic" wasn’t a nation of little hippies then; they were mostly the kids that would become hippies in about five years. Tony Stark was conceived as Mister Public-Private Partnership - Mister Public-Private Partnership in things that explode. There’s a quiet, gutsy moment in the cave at the beginning of the movie where Shaun Toub’s Yinsen let’s Tony Stark understand that he is far from the first person to have pieces of Stark Industries shrapnel tunneling toward his heart, and by no means the most innocent person to be in that position. It’s a truth the 1960s Iron Man never showed. The early Iron Man had one customer for that shrapnel, and that customer paid well.
Comment by narciso —
May 5, 2008 @ 12:40 am
But Gulmira as I recall the village was called was devastated by the Stark weapons that Obadiah sold the Ten Rings.
That was the point that was obfuscated.
The Talibanish nature of the Ten Rings
was the point; not the weapons themselves.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
May 5, 2008 @ 9:26 am
Heh. Nothing sums up how much times have changed since the early 60s than a brief dialogue exchange from one of those very early IRON MAN stories running in the front half of TALES OF SUSPENSE:
PEPPER: You have a call, boss… from… behind the Iron Curtain!
TONY STARK: From Commieland, Pepper? Put it through!
The call was, of course, from some evil commissar trying to set up an internationally televised combat between Stark’s ‘bodyguard’ Iron Man and Russian armored champion The Titanium Man, and, naturally, Iron Man eventually put the stinking Red in his place.
As decades passed and Stark aged but little (as is the lot of all characters trapped within the confines of open ended serial fiction like comic books), Marvel necessarily had to change Tony’s essential character to reflect shifting cultural more’s. (They also had to continually update his topical references; eventually, all mention of the Vietnam conflict as part of his origin was lost, to be replaced by a much blander ‘he was touring Vietnam when he was ambushed by bandits/terrorists’ meme.) But it still cracks me up to look back on those old old early Silver Age comics, when, like nearly everyone else, Tony Stark was still a hardline conservative redbaiting war profiteering munitions manufacturer… and proud of it, too!