Ironman

I 100% think that Superior Iron Man was Ironman at his FUCKING PEAK.

I am unironically serious when I say that Superior Iron Man should've been fucking permanent. Tony being a villain was perfect. He was sleazy, he was narcissistic, and most of all, it felt like we had some sort of Gigachad version of Lex Luthor in Marvel. When I read the story I finally found an Ironman in comics that actually works, even though he's a scumbag villain.

It was fucking perfect, and they took it away from us. I'll never forgive Marvel for that.

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Eh, I think Superior Ironman was ok but I respect your opinion.

He's a mediocre character with only one good movie which is pretty fitting.

Shit writers, and the fact that Marvel editorial is obsessed with this retarded idea that the world shouldn't move forward beyond what is contemporary with our time, unless it's super science that's only accessible by a relative few, and it'll never reach widespread status. The latter affects how Iron Man is used, simply because nothing he can do can ever drastically change the status quo, which defeats the purpose of having a person that is drive with pushing the envelope when it comes to tech and engineering.

Onscreen he's A-list, in the books he'll always be a C-lister.

I have a hard time believing his comics were always bad, what about Marvel's golden years in the 70s and 80s?

Why would his success on the screen translate to comics? Comics are not an especially popular format and they're a pain to get into for normal people.

honestly, my only gripe with Superior is that it lacks an ending. how did tony get back to normal? we will never know. why? because Bendis that's why.

Nobody was buying his comics in the 70s and 80s. People were more focused on Spider-Man and Fantastic Four than Stark. It didn't help that he nor was his rogues particularly interesting.

Rhodey was Iron Man during Marvel’s peak in the 1980s.

Oh.

Like you said his villains are outdated or shit and his supporting cast is gone. Happy's dead and I don't know where Pepper is, Rhodey popped up in Cantwells run but left and Tony isn't at Stark Industries.

He needs a revamp.

No, just good writers that know what the hell direction to take him, also drop the whole retarded idea of "world outside your window," it hamstrings his development.

I feel like RDJ was a likable douche where as comics Stark feels just like a douche.

Spot on.

A lot of it was bland. The whole Tony Stark bodyguard thing was silly. Far too many samey villains.

He's honestly just never been that interesting as a character. He has (essentially) magic armour and a heart condition. It's not exactly riveting
The main reason why everyone loves the films is because RDJ just single-handedly carries them. There's a reason almost every single MCU hero since has just done variations on RDJ's way of talking. The other big reason is the visual aspect: the early films really emphasised the mechanical nature of the Iron Man suit and came up with a definitive design for him that almost instantly supplanted the comics. The way it whirs and clunks around creates a great physicality to it, which is very cinematically appealing. They lost that from about 2015 onwards when they started completely CGI'ing the suit instead, which was incredibly disappointing, but by that point people were already endeared to RDJ's Iron Man

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In order for a Superhero to be good they need a good rogues gallery, supporting cast, and a reason for you to root for them. In the comics Stark, has none of that.

It's really a shame that they went full CGI with his armors. I prefer the clunky and bulky suits to the nanotech.

Old comics are dull as fuck and hard to read.

The CGI in later Iron Man appearances is awful, it's such a massive departure from the first film that I can't understand why they did it in the first place. Though IIRC they did use some practical suit bits in the first few films, apparently it was uncomfortable so they gradually reduced the amount of kit until they got to the shiny vidya-looking ass nanotech point, which is where he's only wearing a mocap suit and the top half of a chest piece.

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Iron man 2 should've been a armor wars adaptation.

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Some old comics are great and fine to read. Iron Man though has always felt clunky. The stuff about Stark Industries, the espionage, the obsession with losing his tech, the business stuff, the "Iron Man is Stark's bodyguard" shit.

Not to mention the stories aren't worth reading.

>Why didn't his success on screen translate into the comics?
Because of the absolute state of Marvel's writers. When they actually put a 'star writer' on the book, with a mission statement of making Iron Man's comic as successful as his movies, we got Bendis trying to replace Tony with an OC based on his daughter.

In addition there's the problem of the comics industry's inability to draw in new readers, meaning that no matter how popular a character gets with normies because of an adaptation, the size of their comic-buying audience is largely fixed to the same size it's always been for the last 20-30 years.

>What can we do to fix him?
Replace the entire talent pool of cape comic writers, or at least stop letting people who inherently hate everything about Tony Stark write his book.

The people who keep insisting Iron Man was C- or D- list will likely insist that some characters like Cyclops or Storm who don't even have solo books are higher-tier characters than him, but being someone who has ALWAYS had a solo book means Marvel definitely consider him B-list, and that's usually how his book sells.

>The people who keep insisting Iron Man was C- or D- list will likely insist that some characters like Cyclops or Storm who don't even have solo books are higher-tier characters than him, but being someone who has ALWAYS had a solo book means Marvel definitely consider him B-list, and that's usually how his book sells.

I'm not even an Ironfag and I agree with this, having a consistent solo book definitely makes you important within capeshit sales, meta, in-universe, etc.

Ironman is usually better when he's a villain.

I'm tired of Stark being a villain, I want to see him being heroic.

Eh, Armor Wars was ok.

because modern writers humiliate him or make him the bad guy. He saved the world in the mcu, in the comics he's been a schmuck since millar. How can a superhero's comics work, if they make him a loser?

>I want to see him being heroic.
That'd require a little bit of a personality shift, and deemphasizing his more negative traits. The problem is leaning in too much of him being a dick, and despite the ass way they've tried to walk back his involvement in Civil War, he still largely has that stigma attached to him, not even counting his Illuminati bullshit.

I think you'd need to have most of the other armored characters already established before you could do an MCU version of Armor Wars, Iron Man 2 would have been far too early to try it, but even now they don't have enough armored characters to do it.

>The people who keep insisting Iron Man was C- or D- list will likely insist that some characters like Cyclops or Storm who don't even have solo books are higher-tier characters than him, but being someone who has ALWAYS had a solo book means Marvel definitely consider him B-list, and that's usually how his book sells.
But desu Tony Stark has always felt better part of the Avengers or some other group that with his solo book.

*than with his solo book

Civil War really fucked Stark up.

Tony Stark is Reed Richards.
Their only character arc is "worlds smartest man becomes Super Science Hitler to save the world"

It both elevated his notoriety and tarnished it at the same time. It's not like Iron Man wasn't a known figure, but Civil War is probably where he peaked in comics. The problem is that everything he could have done wrong, he did, which only reinforced the image of being a dick with a penchant of wanting to get his way, no matter how unscrupulous. Armor Wars being his most notable story prior to Civil War sure as hell didn't diminish that.

In a meta sense, his status as a veteran superhero and one of the founding Avengers gives him a sense of in-story importance that's more obvious when he's surrounded by lower-tier heroes who look up to and respect him, and that's probably what you're seeing. But he was created as a solo book character, it's not his fault Marvel's writers have neglected his supporting cast and rogues gallery so badly.

I think there are a lot of writers and fans who were around in the 00s who are never going to get over Civil War and never stop holding grudges against Tony, but there are also a lot of newer writers who just look at Tony, see "straight white rich man who runs a big powerful international corporation", and can't bring themselves to write him as a good person because he's everything they hate.

I just think his solo book has been mostly bland for so long they never really got what they wanted to do. Even the original conception, when hearing Stan talk about it, sounds far more like a gimmick with no real legs in where they wanted to go, unlike some of the other marvel heroes.

>Iron Man is Stark's bodyguard
That thing emasculated him a lot, I think the best thing the movies did was making Tony reveal he was Iron Man to the public in his first movie. It gave his character more freedom
>Tony gets tired of being view as villain and decides to clean his name and become the hero the world deserves
It writes itself

Iron Man comics were mostly solid for decades, the problem has mainly been in the last 20 years, and it's more because of the writers Marvel has chosen to write the book than anything wrong with Iron Man as a concept, he's not the only Marvel character to suffer through long stretches with a succession of bad writers, or even the supposedly good writers just not being a good fit for the book, and not particularly invested in the job.

1) That design is a Cyborg Ninja ripoff
2) Tony is a responsible business man, scientist. Thats what hes been all his inception. Worked out pretty well since hes had animated series long before movies. A classy stache, classy man.

Movie Iron Douche is just Iron Douche. Some tacky ass goatee, endless sarcasm, no real depth. Of course it would be popular with movie goers. Im so happy he died in the movies because we finally got a proper non-douche Stark back. I embrace "failure". And hes not really a failure because as mentioned hes popular enough to get an animated series. Not everything in pop-culture is greatness.

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Solid perhaps but never the stand out of the line. I think far too many people jumped on the futurism shit especially post Extremis and then mismashing with the RDJ MCU shit.

But that being said I don't think Iron Man has those amazing stand out stories, some alright ones here and there. What would you say are the solid runs/stories?

>It writes itself
It does, but it ends up becoming like the Hank Pym slap, or House of M for Wanda. You end up where all their stories become about that one thing, some writers trying to give them redemption arcs, then others go back to it because it's their biggest story and they must always be unforgivably awful because of it. The only way Tony gets to move on from Civil War is by writers putting it firmly in the past and not writing more stories about it, and editorial who want to do the same.

It's like the opposite of Daredevil. No one wants to write Iron Man except people that'll think it'll be easy sales so they half ass it.

Tony not being an antagonist for Krakoa X-men was a huge missed opportunity

He's good conceptually but on paper he's meh.

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His villains are trash, guys like Spider-Man and Batman are defined by their villains and the fans want more of them. Who does Ironman have besides armoured Soviet bad guys and businessmen.

He doesn´t need a big redemption arc, just make him do good stuff, fighting new evil villains, perhaps making him the good guy in a event for once, etc.

I think the point user is making is how some of these crap modern events have defined a whole perception of a character. Like how he mentioned House of M, most normies know that shit and it was constantly mentioned in regards to Wandavision. That event is so cemented into creators/audiences brains that it is hard to seperate it.

>But that being said I don't think Iron Man has those amazing stand out stories,
I think too many people obsess over a character's worth being defined by whether they have that one big stand out story or not, when that wasn't how classic Marvel really operated, they weren't trying to create that one story arc that would define the character and stay in print forever, they were trying to create solid monthly books that would keep readers coming back every month. Not every character needs to have their own DKR-tier story.

>What would you say are the solid runs/stories?
80s to mid-90s Iron Man, from the first Michelinie/Layton run to Kaminski is probably the peak era of Iron Man comics, it has Tony vs Alcohol, rounds 1 and 2, Armor Wars 1 and 2, Tony's two time-travel adventures with Doom, the Dragon Seed Saga, Jim Rhodes becoming War Machine, and a lot more.

Ironman has tons of great villains, they're just underutilized.

Just paint a big Z on his armor and start pushing him.

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I never said "one" stand out story and I don't mean TDKR tier stories but in general those inbetween okay and amazing. Good solid stories. Course it is about creating monthly comic books to keep readers coming back but some other Marvel characters have had more defining storylines, think Kraven's Last Hunt or things like that. Most of the time people just discuss Demon in the Bottle/Armor Wars and that is it, in regards to Iron Man.