Did they fail to make Iron Man villains cool even when they tried?

Did they fail to make Iron Man villains cool even when they tried?

You don't have to totally reinvent a character to make them cool, you just have to make them competent and remind people why they can go toe-to-toe with the hero.

This is why Iron Man was a B-tier hero before the MCU. He had a couple of good story arcs and that was it. And that's because he only has a couple of decent villains.

Mandarin and alcoholism

Iron Mans villain should be Magneto

nice try, sweetie

When the majority of your villains are just randos with power armor, just like you, then, uh . . . yes?

Alright, let me ask you guys this: besides Mandarin and any character who amounts to "evil Iron Man" (Dynamo, Monger, Titanium Man), which Iron Man villiains have the most and the least potential to be awesome and threatening?

Ghost

Ghost is the best answer.

Living Laser as well.

So, do we agree that Fraction & Larroca's Iron Man run was actually not-that-bad-and-pretty-good-but-not-as-good-as-Superior Iron Man?

World's Most Wanted is legit 10/10 comics.

Here's the whole problem: "just give everyone armor" ISN'T "trying".

First post best post

Completely off topic, but is Surgeon X any good?

Yes.

Tony Stark

I like it when Heroes are forced to fight enemies that are outside of their context. Why is every Iron Man villain some guy in a super powered suit (Or the mandarin)?

Where's him fighting some magic guys?

Gillen's run.
Fear Itself Hey, you asked.

Ghost & Madame Masque.

In a lot of story telling, the villain typically acts as a foil to a hero in a sort of "what if the hero hadn't chose to be good" situation
-Many of Spider-man's villains are also the result of a freak accident involving science (Doc Ock, Lizard, Molten Man, Green Goblin, Electro) They choose to turn to crime instead of being a hero due to the choices they have made
-Sherlock Holmes main villain is Moriarty-more or less an Anti-Sherlock; sharing his intelligence but not his moral beliefs
-The X-men fight Magneto and his Acolytes, both groups want to fight for the mutant cause, but one group is considerably misled in their believes being guided by anger and the same xenophobia that they themselves are ostracized for
-Even the story of Jesus and Lucifer has a similar premise: Being chosen as God's favorite, then being told to humble themselves before humanity. Lucifer rebelled and became the 'villain' while Jesus obeyed and became the 'hero'
It's not always the best way to go, but the symbolism of your villain being the dark version of the hero is ingrained in literature in all it's forms.

best iron man villain will always be fin fang foom

yeah so how is 'guy in an inferior suit' a foil to a tech suit guy? he should fight magic guys. that's why mandarin works. cosmic magic is even better, because it's the kinda shit that marvel usually says IS technology, but way beyond tony's level. that'll frustrate him, not being able to do what he does best.
evil tech guys too, of course, but they shouldnt be the sorts who all also wear suits.

also it's pretty easy to obey god when you are god (though we do get a few moments where he's fed up with the shit and asks the rest of himself if maybe he can lay off. no? okay fine. have it your way, rest-of-me)

In the movies at least, the Iron Monger and Whiplash are both in their own respect geniuses when it comes to engineering and making high-tech weaponry.
While Tony Stark had a change of heart and decided to his use suit for good, these others great minds used their intelligence for personal reasons like revenge or the desire for profit.
Conclusively, you have two scientists, one using his super suit for good and one for evil.
Tony Stark could have just as easily gone down the road he was originally headed and become a nasty villain.

I'm not saying that having a 'fish out of water' situation is bad, in fact it can provide a lot of growth for a character making them jump out of their comfort zone in a sort of devil you know vs the devil you don't.
Just pointing out why most heroes are paired against villains that are the same as them like
Dr. Strange and Mordo or Thor and Loki.

>implying that there is a good ghost story outside of thunderbolts

the problem is the majority of his villains all had the same motivation and no personality. just a bunch of 'you american capitalist pigs need to be stopped' nobodies that are utterly interchangeability.

Fractions run did a good job getting all the villains' personalities down and making them feel unique. Blizzard, Whirlwind, and Living Laser are pretty cool. Ghost is great. Spymaster was creepy as fuck.

I never got how Iron Man never got a really distinct rogues gallery. Everything about him says that he should have a stellar gallery of tech-related villains. I always thought his villains would be badass, 80's /m/echa-style villains of corrupt rival business dudes and people looking to make a cut in the military industrial complex, which to some extent, a couple of them are, to my understanding. And beyond that, they could have really cool, unique sets of armor that stood out and weren't just 'generic power armor' and vendettas that would go beyond just greed at some point. Right?

Well it turns out that other than Obadiah Stane and Justin Hammer, both of whom are barely ever used anyway, most of his villains are boring guys who you have to wonder how they ever became Iron Man villains in the first place. Like fucking Whiplash. So he's a guy who made a pair of really powerful whips and decided to take on Iron Man? And one version of him is Russian? Really? Really?

I mean, I don't read Iron Man comics, but it always seems like there's so much potential there that has hardly ever been realized.

Also, someone educate me. What makes Iron Man's villains so good?

>Metal OmegaRedmon

Fin Fang Fucking Foom

Iron Man: Armored Adventures did a really good job with reinventing and breathing life into Iron Man's rogues gallery.

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It isn't even like Iron Man doesn't have a potentially interesting set of rogues to work with. Most people just ignore the ones he has and don't bother doing much with them.

It definitely had some cool ass designs, but I found all the high school shit really grating and the animation just barely passable.

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I really liked Living Laser in this. He played a tragic villain decently and his design is pretty unique among suit-wearers. Hate the fact that they brought him back to life only to do nothing with him.

I also liked MODOK's first appearance and design, but they just made him a joke villain after that.

Mandarin isn't good either.

The choice for making the characters teenagers was an incredibly odd one, I agree. I wasn't, and still am not, a fan of that choice, but it grew on me eventually. Seeing how they handled the rogues gallery made it worth it to me.

Which brings me to my point again. If a show where they made Tony Stark into a teenager could somehow manage to handle his villains well, why the hell hasn't any of his regular comics for the past several decades been able to?

Everyone keeps complaining about Iron Man not having an interesting set of villains, including writers, and those writers try to go out of their way to either give him new and exciting enemies or just reuse Mandarin, Madame Masque, or somehow work in Stane or Hammer in again. The times they tried making new enemies, they always end up creating a throwaway character that feels even more generic than any of his classic enemies.

The most recent example with Bendis being Bendis and slamming Iron Man's enemies outside of his waifu Madame Masque and saying every other character is vapid, and that he plans on "creating a lot of cool new enemies for him to fight", then goes on to have Tony fight a generic Hand knock-off ninja clan and some generic mob.

I hated the high school shit, but at least they didn't shove it down our throats and most of the plots had little to do with it.

I liked it when Tony treated it like an obstacle. He cheated in a test to fight a villain and he wasn't chastised for it or there wasn't a lame moral about doing the right thing. He bent the rules to save lives.

Mandarin is a character writers get wrong so very often, because he's the only villain most writers bother using. The past few decades, writers working on Iron Man's books have followed a trend of writing their own original enemies, which are usually pretty forgettable. Then, when the end of their run is approaching, they'll bring out Mandarin for a "classic" Iron Man villain to round off their generic content. Most times it feels like an afterthought, as if they have an obligation to toss in an older Iron Man enemy for his fans and don't really have a fully thought out idea for Mandarin.

I think the last appearance I liked of him was the Haunted arc of Iron Man: Director of SHIELD.

I like him when he's done well. He's essentially a stage magician who relies on advanced alien technology to do what he does, but presents it as magic. The ten rings themselves cover a rather large and varied range of abilities, which makes him a fairly sizeable threat. Couple that with him being a good long-term planner, he could be a menacing enemy on several levels.

Yeah, it felt a little closer to Batman Beyond in that regard. The school setting showed up a lot more comparatively, and that's not even getting into how this isn't a legacy character but the actual Tony Stark and friends themselves, but the main focus was still on the superhero side of things.

One of the designs I wasn't entirely sure about was the show's Crimson Dynamo. It's weird having it be 99% white aside from the red star. I don't hate it, but I'm not a huge fan of it either. The actual character was handled in an interesting way, though, I thought.

It was also cool that they made the Crimson Dynamo suit something meant for space, rather than it being specifically designed to be an anti-Iron Man armor.

It helped make the world feel like it didn't completely revolve around Tony.

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Living Laser was phenomenal. His design did a good job conveying that he wasn't just wearing a power suit, but had actual powers by that point with its less armored appearance.

MODOK was great the first time around. I also liked the design for the AIM scientists. I guess they couldn't resist temptation to play him as a joke based on his appearance afterwards, which was a shame. Some of the villains that reappeared didn't feel like they should have.

Technovore

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Is that show worth watching at all?

The highschool angle will make or break the show for you. If you can manage to stomach it, it'd be worth your time. It doesn't adhere to some cliches normal for that kind of setting, and it uses the fact that they're teenagers somewhat well with the plot itself, like putting a new spin to Tony constantly struggling with Obadiah Stane for control over his family's company.

It does wonders for his rogues gallery, in that it bothers to use them and make the most of them at all.

It also made some interesting choices, like making Black Knight an enemy, which felt a little out of nowhere.

>It also made some interesting choices, like making Black Knight an enemy, which felt a little out of nowhere.

One of the Black Knights was a villain.

Read comics you fucking faggot

Spymaster is awesome

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Huh, interesting. I never knew that and I liked reading Black Knight in the various Avengers books. Shows what I know.

Fixer as an Iron Man antagonist was pretty fun.

Maybe I'll check it out. I've seen it playing on tv in the background while I was doing other things and always felt like it looked like a generic, crappy show.

>-Many of Spider-man's villains are also the result of a freak accident involving science (Doc Ock, Lizard, Molten Man, Green Goblin, Electro)

See, this is a perfect example. The Iron Man equivalent of that would be if every single one of those guys was also bitten by a spider that gave them powers. Iron Man's "foil" villain should be a genius who invents something, but that something should not be another super-suit.

I like the Mandarin as a foil villain. He's not a guy in a super-suit but a man of advanced alien technology that presents himself as a man of magic.

I'd actually like to see Controller in a more prominent role, though. He's a guy who's able to mind control people and could really fuck with things on a small and large scale. That kind of character would be a perfect embodiment of stealing other people's work and trying to pass it off as their own, forcing other people to invent things for him and manipulating things.

>World's Most Wanted is legit 10/10 comics.
It would have been okay if they cut it down to like 6-7 issues. 10 was waaaay too long.I know it's because it had to fit in the timeline of Dark Reign but still.

Fin Fang Foom.
Ultimo.
Vibro.
Ezekiel Stane.
Firebrand.
Mordecai Midas.
Spymaster.
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