So how the F U C K did Iron Man stay in publication for 40+ movieless years?

So how the F U C K did Iron Man stay in publication for 40+ movieless years?
People are always talking about how much of a washout C-list gamble he was back in 2008. And sure enough, nobody ever brings up classic runs, or defining moments, or memorable characters as often as they do any of his peers. He doesn't even stand-out in any of the old cameos or Avengers appearances I've seen him in. It just doesn't add up. How'd he survive? What was his niche? Who'd he appeal to?

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80's iron man was fucking cool though

he's the cool exec with the heart of steel

he appeals to losers who need some solid dick

Forgot to add:
Yes I know Demon in a Bottle is a thing. Read years ago. I don't see the big deal.

>And sure enough, nobody ever brings up classic runs, or defining moments, or memorable characters as often as they do any of his peers.
>Demon in a Bottle
>Demon in a Bottle
>Demon in a Bottle
>Armor Wars
>Extremis

Here, five nice memorable arcs.

Because the Avengers existed as a title specifically for characters not popular enough to carry their own book but could sell by pooling together and drawing in tons of people who were only there for one or two of the characters, which paradoxically made Iron man popular enough for a solo title because he was an Avengers mainstay and defacto leader.

With Spider-Man, X-Men, F4, and Hulk being the most recognizable Marvel faces pre MCU....Iron Man existed in that B lister space...he wasn't as popular as any of the others but he was still recognizable as someone who was "iconic" to Marvel along with Captain America and Thor to people even if people didn't know a lot about them

>7 seconds
HAH

Extremis was better, I guess. Armor Wars has been squatting on my HD for a while.

Gruenwald wrote him for years, sorry if you can only recognize specific stories.

A lister in the universe. In universe spiderman was c lister until the 80s.

That's the thing tho.
Cap & Thor, I totally get. Their old stuff's great.
If anything, it highlights the absurdity. Why the fuck was Thor cancelled twice and not Tony? ESPECIALLY when you're keeping Cap; that makes him extra redundant.

This. He was a main on Avengers so he could continue being relevant. Even though most of the stories weren't about him. He was the tech and funding guy.

But by avengers starus he was popular. Who did he compete with? Cap? Even less people cared about him

I know, I don't agree with the C-list label myself specifically because he's never been OOP.
Comparing content though, it suits him more than everyone else who's never been OOP.

Makes sense.

He doesn't appeal to anyone. The reason the movies work is purely RDJ. Iron Man is a shit tier character with a shit tier mythos.

His costume/powers were sort of interesting so he had fans. There are a lot less popular characters that have been around that long.

>Cap? Even less people cared about him
Citation needed. I've heard more about classic Cap than I ever have classic IM.

COme to think of it, yeah: doesn't explain why Tony'd always get a relaunch instead of a cancellation. Was it just selling better than Thor at the time?

Iron man is very much a serial type character. Not a character who gets big runs or moments.

Not that different from Earth 1 Superman.

Then why'd the mythos keep getting added to every month for 40 years? RDJ wasn't there.
So consistency & luck.

>Iron man is very much a serial type character
Interesting. Could you elaborate?

Iron Man got the most fanmail from women. So I 'spose that's who he appealed to.

Big Armor Tony working the ladies. Based.

Huh.

The ongoing adventures and themes. Saving the day, womanizing, little character progression, not much big life defining events either.

Not that different from golden age sunday strips or serial movies.

Wheras spiderman is always moving ahead yet slowly, spiderman always have life defining moments or events that move him forward.

Lot of early dc comics pre 80's never really had character progression, where even things never get mentioned again but the status quo stays the same for the reader.

Iron Man was B-List at worst. Certainly no more obscure than Daredevil or Ghost Rider. An Iron Man movie wasn't really surprising. The fact that it was good was.

Women is who he appealed to the most.
Seriously. All the fan mail they got was all women for Iron Man, mainly because they wanted to mother him and take care of him.
They had a maternal boner for him.

Layton/Michelinie is godlike
unlike the dogturd movies

>tony was moe by helplessness before it was cool
That's kinda cute.

source on this one?

I'd take liquid moxie given the option, but I'd keep the solid dick for my friends who went without.
This. Kinda explains the pathos of a multi-millionaire who can't seem to affect the state of the world with any permanence despite the awe inspiring technological marvels he introduced to the world.

Whatever happened to the Mandarin?

I imagine the financial model and the market was a bit different back then.

Up until the last 10 or 20 years you still had obscure titles lasting for hundreds of issues before ending, like Alpha Flight and Exiles, they were pretty far from A-List titles but they kept plugging along for a while.

I guess expenses have increased and now they're much less willing to let books coast on low sales.

I don't know if any of this is the case, it's just the most obvious answer to me.

I use to watch his 90's cartoon as a kid and enjoyed it.

For the longest time I thought War Machine was the *main* Iron Man because of Marvel vs Capcom.

His ass, more than likely.

>Marvel start getting popular
>Iron Man created as the anti-Marvel

>Marvel's biggest strength was change
>Iron Man never changed

>Marvel stopped changing
>Iron Man becomes their headline character

This is some Hypercrisis bullllllllllshit right here.

>Lee said that "of all the comic books we published at Marvel, we got more fan mail for Iron Man from women, from females, than any other title....We didn't get much fan mail from girls, but whenever we did, the letter was usually addressed to Iron Man."
-The Invincible Iron Man (Ultimate 2-Disc Edition Iron Man DVD). 2008.

Literally 2 seconds in Google.

Hey I can believe it, I just wanna know more.

Damn right "huh" you need it spelled out in flaming letters across the skyline?
You need professional help for you boot addiction.
>Demon in a g-string
HERE'S MY SUNDAY BEST

Good enough, cheers user.
>the letter was usually addressed to Iron Man.
Dawww.
Gru was behind the curve.

but y

The 1st time Thor was cancelled were because of the character of Thor being included in the Heroes Reborn deal with Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, but the Thor book not being included. This resulted in the book reverting to the 'Journey Into Mystery' title, starring "The Lost Gods" for a year, essentially a "Thor Comic Without Thor" series.

The 2nd time, was after Avengers Disassembled, when Avengers relaunched as New Avengers, the Iron Man and Captain America books also relaunched, but Thor wasn't brought back until about 3 years later. The reason for this was because they were trying to find an A-list writer to relaunch the book. They'd already decided on the "Asgard is rebuilt in Oklahoma" set-up for the series, but spent years trying to get people like Millar or Gaiman to do it, before JMS got the job.

>Marvel changed into SJW pandering
>Iron Man entered into a comma
>YASS QUEEN! became the "face" of the company
Really fires up the good ol' neurons.

Is it fair to say that Iron Man was the Coronation Street of Marvel comics?

yasssssssssssssssssssss

I don't like your continual avoidant personality problems in the face of evidence you death worship freak.

>Coronation Street
And what would that be?

This user is right about how Iron Man was designed to be "anti-marvel". Or so it says the "Untold Story of Marvel Comics". It somehow gained enough recognition to become a solid B-list character eventually.

You're a retard fetishist slut aren't you?

You've lost me. I was referring to this.

Why doesn't Marvel switch to a glorified webcomic model or single issues and only physically publish trades of the most popular titles? The decompression in most comics today means one story equals one 4-5 issue arc anyway.

>So how the F U C K did ________ stay in publication for 40+ movieless years?

It's funny how contrarians pretended to like Carol just to shitpost and now we have very vocal retards who unironically "like" her for whatever bullshit reason shitting up the board.

I can't wait for synergy to do its job.

Do you mean to say that plot oriented stories and comic strips can't be good or can't become classics?

Iron man changed a ton though, him become a static relic is only a modern movie synergy thing.

TV soap opera. Britbongese, don't know what the US equivalent would be. They've been churning out episodes since before color telly, yet it always stays on air. No season model either IIRC, new viewers just constantly cycle on in media res.

Not really. One of the main complains of Iron Man's character is his bland personality. He's been the drunk fuck up for most of its history up until Civil War when he became a fascist ,drunk fuck up who put his friends in prisons inside the Negative Zone.

Oh wow, it's almost as if she was written by some of the best Marvel comic writers ever. Clarrmont and Busiek

I didn't grow up reading that many comic books. Maybe pick up an Archie or a Marvel or Image at the gas station convenience store every few months. But then I didn't really NEED to.

I don't think you took my meaning the way I intended, my good chum.

Iron Man was a pretty great character with a lot of tragedy, emotional and personal suffering behind him, he was never all about jokes and quips (every time I read the early stuff I hear Robert Hays’s voice from Season 2 – that’s the closest you will ever get to a real sounding Tony Stark, to me he’s like Kevin Conroy to the Bat universe), nor was he a manlet like RDJ, before MCU ruined him and deformed the crap out of him (beyond recognition).

All of Tales of Suspense stories were pretty entertaining and solid (constant problems with women, heart, politicians, The Avengers, supervillains getting an upper hand and Stark barely surviving his first fight with Whiplash and Titanium Man and other solid developments), vol.1 was mostly great, but it really got interesting only when Layton and Michelinie got their hands on the story and then Dennis O’Neil made it a better use of Tony’s alcohol addiction than both Bob & David ever did, and then John Byrne, Len Kaminski and a lot of talented artists were touching upon all sorts of fascinating medical problems (technological version of aids was the best way to present Stark with a problem of death and cryogenics + not to mention his deteriorating lone-wolf-influenced relationships with his closest friends and allies).

Then, after Kaminski got the boot… it all went downhill… with the Crossing BS, but then Vol.2 (as weird as it was) had some nice characterization of Stark with interesting visuals provided by Portacio, even though the story itself was convoluted as f.

Vol.3 and the combo of Busiek/Chen was the best of all worlds because Busiek was always a fan of Tales of Suspense Iron Man iteration (just like that perfect Enter the Mandarin mini by Casey) and made the best of it, by combining modern day tech and espionage stories with the flavor of the Golden Age of comics with his 26 issue take on Stark.

And before Tieri took over and they started going insane with the character, I really loved the evolution of Iron Man’s armor and tech, and how each suit actually had a purpose to the story and in a bigger scheme of things.

Also, Secretary of Defense arc was pretty legit (as well as the Knaufs making a total badass out of Mandarin and using the Extremis plot in a really clever way), seeing Stark getting older and facing the mistakes of his past and all the Armor Wars during the Bush administration was actually neat.

What I am trying to say is that most of the early IM stuff (unlike Ellis, Fraction and other MODERN writers like Bendis who never actually read a proper Iron Man story aside from Demon in a Bottle) is worth taking a look at because it is filled with deeper characterization of Stark and goes inside the philosophy behind the invention of his suits, what makes Tony tick and how he tries to cope with that weird life post-war-mongering type of biz man…

It was a joke pham
and by your definition probably

If that were true she'd have had a cult fanbase since before becoming Captain Marvel which she didn't.

Literally nobody gave a shit about Carol, aside of lewds maybe, to warrant having a minority of vocal retards hyping her up for every little shit like she does nowadays.

fuck youuuuuuuuuuu
user there are at least 2 genuine Carol threads for you to shitpost in, pls dont start

I disagree. Bronze age Tony Stark comics were nothing like you described. They had overarching plots and character moments.

Oh I didn't either. It's a relatively recent interest. Now I DO need to.

>user there are at least 2 'genuine' Carol threads
Exactly.

Genuine as in 'for Carol shitposting' not even I'll argue that they're worth a damn

>Who'd he appeal to?

Iron Man's big thing for the first decade or two was that he was created to represent things the readership hated (capitalism, arms manufacturing, war profiteering, etc). Iron Man was Stan's test to see if he could make the readers like a character they wanted to hate. And it worked.

This lasted until the point where they made Iron Man renounce everything that made him stand out in the Marvel Universe. They made him just like everyone else, which made him boring. So now that his external traits were the same as everyone else (giving his money away, not manufacturing arms anymore, humanitarian), they began to explore the internal (he's a drunk).

He remains boring to this day, and will continue to be boring, because he is now the antithesis of the character he was created to be.

Instead of being the character you hate to love, he's just the character you hate.

I remember liking Iron Man as a kid because I thought robots were cool. Never quite clicked with me that he was actually a regular guy wearing a power suit- I saw the metal skin, the rocket boots and the lasers and immediately thought "cool, I like that robot".

When I got a little older, a friend of the family gifted me a bunch of comics, including the original Secret Wars and the 90's War Machine run. Didn't know anything about Tony except that he was the original Iron Man, passed the mantle to Rhodey sometime before Secret Wars, and possibly retired when Rhodey became War Machine sometime after. The way Tony was spoken of in the War Machine books made him seem like an irresponsible, reckless drunk at best, and a chronically absent non-character at worst. There definitely wasn't anything in there that made me want to seek out Tony's solo books. Who wants to read about a washed out slob?

I know a bit more about the character now than I did then, but I still see it as something of a miracle that Marvel Studios was able to pull such a 180 with the character's public image... Though I have to admit, a large part of that seems to come from the fact that Movie Tony is almost a completely different character from Comic Tony. Maybe that change was necessary to sell him properly.

good iron man stories:

>hypervelocity

thats it lol

He survived through inertia. That's all.

Shit character though desu.

the problem with iron man is that anyone smart enough to come up with a bunch of cool sci-fi ideas is also smart enough not to waste them on an iron man comic

Silver age. And any universe.

The thing is the character eventually rejects change. The iron man era from heroes return, the era he gets brain his brain resetted to move away from civil war.

No but still nobody twlks about phantom as much as spiderman or batman.

Post criss superman gets more love comparared to my fave earth 1 superman.

>I don't read comics: the post

downloadin
Not Iron Man comics!
Pitch some if they're so great.

All you fags are idiots. RDJ didn't make the character, he just took the best parts and exaggerated them a bit. Tony has been a major player in most events. And the only good part in fear itself was him giving up sobriety to bait Odin.

Silver age had no overarching plots or many character driven stories. At least DC didn't, since you used it as an example.

The movie version has a more charming personality but I find they've really nailed what a reckless, irresponsible, but well-meaning fuckup he is. They've done an admirable job conveying it without ever touching on the alcoholism. I mean people complain about Iron Man getting too much focus but he's almost always made out to be an irresponsible futurist that inadvertantly creates all of the problems in his life.

Reed's run has something of a cult fanbase so pre-Captain Carol has at least something going for her

>he's almost always made out to be an irresponsible futurist that inadvertantly creates all of the problems in his life.
Civil War is a testament to this. I really liked his arc. For the first time he plays by the rules and ends up fucking up anyway, to the point of having the Avengers disbanded.

Robert Hays /// Iron Man => soundcloud.com/edeny115/280-for-mr-kaminski

Like a lot of characters his defining runs came later on, when enough of his character, world, and supporting cast had been solidly defined to make grander stories.

Until then, he survived by being a founding Avenger and vital to various operations - like Reed Richards, he was a go-to science guy.

Also: Armor Wars, Demon in a Bottle, Extremis

all pre-movie storylines that redefined and pushed the character in new directions. Funny thing, in fiction, traditionally, and even in comic books prior to the 1990s - what most people want is new stories.

There are no more time for jokes parasite.

>Is this to EASY for YOU???
There are things called hobbies and being subtle, but I get what you mean.

In the 60's? He had a good visual design, had the usual Marvel conflict ("can't get close to anyone because I have to wear the metal chest plate that keeps my heart beating, is this the curse of being Iron Man?" or something like that) and there was less competition. Even outlasted Silver Surfer (though that got canceled partly because it was more expensive than the average comic) and Doctor Strange's first solo titles. Even X-Men, sort of (that title went into reprints for a while)

Then you have David Michelinie and Bob Layton in the late 70's and early 80's (and then Denny O'Neil in the 80's) doing stuff like Demon in a Bottle, the Doctor Doom stories, having James Rhodes be a major supporting character, the Obadiah Stane stuff, Armor Wars, and other things that made Iron Man a solid read. Sure, it's not as good as Claremont X-Men, but I would rather read their stuff over a lot of stupid fucking crap from Marvel recommended to me in the last seventeen years.

Same.

War Machine was my shit.

>Who did he compete with? Cap? Even less people cared about him
lol no

I like what I've read of her, which is Reed's run, the run that CW2 killed, and Kang Dynasty. Does that make me a contrarian?

Iron Man also made an effective character foil. Many Marvel characters find themselves in conflict with the establishment in some way or another, and Tony is very much part of the establishment. So in a team setting he offers a contrary viewpoint.

He kind of was, in the comics when Tony "died" the first time. And also if you count the time when Rhodey was wearing the red-and-gold while Stark was too drunk to function properly.

>Funny thing, in fiction, traditionally, and even in comic books prior to the 1990s - what most people want is new stories.
I wish that were still true for comics now though. I feel like what most people want nowadays is constant nostalgia wank and the same stories over and over again.

I guess it's mostly because the comic book audience didn't really change, it's just the same people that want to read the "comfy" stories of their childhood forever. As much as Marvel/DC try to bring in new audiences with the movies and shit, it seems like it doesn't work.

I'm pretty sure "new audiences" also want stuff they are familiar with after watching the movies.

It'd be a big letdown if you want to see what transpires with Tony in the comics and find out he's been replaced with a unknown teenager you don't give a shit about.

Demon In A Bottle is overrated af. It's one of those stories whose only value is their historical significance, just like The Death Of Gwen Stacy.
I believe Stark's alcoholism has been brought up in some runs after DiB, and they did it better.

That's not really what I'm talking about though, I'm mostly talking about taking the characters in new directions and doing some interesting storylines with them. Putting them in an unusual setting, making the comic something other than straight up superheroics, giving the character a new challenge or something unusual to overcome (like how Demon in the Bottle had Tony struggle with his alcoholism).

Other examples would be the latest Vision comic, which had some horror-ish elements to it and wasn't really about Vision saving the world, but about his struggling with not being human and trying to live a normal family life. Or for DC, the Grayson comic where they put Dick in an unusual setting (throwing a pretty morally white character into the grey world of espionage) and having him struggle in this new world and away from his usual family/friends. These are the type of stories I want to see more from Marvel and DC, where they take a chance and do something a bit "out there" with the characters. It's not gonna work every time, but I'd rather see them take more chances than to read the same old stories rehashed over and over again. I know the industry doesn't really support this type of storytelling (at the end of the day, straight up superheroics with A-listers always sell more), but a guy can dream.

Chill out, nigger.

I was only pointing out casuals also ride the nostalgia wagon and how when they try comics, after watching the movies or whatever, they're driven away by how different everything is.

I'm chill son, no need to be hostile.

Do you think casuals would still be averse to more "out there" comics if they starred the characters from the movies though? Because I've given some MCU fans Vision and Hawkeye to read and they actually enjoyed them (even though both are different from movie Vision and Clint). Yeah they don't want to read about Riri and Laura Wolverine and Hulk's cousin, but they did want to read comics about the characters they know from the movies, even if the events from the comics were very different from the movies (Vision having a family/Hawkeye being a bit of a fuck-up with no family). I wonder if a MCU-line of comics would sell (I know they make tie-in comics, but I'm talking about a proper MCU line the Ultimate line). I have a feeling it still wouldn't bring in that many new comic book fans.

You're a Monicafag aren't you.

I wasn't being hostile, faggot. Stop crying. Now I'm being hostile.

It really waters down to what the person enjoys, different styles and takes are always welcome.

I'm certainly sure having familiar faces running around would actually make people pick up more than one issue, the medium is still looked down upon despite the movies being popular so it definitely wouldn't make a radical change in readership, but at least little Jason would buy Iron Man every month to keep up with his beloved Tony Stark until the next movie drops.

>I wonder if a MCU-line of comics would sell
Judging by Avengers World it doesn't. People want the *main* superheroes from the *main* Earth in the *main* book.

No.

They've have just gotten greedy