Iron Man

Iron Man’s alter ego of Tony Stark—wealthy playboy inventor, owner of Stark International, and international arms manufacturer—was partly based on the wealthy inventor, business mogul, and defense contractor Howard Hughes. In Marvel’s early days, much was made of the company’s creation of “heroes with problems,” and Stark’s problem was potentially fatal: while demonstrating some new weapons in the jungles of Vietnam, he is injured by a bomb and captured by a Viet Cong warlord. With his life ebbing away, Stark is forced to work for his captors, creating new weapons, but unknown to them he secretly builds himself a high-tech suit of armour that will both keep him alive and make him a walking arsenal. Once in the gray clanking suit, Stark defeats the warlord and returns to the United States to assume the role of a superhero, but his tragedy is that he can never remove the chest plate that keeps him alive. To compound his dilemma, the armour needs constant recharging and has the unfortunate tendency to run out of power at the most inconvenient moments, usually in the middle of a pitched battle.

Among those in Iron Man’s supporting cast are Stark’s chauffeur, “Happy” Hogan; his perky secretary, Virginia (“Pepper”) Potts; and James Rhodes, a former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who would eventually don his own suit of armour as the costumed hero War Machine. Iron Man’s major villains included Titanium Man, an armour-wearing Soviet giant (later immortalized by Paul McCartney in a song on his Venus and Mars album); rival industrialists Obadiah Stane and Justin Hammer; the Maggia crime cartel; and his archenemy, the Mandarin. The Mandarin was a sinister mastermind who rivaled Stark in scientific genius, and he wielded 10 rings of alien origin that granted him an array of powers.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Iron Man was a mainstay of Marvel’s output. The character was one of the charter members of the Avengers and has maintained a regular presence in that group. Stark’s wealth funded the Avengers’ mansion, and his technical wizardry led to the creation of a virtual wardrobe of armoured suits. His hulking gray costume was replaced with a succession of ever-sleeker designs that generally hewed to a red and gold colour scheme.

The story line took a dramatic turn in the 1980s, under the writing team of David Michelinie and Bob Layton and artist John Romita, Jr. Stark International was suddenly hit by industrial espionage, and, as a despairing Stark took to drinking, Rhodes took his place in the Iron Man armour. Stark’s ongoing battle with alcoholism would become a recurring theme in subsequent years. One especially notable story in this era was the “Armor Wars” saga, which pitted Iron Man against a stable of armoured villains who had capitalized on stolen Stark designs. The 1990s were characterized by uneven stories that too frequently relied on Stark’s apparent death as a plot device. As the Vietnam War became an increasingly distant historical event, Iron Man’s origin was reimagined to have taken place during the Persian Gulf War.

In the early stories of the 21st century, Tony Stark publicly revealed his identity as Iron Man and even served as U.S. secretary of defense. Stark played a major role in Marvel’s Civil War (2006–07) event, and he briefly served as the director of the law-enforcement agency S.H.I.E.L.D. Fan backlash in the wake of Civil War—a story that pitted hero against hero, with Stark serving as the primary antagonist—led to the rebooting of the Iron Man franchise, and writer Matt Fraction and artist Salvador Larroca redefined the character with their award-winning run on Invincible Iron Man (2008–12). When Stark was beaten into a coma during the second Civil War event (2016), the Iron Man persona was assumed by Riri Williams, a brilliant African American teenager who had reverse engineered an Iron Man suit. She eventually adopted the crime-fighting name Ironheart. An alternate version of Iron Man was one of the original members of the title team in The Ultimates, a series about the Avengers’ counterparts in a parallel universe, and he was featured in two Ultimate Iron Man comics miniseries (2005–06 and 2007–08), written by science-fiction author Orson Scott Card.