Iron Man, Delineated
Core Genre: Science Fiction. Duh.
If superhero stories really are ultimately the interactions between heroes and villains, then Iron Man’s tale is all about how Tony Stark reconciles or contradicts the different aspects of himself.
The Bad: The alcoholism storyline did the character’s storyline a huge favour by adding relevance and realism (ho ho), as well as a theme (his own worst enemy) to focus an otherwise rudderless character. Before that point Iron Man, the adventure capitalist, was nothing more than Marvel’s least subtle anti-Red hero (and this is 60s Marvel we’re talking about, so that’s saying something).
The problem is that, like Batman-the-psycho, this has been taken to it’s logical conclusion and back so many times there’s really nowhere else to go with it. His story arc is more of a story ECG reading, where he’s had more ups and downs than a kangaroo with a speeding ticket*. First it’s crime-fighting whilst shitfaced, then it’s having your designs stolen and used to kill people, before topping it all by cloning a close mate and letting the resultant abomination murder another hero. I’m not sure you can top this without having Stark exterminate the world as he buggers children (which, incidentally, would have been Warren Ellis’ second arc on his reboot).
The Good: Millionaire industrialist superhero? There is just so much to say with a character like this. I’ve got a post coming up where I get a little irate at the way Green Arrow-as-lefty descends into caricature. Well, Iron Man seems of late to be even more prone to political caricature, to become a cartoonish Republican supervillain. First of all, of course he’s going to be a little more right-wing and a little more authoritarian than other characters. But have the writers really thought that through? Wouldn’t he more likely be the kind of person who opposes governmental interference, who believes citizens are better placed to take their safety into their own hands? He bootstrapped himself to power and influence; wouldn’t he at a minimum expect this from others? I don’t know, controlling the superheroes of the world as the Director of SHIELD doesn’t seem very neo-liberal to me. Underfunding and understaffing them into obsolescence, I could probably buy that.
My point is that there are some fascinating elements to play with here. They shouldn’t be so quickly bulldozed just to mould Tony Stark into a bad guy.
These delineations are going to get a little tougher the further away from the A-list we get. We could perhaps say that a lower-tier hero has lower-tier villains, but I suspect it’s the lack of quality in the villains that shapes the hero; if our central argument is that all superhero stories are at their core interactions between the two, then a fault in one side of the equation will effect the other. This makes a definition of our heroes difficult because it becomes more difficult to find the villain’s context. Batman’s bad guys are superb, of course. Plenty of layers and gimmicks for the Dark Knight to immerse himself in. But Whiplash and the Living Laser? Yeah, good luck with those two.
By necessity, the further away from the A-list we get, the more we may have to resort to projecting what a character’s contextualising factors should be, rather than what we can extrapolate from the evidence. I don’t really see a way round this, as it comes down to the mathematics of the thing. The fact that Batman has so many more stories in so many different media than Iron Man has means that the simple weight of numbers will skew towards a higher proportion of decent stories. There are always going to be exceptions that buck the trend, but I suspect they will be few and far between, and will rely on very specific circumstances.
Anyway, back to Stark:
A) The armour
B) Scientific curiosity and creation
C) Analysis (the converse being any weakness resulting from a lack of analysis)
D) Super-rich.
I think Iron Man’s major sub-theme is responsibility/irresponsibility, but I suspect that this is more a derivation of the other factors than a factor on its own.
Tony is saved from a fairly lacklustre set of rogues by the hypothesis that he himself is his own arch-enemy. But I don’t think that excuses us from ignoring his external world quite yet. The armour is his interaction with his world, and his enemies. His way of locating them, of placing them in their context, is by a combination of analysis and curiosity. Essentially, the Iron Man armour is also used as a way of extracting data from the world and displaying it in a way that allows Stark to quickly analyse it. Internally, this is enabled by Stark’s own ability to create, which is in turn enabled by his own sense of curiosity and experimentation. Externally, it is enabled by the fortune Stark has amassed almost as a by-product of his other skills.
By the same token, his interaction with the various aspects of his own psyche are also governed by his ability to self-analyse. In short, he’s not very good at it. Whether it’s his alcoholism, his inability to safeguard his own weapons designs, or his monumental idiocy in cloning Thor (although frankly, that’s more of an awful plot point than a decent use of Stark’s character), Stark shows time and again that he has trouble turning his analytical skills inward. I know I try to stay away from commenting on psychological motivation in these delineations (er, except for yesterday, when I spent a whole post on it), but when the character’s biggest bad guy’s himself, it’s really unavoidable.
Conclusion: Politically dodgy, but probably due to mischaracterising the conservative mindset rather than an error in assigning Tony Stark that inclination. Iron Man’s greatest challenge is in analysing himself, and his greatest skill is in analysing the external world. An Iron Man story should embrace creation, but not dismiss its consequences.
[*^ Who would, of course, be hopping mad.]
on October 21st, 2008 at 2:46 am
What’s interesting, too, is putting this in the context of the most recent movie, not to mention taking into account Downey and his political slants. Without getting too much into the politics of it, part of the reason the movie worked so well was that it explored that responsibility/irresponsibility dichotomy very well, and you’re right; while Don Cheadle’s character may don a suit next time ’round, I think what’s really going to be explored, and what most needs exploration, is what Downey noted in that final Stark speech: he’s not a “hero.” He’s a rabble-rousing, skirt-chasing, carousing sumbitch (which is, actually, part of what makes him so awesome).
“Wouldn’t he more likely be the kind of person who opposes governmental interference, who believes citizens are better placed to take their safety into their own hands? He bootstrapped himself to power and influence; wouldn’t he at a minimum expect this from others? I don’t know, controlling the superheroes of the world as the Director of SHIELD doesn’t seem very neo-liberal to me. Underfunding and understaffing them into obsolescence, I could probably buy that.”
Yes, he would, but I think that’s a common mistake in liberal/conservative dichotomy. I guess I should note that people would call me liberal, and I’m voting for Barack Obama, but I identify neither as a liberal nor as a Democrat (I would have totally voted for McCain in 2000), and I note all that because I think this is misconception about conservative/liberal&right/left thinking. I would rather the government provide healthcare and education to millions instead of, say, bailing out Fannie Mae and etc., and it’s funny that all the people most opposed to welfare are the ones so strident about needing bail-outs right now.
And I know that’s getting political, so moving on:
I think you nailed everything about Ironman, but I think one of the things that lends so much complexity to the character is the complexity of the dynamics at work. It’s human nature to make them binary, call them left and right or conservative and liberal, but I think Stark himself would resist that temptation, and therein lies his dilemma. He’s nearly a classic villain, in that the most extraordinary villain is the one who wants to rule the world solely because he thinks he’s the best man for the job, a la Dr. Doom.
on October 21st, 2008 at 7:37 am
I think you’re absolutely right about the lack of complexity in the black or white choice. In fact, I think the placement of Iron Man so rigidly in a particular political perspective has only happened of late as a result of peculiar political circumstance in the real world. Tony Stark gets painted with a broad brush as the Marvel writers stab at ‘relevance’, but it’s actually pretty immature (as is much of contemporary political discourse. I’ll touch on this again when I get to Green Arrow).
While I’m certain Tony Stark should be characterised as conservative, ‘liberal’ in a 19th Century freemarketeering sense, his motivations would certainly be complex ones, and more complex than they’ve been written in recent years.
on October 21st, 2008 at 11:18 am
Ha, this is going to be fun, because I disagree. Unfortunately I can’t do it at length ’til tomorrow, but just for now…
Iron Man has excellent “rogues”, actually. The Crimson Dynamo, for one, was meant to answer Iron Man’s continual low-on-power status…therefore an opposite number…and the Titanium Man was supposed to be a “more is better” use of technology (although I haven’t read those early issues in a while, so I may have to refresh my memory), therefore an “evil twin”. The Melter and Jack Frost were both elemental foes who could neutralize the armour (Whiplash and the Living Laser fall into this category too), and the Mandarin, as the top villain, opposed alien technologies and power-sources to Stark’s own. Meantime I believe the alcoholism is just a repurposed “bad ticker”, but I’ve always felt that bit to be without the same force — the bad heart plays more superheroishly with the externalization of character, right down to Tony not being able to tell Pepper how he feels because he’s wearing a big iron girdle under his clothes…so how can they be together?
But don’t spoil the movie for me, guys — I’m gonna see it probably tomorrow night.
on October 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
We’ll avoid the spoilerage, and I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts on this.
I actually see what you mean regarding the bad guys, and I’m forming an idea of how they could actually work well, as regards how they interact with Stark. But I think we will find ourselves talking about why these villains should be good rather than why they are good. They have a lot of potential (almost everything does), but have they ever really been utilised effectively? Perhaps that’s a failing of the writers rather than the concepts, or a failing from my own subjective viewpoint.
on October 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 am
Well, it’s the Red-bashing thing, really — there are a ton of old Iron Man comics that basically read like multiple reprints of Hulk #1, and this seems hard for modern readers to penetrate. Actually the hero-villain dynamics are sketched out quite well, in just a couple of strokes, and the “tragic flaw” stuff is…well, let’s be kind and say it’s merely omnipresent. The Mandarin’s duping of the Chinese is actually okay-complex for such a setting, and if what happens in the comics is anything like what happens in the old cartoon, there’s one particular idiomatic death-trap from this period which is damn clever: to get to the man inside the iron suit, the Mandarin sets him spinning on a centrifuge, reasoning that iron suit or no, the man inside will have all the air expelled from his lungs anyway. The fiend! But he hasn’t reckoned with our hero’s good old American know-how — Iron Man figures a way to generate power from the centrifuge’s spinning, so he can recharge and break free.
It is always about recharging, with that guy. By contrast, the Crimson Dynamo’s whole gig is that he never needs recharging, his overabundance of electrical power is such that he can use it as a weapon, just toss it around everywhere…
Anyway, tragic flaw, check…unattainable girl, check…hapless buddy, check…idiom of conflict (the economic/technological/ideological styles of the major Cold War players), check. But this last one looked pretty tired well before we got out of the Sixties, so it had to go…thereafter followed a period where Iron Man had to symbolize something slightly different, and you know this actually did happen! Out of his full Cold Warrior representation, he still stood for the disguised liberal wearing Establishment costume — to outward appearances, Tony Stark is a man of outrageously ungoverned privilege, and Iron Man is his hired superpowered muscle — one of the keys to the concept is that no one thinks Iron Man is Tony, they think he’s Tony’s stooge. So it’s a reasonably nuanced deceit, as far as secret identities go: no one knows about the damaged heart, no one knows about the secret heroic identity of the playboy, and no one knows about the moral independence of the guy in the tin can as they would if they could see his face. Anyway, in the Seventies and Eighties, this “secret liberal” stuff — I am not speaking of today’s dubious American inflection of the term, you understand — was played up pretty well even if the Us vs. Them stuff was slightly less in evidence, but I guess somebody somewhere felt that was losing gas too. Maybe it was ditching the bad ticker thing. Probably. Then in the Shooter era of Avengers Iron Man was reimagined as a guy who was really a bit of a dick, and like so many things inaugurated during Shooter’s reign, this stuck.
Okay, and the “Demon In A Bottle” thing may well have come from this period too. I think it did, though I can’t be sure.
Anyway, Shooter: when he was EIC, he presided over boatloads of “permanent” changes to the various Marvel titles and characters, and many of these stuck as new status quo. Precisely why and how it all happened I don’t know, but it was probably half-corporate and half-artistic. Anyway today we might almost call it a “soft reboot” of the Marvel Universe. So then you get alcoholic control-freak Tony, who starts going through massive ups and downs all over the place, and that becomes the “power issue”: can he be trusted? Not that this is a crazy place to go with Iron Man — in fact as a new twist on the old idiom (at least the slightly mutated one of the Seventies) it kind of works. Fall from reputation, compromised ethics, these are what the new Iron Man at that time was all about. And he got some new villains for that, but the old villains didn’t fit into it very well anymore — now they were just jackasses, really, and they did not get “located” by their conflict with Iron Man. Possibly they had not been well-located since the Seventies shift, but now they *really* didn’t fit. Then 1989 rolls around, somewhere either just before this or just after, I really can’t remember, but as soon as it does the last of the ideological representations fall away from our hero, and then what?
Well, lots of stuff, but then the Nineties hit, and now the only Iron Man anyone can remember is the arrogant guy with the drinking problem, whose rogue’s gallery sucks. I mean, The Melter? In the context of present-day technology that just doesn’t work, and maybe it didn’t work so hot even back then, but he was a villain whose power trumped Iron Man’s one unbeatable protection, so every time he showed up Tony Stark had to show some Yankee grit, even though he wasn’t actually fighting superpowered communists. Think of the Melter as a fifth columnist. But today his power’s just dumb, and Iron Man’s power has been boosted about a hundred times to keep current…pardon the pun. The Living Laser still works, power-wise, but he can’t be a “fifth columnist” now either, so who the hell is he, and what’s he for? He’s not even less trustworthy than Iron Man, anymore.
I’m gonna return to this, because I think something could be done about it…that has specifically to do with the “locating” function of the hero/villain fights, but until Iron Man’s given a workable idealism to stand for there’s really not much to locate…
Jeez, long comment or what?
Seeing the movie tomorrow night, damn it.
on October 22nd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
The problem is certainly a lack of workable idealism. I suppose the recent rounds of ‘futurist’ posturing stem from the idea of corrupted idealism, or a character who’s now firmly believes in the ends justifying the means. Which is all very well, don’t get me wrong, but by convention it’s a motivation for a supervillain, not a superhero.
Stark’s current brand of ‘idealism’ is, I’d argue, unworkable within the framework we’ve been given for the Marvel U. At some level, the Dissassemblies/Civil Wars/Invasions we’ve seen recently are an attempt to change the framework. My skepticism creeps in to the extent that I doubt the average Marvel fan really does crave actual change, and I think a too-radically altered status quo will upset the movie gravy train. Of course, my biggest criticism of all this isn’t that I think the new direction is bad because it’s created a new context for the Marvel U, it’s that I think it’s created a context for the Marvel U that’s just a takeoff of themes done to death in, amongst other things, the New Universe, Image, Wildstorm and the Ultimate MU.
On reflection, I’ve been too hard on Iron Man’s rogues gallery. It’s not a failure in the engineering, it’s a failure on the part of writers over the past 20 years who haven’t been able to recontextualise them as regards the contemporary world. It’s not the Titanium Man’s fault the iron curtain came down.
on October 23rd, 2008 at 6:57 am
Just about to watch it! My God, it’s been months!
Agreed about “Ultimates creep” — it’s ruining a lot of Marvel comic books.
Now, one of the peculiarities of Iron Man’s classic villains — maybe all of his villains — is that they’re all twisted reflections of Tony Stark. Alternate universe Tonys, if you will. They all come from the same root, which is the original “locating” function of the character — geopolitical stand-ins, industrialists gone broke, inventors gone unrecognized, anonymous men seeking recognition, etc. etc. etc. Jilted lovers and technophobes and victims of capitalistic excesses, who in may ways have the “right” of it all, because they’re just a hair’s breadth from being Tony himself…and but for the grace of god, he’d be a villain too. All of this stuff could still be revivified, even used to breathe life into the current fascist-Tony, even to concretize the alcoholism thing along with whatever state the “bad heart” is in now. Except it appears no one can see it, who’s got the reins in his hands. Which is a shame. Elementary lantern-hanging in the Seventies and Eighties mode: where is Tony’s idealism? Where ever was it, or what was it? By this time he’s experienced every last downfall, ethical and otherwise, that any of his rogues ever did — he’s played every part from Jack Frost to the Cobalt Man to the Mandarin. So where do you take him now? I think it’s all right there, and I’m sure Joe Q. would like me to believe that this is indeed the master plan, but I just don’t think it is, I don’t think they have enough old-fashioned craftsman to realize there’s any way to salvage the character…because I’m unconvinced any of them understand what the rupture is.
Now, maybe the filmmakers understand this. Guess I’m about to find out!
on October 23rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
“No, I’m just gonna rent it.”
“Why? I’ve got the disc right here!”
“Yeah, but…”
“Just give it back to me when you’re done!”
“Yeah, uh…okay, sure, why not?”
People should not pass on scratched discs. Everything from Pepper being chased to the end of the movie — frozen dead. Tried to get my way past it for an hour.
Sigh. Bright and early tomorrow, to the rental place. Really annoying. Shoulda seen it in the theatre anyway.
Of course given almost two hours of set-up, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happens. But how great would it be to see it acted out?
Pretty great. Still, first time I’ve had to pay seven bucks to watch fifteen minutes of a movie I already know the end to.
That said — AWESOME!!
Will return tomorrow. ‘Til then, beware of geeks bearing gifts, and all that.
on October 23rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
That’s what I call dedication.
on October 24th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Well, they got it right, naturally…people wouldn’t've liked it so well, if they hadn’t. Here we have Tony Stark as a guy who can figure out what everybody else already knows: what’s right and what’s wrong. And he chooses right. Though I’ve become disenchanted with the movie villain who is an Evil Businessman (they’re laughing up their sleeves at us with that, you know), the Stane stuff has been there for an awfully long time, and they use it correctly to cinematize the origin. Wow, watching the deleted scenes was interesting too — because none of those scenes were any good! Never saw a deleted scenes reel without thinking “wish they’d left that in” at least a couple of times, but in this case every one made me think “Jesus, good thing they left that out!” Weird.
Anyway, the Evil Businessman stuff…it works, they don’t waste your time with it by pretending you don’t already see it coming, and in the end making the new Titanium Man straightforwardly stand for Greed is a pretty dandy adaptation…something done in the comics just a couple of times, and never stuck to, but in the post-Soviet era you wonder why no one’s ever tried it on in a more committed way. Rogue post-’89 Soviet supervillain for hire. It goes with the terrorism thing, right enough.
And naturally this Tony never had a Greed problem at all…or did he, only he was too callow to know it? Nice drawing of lines, there. I really liked it. So much depends on having a hero the viewer can actually do some identifying with, and they pretty much nailed that right to the floor, really nice stuff. Also showed that what the comic-book Iron Man is crying out for is simplification…just get it down to ethics a kid can understand, and characterization a grown-up can tolerate, and you’re totally set, you’ve got no worries. The villains basically write themselves around that.
So maybe you were right about Iron Man needing to locate and contextualize himself after all…on the other hand, that’s the whole reason superheroes even have supervillains, right? Contextualizing the villain is always the same as contextualizing the hero.
Gonna go watch it again, now! I made a huge mistake not seeing this in the theatre, it’s so frickin’ widescreen it blows my mind. My TV just isn’t big enough to do it justice.
on October 26th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
In the comics, I think they’ve tried to make Iron Man more complex, but used a somewhat immature approach to the politics of the thing. But then, see my earlier comments on political discourse for what I think of that. Iron Man doesn’t need to be made more immature (a mistake that I think is sometimes made in “Marvel Adventure” style comics), and Tony Stark in the film certainly isn’t without complexity, or as much complexity as you can fit into a summer blockbuster (which is a hell of a lot more than you get in the actioners of the 80s and 90s- we would do well to remember that when criticising Hollywood output of the 21st Century so far).
“Contextualizing the villain is always the same as contextualizing the hero.” That’s the theory I’m working on. At least, that’s what I think superheroes are for, and I think that’s what recent comics haven’t been doing correctly. It bugs me that on one hand we have some very, very talented writers in the business, but on the other I find so much of the work unfulfilling. I’ve been working on the assumption for some time that in the arts as a whole we’ve drifted towards a status-quo where characters are analysed only on the terms of the internal atributes of the characters themselves. It’s a very self-centred, inward-looking approach, viewing the Individual as the Ultimate. It may work well in other media, depending on what you’re trying to say, but it kills superhero comics, because heroes should be, to one degree or another, altruistic. How many times have we seen the trope of the self-absorbed hero in the past 20 years? Too fucking many times. Maybe this kind of take on Stark has obscured my own reading of the character. He’s certainly the one who’s suffered the most from this approach.
But yeah, the film fucking rocked.
on October 26th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Sorry, my first paragraph there should have finished with “but the central themes of the title should certainly be simplified.”
on October 26th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
You know, as the admin for this site, you’d think I’d know I could’ve just amended my earlier comment rather than written another one. Sigh.
on December 16th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
A thought occurs…
So, in the movie, Jeff Bridges is pretty much the Titanium Man, and more or less stands for Greed, right? A good match for Iron Man: Greed isn’t as elegant, but it’s bigger and it’s meaner and it’s nastier, and it’s made to kill.
Okay, fine. Love it. Now let’s do some other Iron man villains. Think of them almost as Bond villains, only with a hierarchical structure. First we have Greed bossing the Ten Rings.
But, what if that wasn’t the whole of the Ten Rings? What if it was just one of the Ten Rings? Which is the Mandarin, naturally, everybody knows that…so shouldn’t the Mandarin be a little more awesome than a bunch of terrorists bossed by Greed?
How about: Stane wasn’t the top of this ladder, he worked for someone else.
Consider the Crimson Dynamo: in the comics, his gig is energy, the electrical kind that Tony’s always running out of. But this Tony doesn’t have that problem. So what’s left for the Dynamo to do? Well, how about, he was higher up in the Ten Rings hierarchy than Stane was, and so pure Greed wasn’t his thing. Stane was interested in weapons technology. How about the Dynamo is interested in natural resources, and his thing is Ideology? Stane kept wars going all over the world, to make it possible for Nevsky to do his thing. Stane kept nations fighting, so Nevsky could manipulate continents. Why is Africa poor? Because of Nevsky: he’s got a stranglehold on all their natural resources. Heck, he could even be at the top (or just one step down from it, with a super-secret real Mandarin above him in the shadows), and Iron Man has to fight his way up to him. Stane says the Iron Man technology will “help put the world back on the right track”, but why does he say it, and what does he mean by it? Probably, in this view, nothing: it’s just Ten Rings cant he learned to say so much that he came to almost-not-quite believe in it. But Nevsky believes, because he made that particular kind of cant up.
I’d actually almost be willing to bet that the second Iron man movie will have Tony discover that the Ten Rings was a lot bigger than he thought — anyway that’s how I’d do it. Pure James Bond. You’d have to jump over it, to avoid falling into it.
on December 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Damn good suggestion there, a great twist on the inevitable escalating threat of subsequent films. Only problem is, this is Hollywood we’re talking about. Film Two will have two baddies, three in the next, and Iron Man 4: Die, Iron Man, Die! will have the final four reduced to generic single-power villains, with the production quality of a Power Rangers episode.
I seemed to have supped from the Chalice of Cynicism this morning.
on December 17th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
You know who wouldn’t've made that mistake? Lancelot…
Two, then three, then four, eh? Okay, let’s try it!
Second movie: “Crimson Dynamo” is the big bad guy, so he’ll need a little bad guy to try and kill Iron Man for him. I nominate The Melter. Well, he’d be a cross between the Melter and the Living Laser — anyway Movie-Tony’s probably not prepared for someone to dump lightning-bolt level blasts of heat or electricity on his armour. The key’s the power, of course: if Tony’s the only one with an ARC reactor, where’s all the power coming from? AHA! Um, probably satellites, or something. So it’s Melter/Laser/Devastator/Super-Skrull, I guess…
Hmm, that’s not too good, actually…
Will have to try again!
on December 17th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Hah, absolutely. But then the Chalice of Cynicism is just Christian mythology grafted onto the Cauldron of Everlasting Grouch…
Should Crimson Dynamo be paired up with Titanium Man? Probably not, you don’t want to blow your entire armoured wad in the first sequel, but then the toy line’s already used him so the Marketing Machine is Aware.
Movie Crimson Dynamo: His power source is, essentially, the comic book version of the Arc reactor. Thinks Stark stole the technology from him? Hackneyed, but then the first Dynamo wasn’t completely a villain, was he? Melter gets the energy from the Dynamo, who’s thing is he’s got an overclocked Arc reactor he can’t turn off? That would work.
Of course, the Dynamo was duped by a sinister mastermind, up on the next rung of the Ring: Spymaster, the real thief of Dynamo’s work, who combines it with info stolen by the Ghost from Stark Industries to provide his boss with the blueprints for Titanium Man. So that’s the three for IM3.
Who does that leave us with for the finale?
on December 18th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Hmm, okay…think like a movie guy here…
All right, Alex Nevsky, weird ideological continent-raper, isn’t green like Tony Stark. He doesn’t have the ARC reactor, isn’t even interested in it. He’s onto something else. So what Tony makes in a cave, he can match, but to do it he’ll brown out half of North America: he doesn’t care.
Okay, okay…hold on…
Titanium Man was Obadiah Stane, one of Nevsky’s disciples…Mr. Greed…
Spymaster should be his operations chief…just as the name says, he’s infiltrated everywhere, hmm could blend his power with the Controller’s…every government has a Spymaster agent in it…
The Melter/Laser’s a hired thug, they go through a few of these guys a year, their bodies can’t stand up to the power they’re channelling maybe…
AH! Got it: the big secret. The real Mandarin was an alien, that Nevsky encountered years ago, and before he “died” he gave Nevsky a little Grant Morrison moment that fucked up his brain and turned him all weird. The Mandarin is preserved in one of those tubes, deep within the final lair…Nevsky goes to commune with him sometimes, we think he’s the bih Kahuna but he’s dead. Or…is he?
Nevsky’s preparing the way for an alien takeover that will never come? No? Too sci-fi? But from “The Mandarin” he’s developed tremendous resource-expoitive technologies.
So…the third movie, Tony finally fights his way to Nevsky, through Spymaster…then to “The Mandarin” but it all goes a little Number Six at the end there.
So…second movie is the Melter/Laser, bossed by Spymaster.
Let’s just do a thing with Spymaster that he has many different bodies, all mentally connected…straight-up steal Madrox from the X-Men for it.
Oh I don’t know, I’m not sure it works…
on December 18th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I can see the shape of it, certainly. Spymaster concept’s a good one, a really good one with the controller-zombies added in. But probably let down by the weakness of the character, maybe not quite strong enough for a big bad guy.
You need someone for Iron Man to pound the shit out of, I suppose, and he’s going to paste Spymaster in a couple of seconds. The problem is, how to make a big brutal Final Baddie that doesn’t just look like a retread of the end of the first film.
Alien dragons + Mandarin backstory = Fin Fang Foom.
Would never, ever work in the context of the so-called Cinematic Marvel U, but dear god, we can dream, can’t we?