I Am Iron Man…and So Are You!

With all the excitement surrounding the release of Iron Man 3 today, it’s funny to think that there was a time when nobody really gave much of a damn about Iron Man or Tony Stark. Iron Man has been a mainstay of the Marvel Universe for a long time and he certainly had ardent fans from his introduction in 1963. But for me, he was always a second string character to some degree. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I knew of him, of course, and I wanted to like him as much as I liked Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four. But there was something about Tony Stark and Iron Man that just didn’t do it for me. There was a certain inaccessibility there. Maybe it was that he wasn’t biologically powered and that relied on machinery for abilities or maybe it was the fact that he was too much of a grown-up for me to identify with. Of all the Mego action figures I pined for at the time, he was the one I wanted the least. I wasn’t alone in my lukewarm fondness for Iron Man either; I’m pretty sure Iron Man comic sales numbers from those years weren’t particularly strong compared to Marvel’s other more popular books. For whatever reason, Iron Man, while certainly an icon in his own right, wasn’t top dog of the Marvel U.

It’s been written that Stan Lee wanted to create the “quintessential capitalist” when he conceived of the businessman Tony Stark and his super alter ego Iron Man. In 1963, with cultural attitudes toward big business in flux, one can imagine that the idea of a powerful billionaire as hero wasn’t exactly something people were clamoring for. Add the facts of Tony’s connection to the military industrial complex and a growing anti-war movement at the time and you had the perfect recipe for a character people seemed destined to reject. Stark was also presented as an alcoholic, so that classic Marvel human frailty formula helped to humanize what was an otherwise inhuman sort of character for most people. Despite the winds of change working against hum, Iron Man did in fact attract an audience at the time. His popularity would ebb and flow over the years, however, and until recently, there was a sense that Iron Man could never reach the heights of a character like Spider-Man or the X-Men. But something happened along the way to elevate Iron Man from mildly popular character to his current status as a Marvel A-lister.

There’s little doubt that lot of Iron Man’s recent popularity has something to do with Hollywood marketing wizardry and those clever minds that make it their life’s work to sell the American public things they didn’t even think they wanted. If you can make a dude in a metal suit look cool enough, the world will beat a path to your door. You have to give credit where credit is due when you look at how the Iron Man movies and associated Avengers projects have managed to play out. It’s quite an achievement. But I think there’s more to this new reverence of Iron Man than simply deft re-branding and marketing savvy. Ultimately, I think it has more to do with a cultural shift, a change in the way we as consumers of popular culture perceive a character like Iron Man. Simply put, Iron Man hasn’t changed. We have.

For all intents and purpose, Iron Man is still a billionaire playboy with a penchant for booze and celebrity. He’s still driven by fame and fortune, even if his technologically supported heart drives him to do noble deeds. But while certain less traditional aspects of Tony Stark’s personality were essentially rejected in the past, shifts in our culture now seem to have resulted in making him infinitely more accessible than ever before. I certainly like him more than ever before. Something’s changed. Where in past decades the idea of a narcissistic corporate billionaire was perhaps hard to identify with or even off-putting, we now live in a world where billionaires are perceived as almost commonplace. We live in a world where there’s a perception that anyone can get rich if they have the right idea and the ingenuity to bring their idea to fruition. Got a start-up idea? You too can be a gazillionaire overnight.

And as for celebrity, we live in a world where anyone with an iPhone and a computer can be an instant web celeb. Film yourself in a compromising position and you’re too can have a reality show. I’m not complaining about that, just pointing out that in this brave new world various brands of narcissism are in fact rewarded. Comics are a reflection of the culture at any given time, so it’s not surprising that a culture that has at its core a sense of egocentricity when it comes to money and fame is much more likely to seek out like-minded heroes. As a result, what were once seen as untouchable traits in Iron Man’s make-up are now traits that aren’t so hard to grasp or identify with. Iron Man is perhaps popular because he is, for better or worse, who we think we are…or who we’d like to be.

Another element that makes Iron Man like us is the fact that he’s inextricably tethered to technology and would basically die without it. Technology keeps him alive and allows him to function as more than just a man in a metal suit. The screen of information he sees before his eyes while helmeted might as well be an iPhone, truth be told. It’s his window to a world he’d otherwise be unable to see. All the information to solve his problems is there right before his eyes and he is reliant on technology for his very existence as a superhero. Judging by the number of people I see with their heads down looking at their phones each and every day, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that this technological tether is pretty universal stuff. Again, we see ourselves in our heroes.This is all conjecture of course. Maybe it’s all subliminal marketing and advertising that makes us love ol’ Shellhead more than ever before. Or maybe it’s just been Iron Man’s time to shine. Who knows? But if comics and comic book characters have the capacity to be a mirror of ourselves, our culture and our time in history, it seems worth it to stop every once in a while and look into that mirror. You just might find that, for better or worse, there’s a little bit of Iron Man in all of us these days.

Gabe Roth lives in Los Angeles and spends much of his time “keepin’ it real.” He’s @gaberoth on Twitter.