Day: December 5, 2004

While we’re on the subject of Iron Man (who I never really loved that much before, either, until Warren Ellis started to make him interesting and Adi Granov made Tony Stark look pretty hot), I stumbled across this post from Blackbeltjones, who caught Ellis’ riff on O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference in the first issue of the new Iron Man. Mr. Jones uses this as a launching point to talk about his own disappointment about the lack of truly new ideas at the conference — Stark’s gripe in the comic itself — but this idea is the one that grabbed me the most when I read this issue.

Since I haven’t really followed Iron Man before, I’m not sure whether or not this conundrum has shown up before. I always liked the idea, though, that the Marvel universe acknowledges that it has a few giants of scientific invention — Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Henry Pym (sorry, I know there’s a pun in that one) — and it looks like this new Iron Man series is going to grapple with how one of them actually uses that genius. Is it for the good of the military, or himself, or society? And of for society, what kind of benefit do they get? This Iron Man series starts out updating his origin wih a criticism of how Stark built his fortune on munitions with incredible destructive power. Stark insists that all those inventions had other applications, as well, and that he used the money to do ther things, but I think we’re going to see more of the gritty reality of all that. Poor, boozy Stark has always been portrayed as a troubled hero, but I don’t know how much his overall ethics have ever been thrown into the mix before. I may not know Iron man that well, but so far I really dig where this is going.

It seems, though, that it’s going to tell the story of Stark’s conflict about helping the military. I really would love to see a story somewhere that gets into what would happen if Stark or Reed Richards started tossing off inventions that led to great heaping mounds of fun, useless consumer crap. It’s been a longtime staple of the Fantastic Four for Reed to periodically rebuild the Four’s fortune with a slew of patents on ideas he’s had lying around, but we rarely see what they’re for. Clearly the Marvel universe’s Prada isn’t making clothes out of unstable molecules, so where do all these patents go, and what do they change about everyday life? How would Richards’ or Stark’s altruism handle a world full of people knocking over convenience stores to buy futuristic cellphones or sneakers based on their ideas? The military, after all, isn’t the only place where good ideas can go horribly, horribly wrong when you look at the big picture.