{"id":1291,"date":"2004-12-05T07:41:34","date_gmt":"2004-12-05T07:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2004\/12\/05\/stark_industrio\/"},"modified":"2024-11-29T16:36:46","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T21:36:46","slug":"stark_industrio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2004\/12\/05\/stark_industrio\/","title":{"rendered":"Stark, Industrious"},"content":{"rendered":"

While we\u2019re on the subject of Iron Man<\/a> (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<\/a>, who caught Ellis\u2019 riff on O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Emerging Technology conference in the first issue of the new Iron Man.<\/i> Mr. Jones uses this as a launching point to talk about his own disappointment about the lack of truly new ideas at the conference \u2014 Stark\u2019s gripe in the comic itself \u2014 but this idea is the one that grabbed me the most when I read this issue.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/center>Since I haven\u2019t really followed Iron Man before, I\u2019m 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 \u2014 Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Henry Pym (sorry, I know there\u2019s a pun in that one) \u2014 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\u2019re 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

It seems, though, that it\u2019s going to tell the story of Stark\u2019s conflict about helping the military. I really would love<\/i> 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\u2019s been a longtime staple of the Fantastic Four for Reed to periodically rebuild the Four\u2019s fortune with a slew of patents on ideas he\u2019s had lying around, but we rarely see what they\u2019re for. Clearly the Marvel universe\u2019s Prada isn\u2019t making clothes out of unstable molecules, so where do all these patents go, and what do they change about everyday life? How would Richards\u2019 or Stark\u2019s 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\u2019t the only place where good ideas can go horribly, horribly wrong when you look at the big picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While we\u2019re 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\u2019 riff on O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Emerging Technology conference in the first issue of … Continue reading “Stark, Industrious”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracomics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76925,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions\/76925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}