Iron Man in the 1990s
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I find that people also view the Iron Man comics of the 1990s with the same brush stroke they use when describing comics from this decade. The prevailing argument is that it’s bad because all 90s comics were terrible. However, most commentators of this era don’t seem to look past the surface layer. They mostly focus on the “Teen Tony” saga and Heroes Reborn. This accounts for about 2 years worth of comics. Anyone who dismisses this decade of Iron Man as bad based on 26 issues is doing themselves a huge disservice because there are so many great stories that came out of this decade. Not all of them were winners, but they were pretty good for the era in which they came. They took the character to new heights, modernized him for the Internet age and laid the groundwork for the following decade where the character skyrocketed in popularity thanks to the first film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
However, Tony Stark needed to go through some serious growing pains before he could get there. This decade saw Marvel attempt to reinvent the character from the ground up twice in a two year span. This proved that the problem with Iron Man wasn’t reinventing his past, it was propelling him forward. I’m getting ahead of myself, lets start from the top.
The start of the decade was one of fits and starts. Bob Layton are supposed to come on as the regular writer alongside John Romita, Jr. However, this happened around the time that — according to interviews — became disillusioned working for Marvel Comics and abruptly left. This led to a mish-mash of fill in issues as Marvel scrambled to find a new regular writer. This came in the form of John Byrne. At the time time Byrne had made his return to Marvel after a less than rosy tenure at DC and he took on a lot of writing projects, particularly in the Avengers line of books.
His first major arc was Armor Wars II, a nine issue epic that ran from Iron Man #258 through 266. It is a spiritual successor to David Michelini and Bob Layton’s original Armor Wars. However as far as subject matter goes it only shares a similarity in name. There really isn’t an amor war per-se. It’s mostly about Tony Stark’s body being invaded by business rivals thanks to the bio-chip that was implanted in him at the end of the last decade when he was crippled by a bullet. It is a plot device that is somewhat flimsy as in the plot is kind of half baked. The storyline also mostly jumped between the “Armor War” and scenes of the Mandarin waking up Fin Fang Foom, which sets up Byrne’s second story arc on the title. What makes up for the lackluster story is the artwork by John Romita, Jr. It is Romita at his best. Huge action pieces that fill the entire page. It feels to me like Romita was channeling some Manga energy with this story arc. While this does pad out the story to 9 issues (it could have easily been told in half that amount) the huge two page spreads depicting the battle between Iron Man and the Living Laser are fantastic.
What I don’t like about the arc is that it is setting up Tony Stark to have a physical weakness again. Long time readers of the book will remember that the original Iron Man stories from the 60s and 70s focused on Tony Stark having an injured heart and this weakness plagued him for years until it was finally done away with. I’m all for giving a hero a weakness, but the idea of saddling Tony Stark with a health problem by this point is regressive. This is the recurring problem that plagues Iron Man, particularly in this decade. The need to go backward and recycle old plot devices. I always believe that this is the wrong direction for Stark as a character. He is a futurist who is constantly propelling society forward for the better, yet writers keep trying to push him backward and retreading old limitations and vices. Some times they work, but more often than not they don’t.
At any rate, issues #267-268 saw the late Paul Ryan take over pencil work on the book. These two issues stand out because it was the first time writers went back and re-told Iron Man’s origins and updated it. Prior to this, all past Iron Man origin stories were rooted in the Vietnam War and to continue this trend it would date the character. John Byrne takes a more measured approach when it comes to updating the story. Rather than reworking the tale in a modern context (such as how Warren Ellis did in the 2000s) Byrne told basically the same story except he removed all reference to the Vietnam War. He also tried to interweave the Mandarin into the tale as being the behind-the-scenes mastermind of the whole thing. Which isn’t such a bad idea really, except that most other writers — when tackling the same subject again — would ignore. However, when it comes to later retellings, this one doesn’t really impact much of them, other than Ellis’ version which replaced Southeast Asia with the Middle East to make it more topical. Regardless, when it comes to revisiting Iron Man’s origins, I think the best way to do it doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel. Tell the same story, keep the geographic the same, just update the window dressing. Tony Stark doesn’t need the Vietnam War to be in Southeast Asia. The real world conflict is what’s unimportant. Give that a new coat of paint every once and a while and you don’t have to break your neck reinventing the wheel.
Moving on… The next big story arc by Byrne is the Dragon Seed Saga, which builds momentum from issue #270 until issue #275. In this tale, Tony Stark — his central nervous system a mess — gets into a deal with the Chinese government to defend the nation from the Mandarin in exchange for access to their specialist who might be able to cure his health condition. This story goes off on a weird tangent where the Mandarin revives Fin Fang Foom. It delves into the origins of the Mandarin’s rings which were originally the power source for an alien ship he discovered decades earlier. The aliens are the Makluans, who are reptilian in nature and helped birth the myth of dragons in China. Its later revealed that the Makluans who survived the crash hide among humanity in human form and were working over the centuries to take over the Earth, and they are also magic somehow? It’s a wild story that makes no sense. Also, while Paul Ryan is a decent artist all around, the epic battle between Iron Man and Fing Fang Foom seems more suited for John Romita, Jr. It leaves me wondering why Romita left the book as I think — visually speaking — he would have done a better job.
Byrne’s final issues (#276-277) is a tame pot-boiler about the Cold War that involves the Black Widow. Nothing earth shattering here.
Taking over from Byrne in the following issue was Len Kaminski. Kaminski was making a name for himself working on stories involving Marvel’s supernatural characters such as Werewolf by Night in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents and would work on Morbius the Living Vampire, Doctor Strange, and Hellstorm in tandem with his time on Iron Man.
I think what Kaminski does well is that focuses just as much time on Tony Stark’s exploits as Iron Man as much as he does Tony Stark’s business. He took what worked during David Michelini’s run and elevated it to the next level. The other thing I can give Kaminski credit for is also progressing Iron Man with the times. His stint on the book was during the time the Internet was in its infancy and he wrote a lot of his stories where the technology — while fantastical and more advanced than the real world — were also grounded in reality. It was written by someone who understood technology in the era these books came out but wove it into the stories fluidly. Most writers would either brow beat readers with some “How do you do, fellow kids?” tech speak or come up with something so outlandish that it ages poorly. Reading Kaminski’s Iron Man run you don’t find yourself laughing at dated concepts (like Iron Man’s transistors of the 60s and 70s). Either by accident or design, Len managed to grab terminology that hasn’t really dated that poorly.
I can usually measure the quality of a story by how many paragraphs I’m plunking into my “Topical References” section of the index. Most stories that have withstood the test of time have little if any dated elements. Kaminski is one of those talented writers who managed to pull off, which is no easy feat for a characters like Iron Man who, previously, was mired with techno-jargon becoming old and dated over time.
Kaminski came on in the middle of the Operation: Galactic Storm story arc, a 14 part epic that spanned across all the Avengers books at the time. For his part, his story mostly focused on how Iron Man was pulling rank and this would develop into a schism that would put a divide between the Avengers.
Starting with issue #280, Kaminski was joined by regular artist Kevin Hopgood who would work on the book almost consistently through issue #306. Hopgood got his start doing comics in the UK until he was brought over to do work for Marvel. His work is fine, although I’m not really much of a fan. It’s not awful to look at.
Their first order of business was to work on scrapping Tony Stark’s janky nervous system so that they could focus on stories where Tony wasn’t harping on about his disability every three seconds. With time running out, Tony would create the War Machine armor as he was growing fed up with corporate interference from his enemies as these were pushing him closer to the brink of death with every episode. The War Machine armor would famously get passed down to Jim Rhodes and the two would become synonymous with one another. During this time, Tony also regains Stane International — his former company — from his old foe Justin Hammer. However, regaining the family business will turn out to be a poison pill for him later.
Issue #284 cheaply teases the idea that Tony Stark is dead, when in reality the character is put in cryogenic suspension while a team of scientists try and find a cure for him. Tony leaves everyone to believe he had died, leaving Jim Rhodes in charge of Stark Enterprises. The decisions he will make during his tenure would have reverberations that would affect Tony Stark from here on out.
This is where Kaminski takes another wonderful opportunity to flesh out Tony Stark’s back story. He is the first person to take a real good look back at Tony’s past. We learn that his father, Howard Stark, was also an alcoholic and that Tony’s own drinking problems stem from generational trauma. We also figure out exactly what happened to his parents (they died in a car accident) finally explaining how he took control of the family business. It’s mind boggling that it took 30 years before someone got around to filling in those gaps in Tony’s history. A lot of Tony’s past and his relationship with his parents would be regularly revisited and changed in the following decades (some of it good, even) however, this is the first place where you really saw someone explore that period of time.
When Tony Stark returns he’s cured of his illness, but now needs to go through rehabilitation in order to get mobile again. Starting in issue #290, his Iron Man persona isn’t a suit of armor, but a robot that he pilots remotely. When Jim Rhodes learns that Tony lied about his demise, he rage quits Stark Enterprises to hack it on his own. This would lead to Rhodes becoming a regular member of the West Coast Avengers as well as getting spun off into his own series.
The next ten issues shows Tony’s struggles to become mobile again while also dealing with the fall out from the purchase of Stane International and Jim’s tenure as CEO. None of which are good. Worse, Tony’s former PR consultant, Marcy Pearson, hires a hacker to steal all of Stark Enterprises’ files and release them to the media, uncovering questionable — if not illegal — business deals that were conducted by Stane. This all masterminded by VORTEX a rogue artificial intelligence that sought to ruin Tony Stark.
Kaminiski’s run ends with an epic crossover that serves as a “final” showdown between Iron Man and the Mandarin. In that story, the Mandarin obtains a mystical artifact called the Heart of Darkness and attempts to use it to regress the world into a feudal society. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it.
From there, Kaminski told a few more short tales and wasn’t really focusing on any major storylines. My guess is that since Iron Man and the various other Avengers related titles were tanking in the sales, editorial was moving to shake things up by changing the creative team. Which is a shame because Kaminski’s work is some of the best writing on the book of the decade. If there is a worthy coda to his run on Iron Man it’s issue #313. After VORTEX took over Tony’s body it drank an entire bottle of scotch leaving Tony to deal with the fall out when people thought he was drinking again. Len takes Tony’s struggle to the next level by actually having Tony attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to reconcile all the things he has learned about his addiction over the length of Kaminski’s run. While I am not a huge fan of AA for a number of reasons, you can’t argue that it does work with some people. I think it’s kind of odd that Tony — an athiest — would seek a treatment program whose whole bedrook is “giving in to a higher power” would go to AA, but whatever, using it as a backdrop for the story Kaminski tells is fine.
Starting with issue #319 is where we start getting into the worst Iron Man stories ever written. When people pan the 90s, this is the period they are talking about and these stories often overshadow the better stories of the decade. It’s not without good reason. Beginning in that issue writer Terry Kavanaugh takes over as a writer and I can unequivocally state that he is one of the worst writers Marvel ever employed. His whole deal was to try and revitalize both the Avengers and Iron Man, two titles that were not doing so hot in the post 90’s comic book bubble period. His approach was to do something wildly different to shake things up. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, here it was executed poorly.
Iron Man was one of the many Avengers adjacent books that were involved in Kavanaugh’s The Crossing story arc. This story reveals that Tony Stark had apparently been a sleeper agent for Kang the Conqueror since the early days of the Avengers. All of this part of some nebulous master plan to take over all of time or something. The point is, the story made no since and any attempt to explain why and how Tony had been helping Kang over the years is never explained. All of these ideas, if given to a competent writer, could have worked butall of these twists and turns are treated as after thoughts that aren’t given the proper time to breath and be fleshed out. Worse, the Avengers — for some asinine reason — decide that the only fathomable way to defeat Tony Stark is to go into the past and convince his teenaged self to come to the future and help them stop the now evil adult Tony Stark. This ultimately ends with adult Stark getting killed and his teenaged self taking his place.
Earlier when I said the worst Iron Man stories are ones that try to roll backward and try to draw from the past instead of pushing the character forward is on full display here. Here it is done almost literally by replacing adult Tony with his teenaged self, then saddling the younger Tony with a damaged heart just like the Iron Man of the 1960s. The whole point of this exercise was to try and make Tony Stark more relatable to younger readers and here they were trying to make the character more like how he was in 1963, only younger.
Another problem with this run was inconsistent art across the entire run. From issue #320 through 332 there were something like 16 different artists. Some issues having two or three different pencilers. Some of these artists are great, like Jim Cheung and (one of my favorites) Jim Calafiore, the problem was that the art styles between these artists were wildly different. They didn’t mesh well together and this often ruins the emersion.
At any rate, The Crossing and the teen Tony saga was so poorly received a few years later writer Kurt Busiek would go in an recontextualize the story and sweep it under the rug. Writing it all off as a deception created by Immortus as part of a much grander scheme. Recognizing how utterly stupid this whole period was and sweeping it into the dust bin of continuity where it belongs. This was a good move on Busiek’s part, but it would have its later complications which I will address elsewhere.
Needless to say, the teen Tony saga only lasted seven issues and it was very, very poorly received. Nobody liked it. It was about this time that Marvel was deciding to try and revive their characters again with Heroes Reborn. As you must know by now, Marvel farmed out four of their flagging titles to independent studios. They included Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Avengers. FF and Iron Man, were handled by Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios while the others were handled by Rob Liefeld. These books generated a lot of hype, but after a strong start interest in this reimagined version of Marvel’s classic characters quickly died down. There was buyers remorse as long time readers realized how important these characters were to the Marvel Universe proper and eventually Heroes Reborn went from being the new normal to a year long failed experiment that was quickly undone. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, lets talk about the second volume of Iron Man.
These 13 issues certainly weren’t the worse of the Heroes Reborn run, that distinction goes to the books that Liefeld was doing. Still Iron Man wasn’t without its issues. Primary artist on the book was Whilce Portacio. He’s a capable artist but in my opinion I find his artwork very ugly. Luckily, other artists came in in later issues but the quality of the work varied. I think the biggest problem was the Iron Man armor that was designed by Jim Lee for this run. While it looked cool on the cover of issue #1, other artists just couldn’t capture that Jim Lee flare and the armor in the story always looked ugly.
The other issue was that there was just too much going on for a storyline that only lasted a year. I think a lot of this had to do with the change of writers mid-stream and the decision to cut Heroes Reborn. Writers Scott Lobdell and (later) Jeph Loeb can do some great stuff if given the time to craft a competent story, but there was just too much going on all at once that there isn’t a whole lot of characterization going on. All of the characters feel very one dimensional and not very fleshed out. Like many of the Heroes Reborn books it also feels like a lot of the stories relied on the short hand of pre-established continuity. Which is a weird flex if you’re trying to reinvent something for a new audience.
So all at once, we have a new adult Tony Stark, we have him inventing a new armor, his backstory gets tied into the Hulk’s origins. Then in rapid succession you have plots involving Hydra and the Mandarin thrown in as well. Each issue tries to cram in new reimagined versions of classic Iron Man foils but not a whole lot is done giving them interesting new backstories.
It was also a very weird choice to try and tie Iron Man to the Hulk. I’m not saying that it is a bad idea necessarily, but after an initial clash with the Hulk in the first few issues, the two plot lines kind of diverge and go in separate directions. The results in them rushing Heroes Reborn versions of She-Hulk and Doc Samson who don’t really go anywhere because by issue #12 everything was coming to an end and the old status quo was being returned.
When Tony was brought back to the Marvel Universe proper it was like a reset button was hit. A new volume of Iron Man was put out with Kurt Busiek as writer and Sean Chen penciling. It was a much needed breath of fresh air to the beleaguered title. A competent writer, and phenomenal artist, the sky was the limit. Busiek recognized what actually works with Iron Man. Bringing back the status quo of an adult Tony Stark, he pushed the character in new directions that were with the times. Kurt leaned into the new internet age and had Iron Man move ahead with the times. He understood that Tony Stark is an innovator and inventive genius and this was reflected in Tony starting a brand new consulting agency. The stories were new and exciting. Gone were all the weaknesses of old: health problems, low batteries, and all the other stupid redundant shit that previous writers could never seem to let go of.
Iron Man’s armor became less a bulky suit of metal, but more of a technological marvel that finally was looking futuristic. They leaned into the fact that it has a sophisticated operating system and that it could do more than just stop bullets and fire lasers. Busiek also made the armor an extension of Tony Stark himself, an ever present part of his life, without falling back into the old trap of making Tony medically dependent of the armor to survive. Not having his armor was an achilleas heel, and this is more apparent in issue #8 when Tony gets the shit beat out of him by assassins.
However, Busiek wasn’t totally immune to being regressive with the character. For example, in the 1998 annual, the plot involved Tony being able to erase knowledge of his double identity from everyone who knew it. This was such a common trope by this time it just strikes me as lazy writing during a time where having a secret identity was already becoming kind of pointless. Thankfully, in the following decade later writers would do away with Tony’s secret identity once and for all.
