Tony Stark's Arrogance: A Recent Invention
As of now, I have revisited all the Iron Man comics that were published between his debut in 1963 and 2014 (not to mention a bunch of his appearances in the Avengers line and elsewhere) -- and based on what
I've read, Tony Stark wasn't depicted as arrogant until the late 90's (and back then, it was still only an occasional flaw).
I'm sure that must sound weird to the normies out there - or to the young'uns who've only read his 21st century iteration - but I swear to God, just before the century turned, there was a distinct shift in how Tony was written.
Some themes remained constant of course. Tony
has been a hard partier from the word go. And yes, he's
always displayed what I've described in previous posts as a "need for mastery" -- i.e., a need to have control over his own fate. But unless I've missed something, the Tony Stark of the first era (i.e., the era spanning
Tales of Suspense and the first volume of his solo series)
isn't prideful -- like, at all.
As a founding Avenger, Tony integrates himself into a team with no trouble; indeed, it's
Hawkeye, not Tony, who's most likely to get on Cap's case in this period. Meanwhile, in his own line, Tony shows a repeated tendency towards self-criticism and self-punishment (which, granted, does persist in the better modern books despite the aforementioned shift). When he realizes early on that Pepper has a crush on him, he doesn't pursue her as if she were his birthright; on the contrary, he does everything he can to push Pepper into
Happy's arms because "no woman should bear the burden of having a partner who could die at any second." (Yes, that's his exact line of reasoning.) When he gets into a fight with Cap over a misunderstanding, he berates himself at the end of the issue for being an idiot and not realizing he was being played. When he tries to quit being Iron Man and people get hurt, he declares himself a heel and immediately gets to work setting things right. I honestly could go on and on listing examples of first-era-Tony being
humble, ethical, and sacrificing.
So what happened? I think Tony's later writers may have fundamentally misunderstood Stan Lee's stated reasoning for inventing the character. Lee once said that he wanted to challenge himself by making a hero out of someone people were likely to hate: a rich, attractive military contractor with the entire world at his feet. In other words,
Lee wanted to break a stereotype. This is just my theory, but I think more recent writers transmogrified that into "people had
reason to hate Tony before he became Iron Man" -- even though there's zero evidence in early canon that Tony was behaving in a way that supports that notion. And no, the simple act of making weapons is
not that evidence. War is inevitable (sorry, utopians); thus, there's nothing
inherently wrong with equipping our military with the tools it needs to fight those wars effectively. On the whole, the support for the modern interpretation of Tony Stark, as far as I can tell,
all comes from later retcons -- not from Lee's original creation.
No, yon writers of
Axis and
Superior Iron Man: 616 Tony is
not a reformed sociopath just one nudge away from pure depravity. At least, that's not how he was
originally written. That's you guys deciding that Tony could not have agreed to pick up military contracts unless he was simply a bad person. That's you guys dumbing this shit down to satisfy your own knee-jerk sensibilities.
(Can you tell I've changed my mind and decided to cover everything -- including the absolute trash? Yeah: I've succumbed to the temptation to complain.)
