Iron Man

After the MCU why have people stopped talking about Stark? Did Marvel fail to capitalize on his movie popularity.

people talking about comics

>Did Marvel fail to capitalize on his movie popularity.

Yes and no. Marvel should've pumped out video games and TV shows to boost his profile even more. Comic wise it was always a bridge too far. Despite the success of the MCU, Marvel comics sales haven't increased.

Iron Man sucks.

The problem with Iron Man is, he's always been more interesting as an Avenger than a solo hero.

Iron Man has always been a lowb/high c list character.

Wrong.

Despite the success of the MCU, Marvel comics sales haven't increased.

It's a combination of comics not being a high priority plus bad mismanagement

MCU fans don't read comics.

Iron Man is a tricky character to write for. He's too strong for street level foes, his supporting cast is non existent, plus his company isn't allowed to make any great strides for humanity so.. He's kinda stuck.

Marvel ruined comic Iron Man's reputation with things like the crossing, civil war, and superior.

Tony was the face of Marvel in virtually everything except comics. So when he died in Endgame, Marvel and Disney pushed other characters. But Tony's still alive in the comics so he's back to being an "important" character that doesn't really sell all that well.

Didn't he marry Hellcat? I think that's cool. I don't read comics though.

Because his comics are ass. The MCU had one job, and that was to modernized Stark's rogues, and they failed.

He married Emma Frost and that marriage was fake. The comic sucked, it was just a glorified X-Men book.

MCU demographic isn't really the comics demographic.

And even for that portion that crosses over, Iron Man still has the same problems he always had, lame villains.

I feel like the MCU is when that era died, for all the Spider-Man movies, X-Men movies, even shit like Spawn, those movies existing along felt like big events with all kinds of merch and video game tie ins, it was all very kid oriented

MCU started this thing where it felt like it was more aimed at like young adults, they didn't focus as much on the branding, and like also around that time in general......gaming and action figures also shifted their focus to young adults instead of kids

You go to a kids toy aisle today, you're just gonna see youre usual Transformers, TMNT, Jurassic Park related shit.....you'll see Marvel shit, but it's nothing in specific, it's just like generic "evergreen" "kiddy Marvel" stuff and knick knacs, not new toylines for specific movies or shows like back in the day, hell they don't even do Happy Meals for these movies

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I fucking hate x men but I know for a fact that he was with Hellcat so what are you talking about? Also she tried to make him feel bad for being super powerful but he married her anyway and she learned her lesson that he's a good guy.

He was with Hellcat but, he "married" Frost for a little bit.

Iron Man is a failed concept, Marvel should get rid of him.

He’s cool

Exactly. X-Men would be nothing without Magneto and Sabertooth and Mistique just like Spider-Man would be nothing without Green Goblin, Dock Ock, Venom etc. A hero is only as good as their villains and Iron Man just doesn't have them.

It's not even that the concepts or potential isn't there, they just aren't noteworthy to anyone but diehard Iron Man fans, which has always been more niche among Marvel characters.

He's has Mandarin.

The Crossing was a terrible story that Marvel figured out to get rid of fast

Civil War was a terrible story but in this case Marvel tried to gaslight anyone who tried to criticize it, while privately advising Marvel Studios not to do a movie about it. Even then Iron Man recovered because of the 2008 movie, no thanks to Marvel's comic editorial

Superior I'm almost convinced is shilled by Tom Taylor's fanbase or something

Basically the problem is the Marvel editorial/leadership that has been in place since at least the 00s that's lost sight of what interests readers. Under a competent editorial, they would've gotten rid of the Tony's parents retcon sooner

Cool concept, bad execution.

You're a failed concept

His arc was completed. We got to see it start to finish and all of his stuff is resolved. There's nothing else to talk about. If you're wondering why the MCU feels so fucking hollow right now, it's because there's no actual arcs happening. There are attempts at interconnected storylines and shared continuity between movies, but there's no substance. There's no build up. There's no characters growing from movie to movie that is aiming to culminate in a completed, meaningful arc.

I don't think comic Iron Man recovered from the damage civil war did. Comic fans say they don't like Iron Man because of that story. Marvel made a terrible mistake for that.

Marvel will never use The Mandarin for Stark ever. Some of his old villains need to be bumped up to archenemy status.

Does anyone else think a darker tone would work for Iron Man?

It's more like, if he never got a successful movie he would've been permanently damaged due to how bad Civil War was and how Marvel kept enforcing it

Fraction's Iron Man I did remember had some buzz back then in spite of the bad reception to Civil War. But poor editorial decision since Civil War is what kept Iron Man from getting bigger in comics.

I like Hellcat, even if she is a little silly sometimes. She is cute.

Wow, what a nuanced opinion you've presented us with.

Shitty villains have harmed Stark far more than Civil War.

They were replacing him with Riri Williams while Tony was still in the MCU

Can you show me where they were hinting at Riri pre-Endgame?

Iron Man has always been a lowb/high c list character.

Pretty much. I can't think of another capeshit hero who's popularity is so deeply ingrained into the actor who plays him. Batman and Spider-Man are probably the 2 most popular capeshit characters. Their popularity transcends the actors who play them. The actors have been replaced multiple times, but the characters of Batman/Spider-Man are still a draw. Even Joker who has had multiple iconic portrayals from the likes of Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Hammil; the character of the Joker is still popular outside of the actors.

Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jr. People show up to the theater not for the character, but for the actor.

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Yes. I enjoyed Extremis and I'd like to see more stories similar in that tone. The first Iron Man and the trailer for the third one had some edge.

Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jr. People show up to the theater not for the character, but for the actor.

This is debatable because if it were true, all his movies post-Iron Man 1 would've been box office hits. In reality it's a mixed bag with some doing really well (Sherlock Holmes films, Oppenheimer) and others doing badly (The Judge, Dolittle)

RDJ was already famous before IM, with or without scandals.

Not fair, Stark hasn't been given the opportunity to be played by multiple characters like the others.

The comic version is too tainted. They should do one last big event with him where they try to rebuild him back up with a redemption arc and have him sacrifice himself at the end of it to save the day.

They also need to modernize his villains, bring back his supporting cast, and also let his company make a difference in the world.

I'd say it's a combination of RDJ and Marvel.

Marvel is kind of like the fast food of movies. You know it won't be anything amazing, but you expect it not to be terrible (although debatably it is, and has been on a downward trend as of recent years). Part of the success of Marvel movies is that it's slop anyone can sit through. If I go to the movie theater with a bunch of family, let's say my grandma and my cousin's kid, I can't buy tickets to a horror movie or some quirky indie movie. But if I buy tickets to the latest Marvel film, well chances are the grandma and the little kid will like it well enough. It's the safe decision.

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Marvel made a mistake in killing off characters like Obsidian Stane and Justin Hammer. Hell, even Zeke Stane is nowhere to be found.

But he wasn't a massive box office draw before Iron Man. He was an acclaimed actor, but that did not always translate to box office success. Chaplin was a movie he got a Best Actor Oscar nomination for that had a budget of $31 million but box office of $12 million. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a decent movie that had a budget of $15 million that only got $15 million at the box office.

I agree; I don't think Iron Man alone or RDJ alone would've done as well, it had to be the combination of them.

Fame and money aren't necessarily the same, anon.

If you're claiming the Iron Man movies did well because people wanted to see RDJ and not Iron Man then it is a money thing
I don't dispute that RDJ is an accomplished actor. I just think claiming that people only saw Iron Man for RDJ and not for Iron Man misses the point

He could use a TV show and some animated movies. It's crazy how since he became the face of the MCU he's had none of that.

Comic Iron Man doesn't have very good lore on the level of Spider-Man, Batman, or even a Superman.

There's no vision for comic Iron Man. He's just been doing things with no rhyme or reason.

Big 2 comics sales have seldom ever been affected by successful adaptations, and outside of comics, they turned Iron Man into a big name, then dropped the ball by not doing anything with him since he died in the MCU. There's no reason they shouldn't still be making Iron Man cartoons, games, etc, and the same for the other MCU characters that were the most popular. You've got to keep characters out there and in the public eye so they don't end up being "that thing that used to be popular years ago".

But if we're just talking about comics, no amount of movie success is going to bring new readers into comics, the audience sizes of most comics have been largely fixed for decades, and only really go up much if there's some A-list creative team. Iron Man can be more popular than X-Men with movie audiences and X-Men's comic can still sell better than Iron Man's because there's less than 100K people reading most comics and most of them are oldfags whose reading habits won't ever change. But like a lot of this thread points out, Marvel's been mishandling Iron Man in comics for a LOT of the time since just before the MCU began, which doesn't exactly help.

Nobody who permanently has their own ongoing book is a "c list character". In comics Iron Man is historically a B-list character, but now he's A-list outside of comics, which is significantly more important. People put way too much weight on what's important in comics, what's popular with comics fans, but we're literally talking about an audience of under 100K for even the top titles, it's irrelevant compared with what's popular with normies.

Outside of the MCU, Marvel doesn't have faith in Iron Man.

The last several Iron Man writers have just paired Tony up with some random heroine instead of giving him a civilian love interest. When Slott was writing it was Tony/Wasp, then Cantwell did Tony/Hellcat, and with Duggan it was Emma. Hopefully the current run breaks this trend.

He's talking about the comics. Bendis took over the Iron Man comic in the mid 2010s, talking about how he wanted to make Iron Man as popular and important in comics as he was in the MCU, and built up to replacing Tony with Riri just a year later.

No one cares about that shitty movie.

The only superheroes that most comic readers actively follow are Batman and Spider-Man. It's been like that for 30 years now.

Does Tony have any iconic stories outside of Extremis?

>Inb4 Armor Wars and Demon In A Bottle

Both of those are mediocre.

iconic stories

Can we just stop using this moronic phrase? Especially when it's just to refer to "something that made a 'best comics stories' list made by some dubious authority.

And don't come into an Iron Man thread calling Armor Wars and Demon in a Bottle mediocre while praising something like Extremis that has nothing going for it but the art.

"iconic" can also mean "infamous" like the Civil War event or the Teen Tony arc.

There's Civil War and Superior.

Iconic doesn't mean "the best", it means being iconic, as in, being like an icon, "classic", etc, something people recognize the most

That being said, the only truly iconic story of Iron Man IS Demon in a Bottle. It's the only thing remotely considered so in the larger scale of comic books much like Miller's Daredevil is the only "iconic" story for him. Batman hogs all the "iconic" comic stories let's be real

See shit like this is why Comic Stark isn't liked. There's too much villainy and not enough heroism.

He's getting a preschool show.

Jesus, talk about missing the fucking mark. Why does Marvel think only characters like X-Men and Spider-Man can have good serious shows?

We're talking about stories that for the most part have been read by an audience in the thousands. Little to none of it is "iconic". Comics fandom are annoyingly addicted to misusing the word "iconic" to describe things that don't remotely deserve it, and do it all the time.

to write Iron Man correctly you need a certain amount of testosterone derived interests that most writers don't have.
Most writers aren't interested in high concept speculative engineering power armor battles

I don't think comic Iron Man recovered from the damage civil war did. Comic fans say they don't like Iron Man because of that story. Marvel made a terrible mistake for that.

Marvel has a stupid tendency to do event stories that give a character a big important role, but it's a character-ruining role that ends up being character-defining to a lot of comics fans who weren't really fans of that character before. So they hold grudges against the character instead of blaming the writer for mishandling the character. It's most noticeable with people basing their entire idea of who Iron Man and Scarlet Witch are on Civil War and House of M, but there's also people still yelling at each other over AvX and other events where both sides act like retards.

This is such a bizarre revisionism. People *liked* civil war at the time. It was a big seller. I know some normies who were aware of Captain America and Iron Man for the first time because of Civil War.

Nobody who permanently has their own ongoing book is a "c list character".

I'd say in general that rule makes sense, except for Iron Man. He's c-list. He was 2 memorable stories (Demon in a Bottle and Armor Wars) and he's in the avengers.

People also forget that, what, pre-Onslaught, the character was a mess. Wasn't he an aged up Teenage Tony Stark from another timeline or something? The 90's were bad for everyone but the X-Men story wise but they were especially bad for Iron Man.

The Civil War event was a massive seller, and one of those rare comic storylines that achieved some degree of normie-awareness even before it was adapted to the MCU, but like every Marvel hero vs hero event that followed, it provoked fierce and bitter fighting between fans who were largely just supporting /theirguy/ whoever that may have been. The people who are here in 2024 and are STILL angry at Iron Man because of the Civil War event from 2006-7 are mostly just crazy people, but they do exist, there's a few of them on Anon Babble, and even less-schizo fans were really angry at Stark for years after Civil War. Some of their reasons were unfair or undeserved, but it was what it was, it was like the average Marvel reader was outraged Cap's side didn't win Civil War and there were years of sustained reeeeing.

Don't do that "memorable stories" stuff as an argument. Marvel books generally weren't written with an eye towards creating character-defining stories that would be kept in trade forever. Iron Man's a guy who permanently had his own solo book from the 1960s onwards. He's not "c-list" just because people who don't read his book can't namedrop storylines.

People also forget that, what, pre-Onslaught, the character was a mess.

It's a mess they got themselves into by trying to do a stunt storyline, Marvel editorial were trying to convince their execs not to go through with Heroes Reborn, not to outsource those books to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, so they tried to do anything they could to try and get attention on their books. They failed badly, but overall we're talking about less than a year of comics, that had no real long term effect on the character. Despite how much Iron Man fans still complain about The Crossing, it didn't do anything close to the lasting damage modern a lot of Iron Man runs have done.

He had Armored Adventures and is in the various Avengers shows. That is good enough, right?

That is probably the mindset there.