Iron Man
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| Name: | Iron Man (Tony Stark) |
| Abbreviation(s): | none |
| Creator: | Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, Jack Kirby |
| Date(s): | March 1963 - first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39
Sept 1963 - Avengers #1 May 1968 - Invincible Iron Man #1 March 2005 - Ultimate Iron Man #1 May 2 2008 - Iron Man movie released June 13 2008 - The Incredible Hulk movie released |
| Medium: | film, comics, cartoons, games |
| Country of Origin: | United States |
| External Links: | Official Site:Iron Man the Movie |
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Iron Man in Marvel comics
Iron Man debuted in March of 1963, in the Marvel Comics science fiction anthology Tales of Suspense. The character was the product of a collaboration between Stan Lee (editor/plotter), Larry Leiber (scripter), Don Heck (artist) and Jack Kirby (cover artist/character desgin). Iron Man, playboy industrialist and war profiteer, was an unlikely superhero. Of the character's creation, Stan Lee famously said: "He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. ... I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him."
Over 45 years of consistent appearances in Marvel books, Iron Man's supporting cast has grown to include:
Pepper Potts aka Hera (Tony's loyal assistant), Happy Hogan (Tony's driver and sometime bodyguard; deceased), Jarvis (the Stark family's butler; later the Avengers butler), James Rhodes aka War Machine, Iron Man (Tony's best friend and pilot), Whitney Frost aka Madame Masque (former girlfriend; supervillain), Rumiko Fujikawa (Tony's fiance; deceased), the artificial intelligence Jocasta and Sunset Bain (first girlfriend; supervillain)
Iron Man comics fandom
Iron Man fandom is eclectic and dispersed. Popular fansites for Tony include The Iron Man Armory and Advanced Iron. General comics sites like Comic Book Resources, Scans Daily are also major hubs of Iron Man fandom. Fannish activities include vids, machinima, fanfic, fanart and general geekery.
Fanart and Machinima
Iron Man machinima and fanart have been created using Capcom's Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Second Life. Popular sites for posting and viewing IM machinina include Machinima.com and YouTube. YouTube also hosts a number of IM vids.
Michael Cho has been blogging about Iron Man fanart since January 2006, at Tony Stark: Your Go To Guy.
On March 2, 2008 Silver Screen launched an Iron Man in Second Life machinima contest that inspired a Flickr group for fanart, Iron Man in Second Life.
Fanfic
Iron Man fandom has been producing fanfic since the 90s, but it continues to be much rarer than other Marvel-based fanfiction. The recent increased visibilty of the character in Marvel 616 comics, has resulted in an upsurge in fannish activity. Popular comics pairings for Tony include Tony Stark/Pepper Potts and Tony Stark/ Steve Rogers. Iron Man comics fandom on LiveJournal is dominated by slash, with Steve/Tony being the most popular pairing. Gen and other pairings, including Tony/Pepper, Tony/Rhodey, Tony/Peter Parker, and Tony/Bucky, are somewhat less popular. Iron Man@FF.net, Avengers@FF.net,Marvel Fic, Marvel Slash and Stark Industries have substantial archives of fanfic with Tony Stark/Iron Man in a lead or supporting role.
Steve/Tony
The main Steve/Tony community is Cap_Ironman.
On July 4th, 2007 Elspethdixon and Seanchai began posting Resurrection, Reconstruction, and Redemption, the first Steve/Tony novel. They are widely regarded as having kick-stared S/T fandom. Elspethdixon and Seanchai continue to be active in the fandom, and have been instrumental in its growth. They host the pairing's main archive, Tales of Suspense, which hosts fic and art.
The Alphabet Challenge, which started in July 2008 and continued to September of the same year, resulted in 26 new fanworks, and was collected in a fanzine by Runenklinge.
The January 2009 Winter Fluff and Fairytale challenges on cap_ironman produced over 20 fairy Steve/Tony fairy tales. Steve/Tony AUs have been a tradition since.
In January of 2009 Kijikun launched the Cap_Ironman Big Bang challenge. The Big Bang went live with fic and art on July 7th.
Resources:
Elspethdixon wrote the ship manifesto A Sword, A Horse, A Shield and a primer Printed Circuits: A Tony Stark character and fandom overview.
Nix aka Crimson Quills ran a workshop on Writing Captain America/Iron Man and compiled The 62 Slashiest Moments.
Iron Man movieverse
The Iron Man movie was directed by Jon Favreau and premiered on May 2, 2008. Robert Downey Jr. starred as Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist who builds an advanced power armor suit, turning him from consummate playboy into global superhero. Other main characters included Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Stark's personal assistant; Terrence Howard as military liaison Lt. Colonel James Rhodes; Jeff Bridges as Stark Industries executive Obadiah Stane, and Shaun Toub as Stark's mentor Yinsen.
Robert Downey Jr. made a cameo appearance as Tony Stark in The Incredible Hulk (June 2008). He will reprise the role in Iron Man 2 (2010) and the tentatively scheduled Avengers movie (2011).
Movieverse fandom on Livejournal
The LiveJournal community ironman_movie was founded on 3 May 2008 and welcomes fanfictions, icons, layouts and discussions. Stark Industries is an Iron Man fanfiction liveJournal community, for gen, slash, het and femslash.
The major het pairing for this fandom is Tony Stark/Pepper Potts. There are multiple communities and archives dedicated to this pairing: tonypepper, the livejournal community, The Tony Stark/Pepper Potts 100 Theme Challenge, and the Anyone But You Fanfic Archive.
There are several main slash pairings in the movieverse fandom. The Tony Stark/James Rhodes livejournal community is the_funvee. Tony/Jarvis fans have a community at alowprofile. Tony/Obadiah is also a popular pairing, but has no community as of yet. For all other slash pairings in the Iron Man universe, there is ironman_slash.
Movieverse fanfic trends
Most Iron Man movieverse fanfiction features Tony Stark as a main character, although some authors write Pepper-centric fic that does not involve Tony.
Perhaps because Iron Man has a very small core cast, as opposed to ensemble films like X-Men, crossovers make up a large percentage of the Iron Man fanfiction posted each week. Most of these stories pair Tony with a crossover character of the author's choice, making Tony something of a little black dress. Tony crosses over well into fandoms with technology as a theme, like Transformers, and is often paired with either lonely billionaires, like Lex Luthor, Harry Osborn or Bruce Wayne, or characters who love hands-on mechanical work, like Kaylee Frye, Ray Kowalski or Dean Winchester. Despite the fact that, so far, there is no indication that any of the Marvel movies take place in the same universe (except for the recent Hulk movie), Tony is often paired with characters from previous Marvel movies, such as Bruce Banner, Scott Summers, Peter Parker, or Logan (Wolverine).
