Plight of the Aging Comic Nerd: Tony Stark Is Fucking Interesting

[plight of…is generally a reflection piece on something on my mind. stream of consciousness and usually asks you guys questions in a formless rant that feels good on my fingers and keyboard]

Tony Stark is a dude who operates on multiple levels. He’s a hilarious showman in the movies. He’s a brilliant scientist. He’s a tortured creator living with the ramifications of what he built; twisted and used for evil. Like he shouldn’t have seen that shit coming. I mean, ask Mr. Nobel how dynamite went for everyone in involved.

I like my characters broken. And I think we all do. As much as we like the slings of shields and the deployment of repulsor cannons, we also like to see the cracks within the psyches of those who are so divine on the outside. Is that why people were so obsessed with the Greek gods? Maybe that’s why they floated for so long. We want to believe in those more powerful than us; we want to believe there’s an afterlife, or maybe just an after party when we shed our mortal coils. But we also love the idea that people so seemingly perfect, from a guy who can zip around the world within mere moments, to the Aryan Poster Child who can repel Nazis and Skrulls alike are maybe, just like us.

We love them for their heroics, but we also love them for their ability to have faults.

And maybe that’s why I love Tony Stark so much lately.

There’s something so very schadenfreude about watching Tony Stark’s spiral into oblivion lately. What happens when a billionaire genius is reduced to a vegitative state? What happens when all of that is on his own hands? Siding with the Pro-Registration side in the Civil War, losing the country to Norman Osborn? Being indirectly responsible for one of the death of Captain America? Allowing his weaponry to fall into the hands of terrorists?

It’s enthralling.

Matt Fraction’s been ripping off pieces of Tony Stark’s mind like layers of Iron Man armor, leaving the idealist underneath is exposed. I love in Fraction’s Iron Man Disassembled storyline we see a Stark who is exposed, reduced to his core essence. And what we see is a guy who genuinely wanted to make a difference, only to have shit collapse underneath itself like a poorly played game of existential Jenga.

I’m a sucker for when shit goes wrong. Whoops, a bit simplistic, I suppose. I enjoy the exploration of the paving of hell. You know, with good intentions and shit. Stark wanted nothing more than solve the world’s problems. But his problems? They fucked up. I’m love the flawed, I revel in the mistakes. It seems so very human, especially for a billionaire genius.

How many times have you laid the best of plans, just to see them crumble under unforeseen circumstances? I’m guessing a million, or a zillion. And then compound them with the concept that you’re trying to save the world. It’s fail on a near biblical scale.

As Stark tumbles from his chariot atop Olympus, he’s reduced to a dude in a hospital bed, ruined amongst friends. And as we see him tripping out in some dreamworld, it’s refreshing to see him realizing that he needs help. Parables atop of awesomeness. It’s childish only in its simplicity, but there’s reasons that such lessons have been for thousands of years. We stray from them, only to be reminded of the weather axioms. You’re a brilliant mind, you’re a visionary, Stark. But you’re only a man. And it appears that everyone needs help.

Fraction calls it a classic Campbellian origin story in reverse, and how! Seeing Stark in an Achillean masterpiece unfolding backwards, his armor being taken off piece by piece in epic, gorgeous unfoldlery. Yes, unfoldlery. I made that word up.

So as I said, I like Stark because he’s flawed. He’s an alcoholic. But he also trounces amongst the Gods. And that’s an important secondary portion of what makes him so interesting to me. I know it’s not an original archetype, I know it’s nothing new. But in some defeatist, post-modern mentality, what hasn’t been done? If Tony Stark is an Achillean tale playing out in rewind, then Fraction is rocking his mimetic skills like woah. It is the way he has arranged the archetypes, those he has chosen to fill the roles, and his ability to execute the storyline that makes it so special.

And let’s be clear, there’s a dude who wears a fucking mech for a living in it. That makes a lot of us geeks moist.

For not only do we want to believe in the epic brilliant, the unrelenting flaw, but we want to believe in the power or redemption. We love superheroes, us comic book nerds. We love them like woah. And to a lot of them, there is the concept of rebirth, of reconciliation attached. Tony Stark is the me that can never be. I want to be a billionaire, I want to have a suit of armor, I want to save the world. Of course I do, I escape from the pratfalls and trials of life through men in capes, through aliens and battles. And even though I can never do so, I can live vicariously through Stark and his rotten mind, and his of course, quintessential redemption. The Gods of Olympus remind us of ourselves, they give comfort to us in their flaws, and yet never fail to inspire us nonetheless.