Iron Filings – I’m NOT a bad guy…really

OK the title here is a swipe from the letters page of Vol. III but I thought it best to continue the conversation of about the current Iron Man and address the history’s relevance to it.  With a movie featuring Iron Man coming, a new title being added to the current publication and much fall-out about the character in Civil War it seems time to start putting my two cents down.

In part this blog was inspired by the lacking in many discussions across the Internet of elements that led up to the current portrayal and if they firstly matter or should matter in serial publications that utilize continuity and secondly what is bound to such a way of reading an item of fiction that differs from ‘reading’ in the mainstream mode.  The questions of Paraliterature are many that they ask about what and how we read but for now I have taken to the element that mainstream readers most mark as their entry point into a fiction – character.

Character for a number of reasons involves insight and attachment that makes serial fiction worth coming back to for many. The emotions that refract through the prism of the construct bond or repulse as much as the may cause us to think about these values within and without of the self. These involve values that have many names or labels that we can call our philosophy, our politics, our morals, our choices….and how fixed those are to ourselves.

Iron Man has, as I have been discovering, a remarkably fluid history thanks in no small part to being around since 1963 and being part of a collaborative medium. I confess right off that it wasn’t my first love in comics or first read for a number of reasons that will perhaps reveal themselves in my posts. That pride of place goes to the Fantastic Four and Spiderman. If anything the resistance to Iron Man, despite growing up with a love of all things Marvel, seems to be a useful tool to me in looking at this construct with a questioning values that I have or have held over the years.

more to come…