Super-Endorsements 2012:

Stark Industries won't return my calls

I read Project Rooftop's announcement for their Iron Man: Invincible Upgrade contest with great interest as, like the Beasts! volume 2 open call, it seemed like a good springboard for some focused drawing, and the opportunity to create some decent blog post fodder.

That wasn't my first thought when I heard of the contest, however. My first thought was, "Holy crap, redesign Iron Man? How on earth would you do that?"

See, Iron Man's "costume" is, essentially, his powers and, in large part, his whole character. And while it's changed a lot over the years, it's only changed drastically a couple of times (mainly when it went from the original big, boxy "garbage can" design to the the slimmer, more man-shaped one he still wears a form of), and most of the changes seem to be rather small ones.

So I went to bed that night, thinking of Iron Man and his armor and, over the course of the next few days, I sketched out some ideas, two of which I ultimately submitted to Project Rooftop (You can see the actual winners here, and I discussed some of my favorites last night).

Here’s the first thing that came to mind:

Ha ha, get it? Iron Man? Ha ha. Instead of repulsor rays, the holes in his palms shoot out steam, the same force that comes out of his boot jets and propels him through the air.

This struck me as mildly amusing when it first occurred to me, but by the time I was done drawing it, the joke wasn’t the least bit funny. Besides, I’m sure someone has used it somewhere before. If not a professional in print somewhere, than at least a grade school kid drawing it in a notebook to amuse his friends, then.

So, I didn’t bother submitting this one at all.

The next idea was in the same unserious vein.

Given the fact that Tony Stark is no longer keeping the fact that he’s also superhero Iron Man a secret from the world at large, there’s really no need for his Iron Man costume to function as a disguise in addition to a wear-able super-weapon.

So, I came up with this:

The American flag on is iron lapel? That’s actually a magnet.

I didn’t submit this one either, although now I’m thinking it’s probably the strongest of the four I put on paper. Not one I could ever actually see Marvel using in one of their comics, though.

So, with the joke ones out of my system, I tried thinking a little more seriously about an Iron Man redesign that could conceivably be used in a real comic book.

I started thinking along the lines of computer, automobile and robot designs, the way they trend, and ones I’ve seen in the past that I like.

The major problem with an Iron Man redesign, as far as I saw it, is that technology tends to get smaller, slimmer and sleeker the longer it’s around, but unlike computers, cell phones and music-listening-to devices, the Iron Man armor can only get so small, slim and sleek. At the very least, it always has to be roughly man-sized.

So the only way to make the armor sleeker would be to make it thinner, and that was the idea with this next design.

Here’s the original sketch,

and here’s a final one,

which I did submit.

This is meant to be an Iron Man costume that's more like a coat of paint or a candy-coating than a suit of armor. It would likely be some kinda liquid metal, one that would run over Stark like mercury when he was putting it on or taking it off, and he'd ultimately have the appearance of a red and gold version of the Silver Surfer or DC’s Captain Atom.

Since he no longer has a secret identity to protect, he doesn't need the featureless face-plate, but could wear something like this that hugged his features completely. (One of the robots I was thinking of was the Tom Peyer/Rags Morales Hourman, as he was a human-looking android with coloration similar to Iron Man’s).

My drawing isn’t terribly detailed because, well, I’m not much of an artist, and can’t do detail work very convincingly, but I imagine with this armor, Iron Man would basically look like a naked, painted Tony Stark, with a more Ken doll-like crotch (on account of a modesty concealing cup, perhaps).

I drew him without a goatee or moustache, because I think liquid metal facial hair looks kinda stupid (I think the Armageddon 2001 future Captain Atom had a beard under his metallic sheathe and it looked alright, but, well, I’m no Dan Jurgens). With a good artist, though, it could work. Or maybe he could just shave before Iron Man/Avengers missions, and let his 'stache grow out when he’s being Stark for a few days.

The blue bits on this costume would light up. The eyes would have various vision-related powers, the soles of his feet would allow him to fly, and he’d have repulsor rays in the palms of his hands, and the circle in the chest could work as a spotlight, and maybe shoot out energy like a cannon when needed.

This would limit his capabilities a bit, since he couldn’t carry much on him. For example, grappling hooks and rocket skates and missiles or machine guns or whatever are out; there just isn’t room in the armor for them. That would reduce the sort of Swiss Army knife nature of the armor.

I prefer the sketch over the final one. I like the paler colors, and the more heroic pose. The latter version looks too bright. He’s supposed to be coming in for a landing there, but, eh… I didn’t feel like redrawing it. (I note Project Rooftop's Joel Priddy had a similar idea in terms of some kind of liquid-y armor; Priddy's fellow judge Dean Trippe calls it "nanoliquid.")

Okay, so, short of shrinking the armor as much as physically possible, I thought the other way to show a newer version of it would be to make it more of an art-object. That is, rather than simplifying it, making it more ornate and complex, in a way that is showoff-y (Here I was thinking of another robot I liked a lot, Masters of the Universe toy Roboto, which had a clear chest cavity with little gears that would move when you moved his arms or visor).

(Above: Roboto)

I pictured a big, clear, glass-like Iron Man armor. The only opaque parts would be the face-plate, and perhaps the gloves and boots. Stark’s body would be sheathed in some kind of tight, red bodysuit, and, the human-sized figure inside the clear armor would look a little like a red skeleton. Between the visible Stark outline inside and the outer, clear-metal shell, you’d see all kinds of ornate, baroque clockwork gears, and perhaps brass-colored tubing acing as “veins” in this armor. Various elements would light up, so that when he, say, readied a repulsor ray, you would see a spark form in one part of the armor, travel down a brass-colored tube, build up in the forearm, and then blast out of the palm. Likewise, every time an arm or leg would move, you’d see the gears turning.

I didn’t even attempt to draw that because, Jesus, just imagining it was complicated. I couldn’t begin to actually put it on paper.

Finally, I thought of sort of breaking the rules that have bound all of Iron Man’s armors over the years together, and seeing what that looked like. Specifically, I wanted to move him away from the robot-looking, guy-in-battle-armor look and toward a more standard, iconic superhero. In other words, less Iron Man and more Superman.

Here’s what I came up with:

Complete with notes from Stark himself.

For the head, I looked at the G1 Transformers with more human faces (Starscream, Megatron, Ratchet, Prowl, etc) and Voltron. I wanted to not only give him a radical new look, but also one that would get away from the two-slits-for-eyes, one-slit-for-a-mouth look that’s been the standard for pretty much all of his costumes.

And a nose. Iron Man’s nose armor was a disaster, and, if you were to think of a single rule of Iron Man armor, it would be never include a nose (Note that PR third-prize winner Jemma Salume did, and it looks pretty cool. Of the 14 currently posted on PR, it’s one of only two that dared a nose). A squarish, more Transformer-y nose, however, would be better than that Mr. Potatohead-looking one in his official nose armor. A more naturalistic, Voltron-like nose sculpted right onto the face of the armor, rather than jutting out in a square like this one, would work okay too, I think.

On the chest, I gave him a Superman-like logo. At first I was going with an S-shield shaped pentagon, but switched to a triangle, since the S-shield was too Superman, and Iron Man’s had triangles in his armor before. And, of course, “Fe” for Iron, which I swiped from one of the Metal Men designs. Speaking of swiping from DC heroes, it would have big, show-y bolts on it like one of the iterations of John Henry Irons’ Steel armor (a character who has quite a bit of Iron Man inspiration in him) and the same sort of bolts are used to keep his cape on.

The cape, like the chest symbol, gives him a Superman like appearance, and I just think the Marvel Universe could use more capes. Especially now that Iron Man has proven himself the MU alpha-male through the events of Civil War, he oughta look more regal and iconic, and nothing says regal and iconic superhero like a cape.

I gave him big, huge forearms and fists to go for a Popeye-esque look, as Popeye’s design is so perfect. You just look at Popeye’s figure and you see “punching machine.” That’s what Iron Man should be, in a sense, isn’t it? A punching machine?

(In describing their take on Iron Fist, I’ve seen it said that Brubaker and Fraction have reduced to single phrase “kung fu billionaire.” The old '60s theme song for the Iron Man cartoon tells us that Tony Stark is a "cool exec with a heart of steel," a phrase blogger Chris Sims said gives you pretty much all you need to know about the character. Me, I’m thinking “punching machine” is Iron Man's version of "kung fu billionaire.")

What else? I drew the feet huge to echo the fists, but also I wanted to draw “lifts,” as I was thinking of Stark designing his armor and the way middle-aged men choose big cars to…compensate for some things. So I thought he’d want armor that made him look bigger. I think the crotch would have a sculpted bulge to it too, for the same reason.

I would have kept yellow out of it all together, but I think the rules said something about redesigning the red and gold armor, so I made the cape yellow. I like the idea of bringing an iron color back. One of my favorite “real” Iron Man armors is the one that’s red and gray, as opposed to the more traditional red and gold.

I looked to one of my favorite Bearbricks, which is a robot design, for the color scheme:


Basically, this Iron Man costume is a marketable, action figure of a hero; a big huge toy.

So, those are my Iron Man redesigns, submitted and not, and my thought process behind them.

Long, rambling post about Iron Man: Who he is, how he looks and why we like/dislike him

I expect to spend an awful lot of time thinking about Iron Man this week, as will many of you (and so too will plenty of people who have never thought about Iron Man at all), for the obvious reason.

I’ve never been a real big Iron Man fan, my apathy for the character stretching back much further than Marvel’s fairly recently decision to make him into some kind of reluctant villain for their whole line of comics in the pages of their big tent pole publishing event Civil War. (Oddly, I thought the long-term plan would be to reveal that he knew about the alien invasion threat in their current tent pole publishing event Secret Invasion, and defeated his former allies and essentially took over the world in an effort to defeat the evil aliens, returning to hero status in time for the movie release. Said movie debuts this weekend, however, and Secret Invasion is still seven months away from climax).

The only time I was a regular reader of the Iron Man monthly was during pencil artist Keron Grant’s short 2001 run on the title, and that had a lot more to do with the (then) Columbus-based artist’s style than the character (that’s Grant’s Iron Man above, by the way; Grant also designed a pretty cool “Under Construction” logo for some other issues).

Iron Man has always seemed to me like more of an ensemble character than a star, a character that works better when playing off others, as in Avengers comics, than helming his own.

I’m not sure why exactly he seems so unappealing to me as a superhero, despite having been popular enough with others to last for decades and decades.

It may be just that his Cold War origins stamp him as a character of another generation, or that his personality is that of the kind of guy I don’t much care to spend much time with (two traits he shares with Hal Jordan).

It could be that the vagaries of Tony Stark’s genius and his armor drain a lot of suspense out of stories featuring him; like Reed Richards, he can generally pull some plan out of his ass to save the day, or his armor will reveal some technological fix to whatever conflict is before him (for a good example of the latter, see the end of New Avengers: The Illuminati or the end of World War Hulk).

It could just be that I’m something of a Luddite, and don’t care to read about science in my comics escapism, beyond a Gardner Fox or Grant Morrison-style techno-babble gobbledygook.

It could be that Iron Man never really had his own cartoon or TV show the way a lot of other heroes did when I was growing up, so I never felt like I “knew” him until I met him in comics.

It could be that I’ve always found Tony Stark’s cover story that Iron Man was his bodyguard to be completely, irritatingly insane, since, for that to be at all plausible, they’d have to be seen in the same room at the same time constantly instead of, you know, never.

Or—and this sounds completely trivial, but these sorts of semi-subliminal signals play a deceptively large role in why some superheroes are more appealing than others—it could just be that I don’t like the red and yellow color combination. They remind me of Ronald McDonald more than a superhero.

A few weeks back, Sean Kleefeld wrote a rather insightful essay entitled “Why I Hate Iron Man” which, as the title indicates, was about diagnosing his own antipathy towards the character.

Kleefeld notes that unlike a lot of his superheroic peers, Iron Man doesn’t have two completely separate but distinct personalities. While Spider-Man and Peter Parker, Clark Kent and Superman, Batman and Bruce Wayne or Bruce Banner and The Hulk are portrayed as different people who happen to be the same person, there is, Kleefeld says, no Iron Man.

Tony Stark is himself pretty fascinating, but Iron Man is just an empty suit. “He's a walking ray gun,” Kleefeld says.

I think he may be right, and that may explain why Marvel has repeatedly outted Tony Stark’s secret identity to the general public in the Marvel Universe over the last few years. Perhaps the editors and writers were finding telling stories about Iron Man hard, and getting a little bored of the character, whereas stories about Tony Stark wearing Iron Man armor were much more fascinating?

Last year, prompted to the hype of a different Iron Man movie, Kevin Church wrote a little essay about Iron Man explaining what he liked about the character and, I’ve gotta say, that’s an Iron Man I could get into reading about.

Some kind of fundamental rewriting of the character, so that he’s more like the one Church describes and less like the one that’s been starring in Marvel comics over the past few years, isn’t impossible.

In fact, because the current and recent Iron Man seems like the one who’s off—becoming secretary of state, cloning his friends to kill his other friends, beating the shit out of Captain America, shooting The Hulk into outer space, slaughtering Skrulls by the hundreds in a preemptive strike—making him a more heroic and charming figure shouldn’t be that hard.

Of course, if Marvel doesn’t want to mess with the core of the character too much too fast, they can always tinker with the surface, and simply redesign his armor. Superheroes are forever changing their looks—even Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, who have more or less perfect costumes, tinker with them now and then—but few major heroes change as often as Iron Man.

Hell, in his first appearance he was wearing a large soup can. Then he changed to a golden soup can. Then he started wearing the sleeker, more familiar red and gold costumes, which seem to change every few years anyway.

He’s been wearing his current look for a while now…at least since the start of New Avengers, and he’s probably due for an upgrade.

At least, that’s what the good folks at Project Rooftop thought, and today they published the winners of their Iron Man: Invincible Upgrade contest, with comments by the Project Rooftop staff, Joshua Crawley of sponsor Westfield Comics, and Matt Fraction (writer of the upcoming, awesome-looking Invincible Iron Man monthly) and Adi Granov (former Iron Man artist).

The results, like a lot of PR design and re-design work, are must-browse. As with the Beasts! call for open submissions, I once again decided to draw outside of my weight class, and submitted a few designs, which I’ll post here on EDILW for your derision later in the week.

The winning artist was Daniel Krall, and it’s easy to see why. I mean, just look at this piece:

See, that’s an Iron Man comic I would buy on sight. The armor itself evokes the suits of armor a medieval knight would wear, and that’s a great source of inspiration for a character like Iron Man (Runner-up Marcus Parcus seemed to go for something similar in terms of knight-in-shining-armor inspiration). It looks like it takes forever to put on, but, at the same time, it looks simpler and more heroic than some kind of teleporting, transforming or liquid metal type of armor.

If it were just the armor that Krall redesigned, I would be only mildly impressed with the piece. But man, his Stark is fantastic—I love the jacket and gloves over the suit, the drink in his hand, and the evident pride in his creation, which he throws his arm around. And man, even the “Stark” logo is great.

Judge Joel Priddy mentions Krall’s previous redesigns of Nick Fury and Black Widow, and says “I think we can all agree that Daniel should be assigned an ongoing book set in Marvel’s early Cold War era.”

I agree that Marvel should hire the hell out of Daniel Krall to draw something for them. I’ll buy whatever it is.

My other favorite piece was Felip Sobreiro’s,

which mixed the chunky proportions of the original, chunky, garbage can-looking suits with the later red-and-gold color scheme and more refined components.

I was also particularly impressed with Jemma Salume’s,

which manages to make the most difficult Iron Man feature in Iron Man armor history—the nose—work, and Jon McNally’s

because it included Iron Man’s greatest innovation—boot-mounted battle roller skates. Because why fly when you can skate?

Make sure you check out all the entries, and click through the to the artists’ own sites, as there’s a lot of great art to be seen there.

And come back later in the week for my own poor attempts at redesigning Iron Man, and more thoughts on the character’s appearance.

And yet it's still more exciting then Mark Millar's original ending...

(From What If? Civil War #1's "What If Iron Man Lost the Civil War?" by Chrstos Gage and Harve Tolibao)

Tony Stark...

...is in denial.



That’s from this week’s Avengers Classic #1, from a story by Stan “The Man” Lee and Kevin “Kevin” Maguire.

And you know what? It’s not even the best part of the issue.

Neither is this exchange



from a story by Dwayne McDuffie and Michael Avon Oeming (But that is pretty awesome).




No, this is the best part: