Iron-Man

Serial storytelling is popular on television, but as far as print goes, it’s a dying art. There used to be a time when people regularly followed installments of actual books, printed a chapter at a time in magazines, but now magazines themselves are struggling to keep the public’s interest in the face of the internet. You can find serial stories on the internet—web comics and fanfiction for example—but the business of it isn’t the same. The comic book industry is one of the few businesses that still maintains that original serial model and because of that it usually takes six or twelve issues of a comic to tell a single story arc. The last few months I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what titles to trim from my pull list in favor of waiting for the graphic novel releases. As I’ve evaluated titles, I’ve thought a lot about the downsides of serial storytelling. The obvious downside for the consumer is the price. I bought the first six issues of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman for a cover price of $3.99 which meant I spent approximately $24.00. The graphic novel collection of those issues is currently being sold for $15.00 on Amazon.com. For someone with a tight budget, that kind of difference is noteworthy.

Iron Man 3 has just been released on DVD, which makes now the perfect time to discuss some of the controversy surrounding its primary antagonist. The way the movie handled the character of the Mandarin upset some long-time comic fans and relieved others. When I first saw the trailers for Iron Man 3, I was concerned about the inclusion of the Mandarin. He’s been one of Iron Man’s greatest foes for decades, but as his name suggests, the character was created without much sensitivity during an era when the US was deep in the Cold War. The fact that the trailer showed a British actor of Indian descent dressed in very stereotypical fashion did not assuage my fears.

Mainstream comics have traditionally featured superheroes or, more recently, anti-heroes. Whether it’s Batman, Starfire, Captain Marvel, or Iron Man, the characters that inhabit most of the comics published by the Big Two – and, to a certain degree, smaller publishers as well – feature someone (or a team of someones) who beats up the bad guys to protect the innocent. What drives someone to put on a costume and use his or her powers for good, though? ...