fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-05-22 07:54 pm
some_stars) wrote2012-05-22 07:54 pm
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So somehow I decided that the thing to do with my life tonight was reread the entire Iron Man alcoholism arc, like, ALL of it? While drinking, because that is how I roll. But oh my god, you guys, I have SO MANY FEELINGS. I can't believe how many decades he's been such a fucking mess. And it's not heroic tragic beautiful manpain, either. Just...mess. UGH, FEELINGS. If anyone were to feel like discussing this, I am available, between issues.
--see, I knew, I knew getting into the Avengers movie fandom would lead me back here eventually. I have dozens of story ideas for entirely other characters who are not even Tony Stark! DOZENS. And yet somehow my mind always gravitates back to the self-hating, self-destructive, wholly unglamorously depressed as fuck emotional wreck. I WONDER WHY. He's called himself stupid like three times in four issues now, that was an aspect of his massive damage I either didn't catch the first time around or forgot about.
ACTUALLY you know what I'm gonna liveblog this shit. For...as long as it holds my attention. If this post ends up being at all interesting, I will edit it later with illustrations, but cropping and resizing stuff is not where my interest lies tonight.
So I started somewhere in the late 150s--I totally lied about the "all of it" part--and I've just gotten to 163 with INDRIES NOOOOO and omg, Tony. I'm so impressed at how gradually shit is starting to fall apart for him, or not even fall apart yet, just...the usual superhero shit is getting to him. More and more, bit by bit. And now Indries, and Tony is so into her because someone else died in his arms that day but she didn't, he SAVED her, and I don't think he gets a girlfriend ever in his entire publishing history (pre-2005ish which is when my already intermittent knowledge completely cuts off) who doesn't fuck him over. I mean, I may be forgetting someone, and I don't think ALL of them fuck him over by being secret supervillains and/or supervillain pawns. But it's a pattern. Obviously this bespeaks alllllll kinds of nasty issues on the part of the writers, but I am not in a place where I can criticize that right now. I am in a "TONY NO SHE WILL ONLY HURT YOU" place.
--ahahaha he just had the biggest sexist douchebag moment. ("I thought you were nuts about that lady in the hospital." "Janny is one thing Ms. Moomji isn't." "What's that?" "Here.") Complete with illustration style that made it so much worse. DON'T PUT THAT LOOK ON HIS FACE, jesus. So, you know, it's not all ~oh his precious pain~ around here. Occasionally.
--wait, I just got distracted with a dialogue idea for the Tony/Thor fic. JFC, what the hell kind of chemicals does it TAKE to make my brain calm down? okay fine, opening Word again, hopefully I don't get my comics vs. movie Tony characterizations mixed up or it could end in him weeping against Thor's manly chest. (Happily I have no comics Thor characterization to get confused with; I know him only as a vaguely enjoyable background person-thing in the Avengers and then more recently as the Emanuela Lupacchino-drawn version in X-Factor (ie, a beautiful mix of beefcake and cheesecake, oh Emanuela), who Shatterstar hit on. Those last four words are sort of unnecessary when discussing X-Factor, aren't they?
okay, wrote that down, pretty sure it sucks but I have done my duty. Now back to reading, and I'm realizing I misrepresented this a bit the other day? Because it's more like--there's the initial, short arc, where everything is fixed in one issue. And then roughly a couple realtime years later, a new writer (Denny O'Neil, WHO'S SURPRISED, oh that's right, nobody) starts ramping it up again. And so he starts thinking about his drinking problem, some character or another in almost every issue offers him a drink, and he just told Indries he has "a problem with the stuff." To which she responds with the actual word alcoholic, and he seems like he might be about to say, yes, he is, but crime interrupts. And this is many issues before the big collapse. So it's more a case of a new writer and/or editorial team--I so can't even keep track of that kind of thing--deciding to pick the thread back up and develop it, and it is shown as an ongoing issue in his life before he actually starts drinking again. --Is that even contradicting anything I said before? Ugh, teach me to make grand sweeping posts about shit the day before rereading it for the first time in four years.
I guess what I'm tryign to get at, when I try to describe Tony Stark's character in the comics, is that--okay, so there's this panel in this issue just now, I'll upload it later maybe, where he's holding the helmet in his hand and looking at it. "Sometimes I wonder which is the real me...this splendid metal skin I've created...or the frail thing of flesh that wears it." And the thing is--ALL superheroes have that moment, the crisis of identity, the who-am-I-without-the-suit moment. But Tony reacts to it--he breaks down--in the way an actual human being would. I mean, sure, on a grand operatic scale--he goes from a billionaire to living on the streets and drinking in gutters for months--because, you know, comics. But when he has the classic/cliched me-or-the-suit moment, it doesn't feel like an opera. It feels like a real person is trapped in there and doesn't know how to get out, or possibly is trying desperately to get even more deeply inside until he won't have to come out anymore. I could make more unfavorable Batman comparisons but, well, you get the idea.
OKAY THAT IS ALL ON THAT TOPIC, actual real time reactions only from now on, I promise.
The lettercol in 165 is amazing. One person sees what's coming, although they predict a much less grim outcome than what they're actually going to get. And another person writes in to complain about too many one-shots--"a string of relatively fair hero-defeats-villain actioners," with not enough ongoing arcs and subplots, and not enough of Tony's private life. Greg Magarian of Shorewood, WI: I am pretty sure you were not disappointed.
--and you know what pushes him over the edge? The moment that he later remembers as "the beginning of his defeat"? Having to take a commercial flight home from Scotland, where Rhodey is precariously recovering from spider bites (don't ask), because his pilot's license is expired because his secretary forgot to renew it, and Indries tried to take him to a pub and the bartender mocked him for not drinking and he flipped out due to having had a REALLY bad few issues/days, and decided to go home, and then there's this montage of everything going wrong on the flight--delayed for hours, no food being served, luggage misrouted to Saudi Arabia--and then a flight attendant spills a tray of martinis on him and he thinks about how he'll spend the next six hours "with gin fumes filling [his] nostrils"...that's the moment. It's not a gratuitously dead girlfriend (although Rhodey being almost killed by a villain trying to use him to hurt Tony is a major factor), it's not "I failed to stop this puppy orphanage from exploding even though there was nothing I could plausibly have done!" It's just--fucking life, everything going wrong, crisis on top of crisis and you're trapped in that fucking airplane seat, next to a woman you think maybe you're in love with but honestly you don't even really know her yet, and you keep lashing out at her without meaning to, and now you're trapped with her on a plane for hours, and you've turned down about a dozen drinks in as many days and all you want is to hit something--he says this--and then desperately suck the spilled gin out of your suit--this is not spoken, but it seems pretty clear.
That's "the beginning of his defeat." And it is also how all my defeats begin: with fucking life.
--oh my god, he just brought out the rollerskates. The jet-powered rollerskates built into the suit. Way to ruin the mood, Tony.
--see, I knew, I knew getting into the Avengers movie fandom would lead me back here eventually. I have dozens of story ideas for entirely other characters who are not even Tony Stark! DOZENS. And yet somehow my mind always gravitates back to the self-hating, self-destructive, wholly unglamorously depressed as fuck emotional wreck. I WONDER WHY. He's called himself stupid like three times in four issues now, that was an aspect of his massive damage I either didn't catch the first time around or forgot about.
ACTUALLY you know what I'm gonna liveblog this shit. For...as long as it holds my attention. If this post ends up being at all interesting, I will edit it later with illustrations, but cropping and resizing stuff is not where my interest lies tonight.
So I started somewhere in the late 150s--I totally lied about the "all of it" part--and I've just gotten to 163 with INDRIES NOOOOO and omg, Tony. I'm so impressed at how gradually shit is starting to fall apart for him, or not even fall apart yet, just...the usual superhero shit is getting to him. More and more, bit by bit. And now Indries, and Tony is so into her because someone else died in his arms that day but she didn't, he SAVED her, and I don't think he gets a girlfriend ever in his entire publishing history (pre-2005ish which is when my already intermittent knowledge completely cuts off) who doesn't fuck him over. I mean, I may be forgetting someone, and I don't think ALL of them fuck him over by being secret supervillains and/or supervillain pawns. But it's a pattern. Obviously this bespeaks alllllll kinds of nasty issues on the part of the writers, but I am not in a place where I can criticize that right now. I am in a "TONY NO SHE WILL ONLY HURT YOU" place.
--ahahaha he just had the biggest sexist douchebag moment. ("I thought you were nuts about that lady in the hospital." "Janny is one thing Ms. Moomji isn't." "What's that?" "Here.") Complete with illustration style that made it so much worse. DON'T PUT THAT LOOK ON HIS FACE, jesus. So, you know, it's not all ~oh his precious pain~ around here. Occasionally.
--wait, I just got distracted with a dialogue idea for the Tony/Thor fic. JFC, what the hell kind of chemicals does it TAKE to make my brain calm down? okay fine, opening Word again, hopefully I don't get my comics vs. movie Tony characterizations mixed up or it could end in him weeping against Thor's manly chest. (Happily I have no comics Thor characterization to get confused with; I know him only as a vaguely enjoyable background person-thing in the Avengers and then more recently as the Emanuela Lupacchino-drawn version in X-Factor (ie, a beautiful mix of beefcake and cheesecake, oh Emanuela), who Shatterstar hit on. Those last four words are sort of unnecessary when discussing X-Factor, aren't they?
okay, wrote that down, pretty sure it sucks but I have done my duty. Now back to reading, and I'm realizing I misrepresented this a bit the other day? Because it's more like--there's the initial, short arc, where everything is fixed in one issue. And then roughly a couple realtime years later, a new writer (Denny O'Neil, WHO'S SURPRISED, oh that's right, nobody) starts ramping it up again. And so he starts thinking about his drinking problem, some character or another in almost every issue offers him a drink, and he just told Indries he has "a problem with the stuff." To which she responds with the actual word alcoholic, and he seems like he might be about to say, yes, he is, but crime interrupts. And this is many issues before the big collapse. So it's more a case of a new writer and/or editorial team--I so can't even keep track of that kind of thing--deciding to pick the thread back up and develop it, and it is shown as an ongoing issue in his life before he actually starts drinking again. --Is that even contradicting anything I said before? Ugh, teach me to make grand sweeping posts about shit the day before rereading it for the first time in four years.
I guess what I'm tryign to get at, when I try to describe Tony Stark's character in the comics, is that--okay, so there's this panel in this issue just now, I'll upload it later maybe, where he's holding the helmet in his hand and looking at it. "Sometimes I wonder which is the real me...this splendid metal skin I've created...or the frail thing of flesh that wears it." And the thing is--ALL superheroes have that moment, the crisis of identity, the who-am-I-without-the-suit moment. But Tony reacts to it--he breaks down--in the way an actual human being would. I mean, sure, on a grand operatic scale--he goes from a billionaire to living on the streets and drinking in gutters for months--because, you know, comics. But when he has the classic/cliched me-or-the-suit moment, it doesn't feel like an opera. It feels like a real person is trapped in there and doesn't know how to get out, or possibly is trying desperately to get even more deeply inside until he won't have to come out anymore. I could make more unfavorable Batman comparisons but, well, you get the idea.
OKAY THAT IS ALL ON THAT TOPIC, actual real time reactions only from now on, I promise.
The lettercol in 165 is amazing. One person sees what's coming, although they predict a much less grim outcome than what they're actually going to get. And another person writes in to complain about too many one-shots--"a string of relatively fair hero-defeats-villain actioners," with not enough ongoing arcs and subplots, and not enough of Tony's private life. Greg Magarian of Shorewood, WI: I am pretty sure you were not disappointed.
--and you know what pushes him over the edge? The moment that he later remembers as "the beginning of his defeat"? Having to take a commercial flight home from Scotland, where Rhodey is precariously recovering from spider bites (don't ask), because his pilot's license is expired because his secretary forgot to renew it, and Indries tried to take him to a pub and the bartender mocked him for not drinking and he flipped out due to having had a REALLY bad few issues/days, and decided to go home, and then there's this montage of everything going wrong on the flight--delayed for hours, no food being served, luggage misrouted to Saudi Arabia--and then a flight attendant spills a tray of martinis on him and he thinks about how he'll spend the next six hours "with gin fumes filling [his] nostrils"...that's the moment. It's not a gratuitously dead girlfriend (although Rhodey being almost killed by a villain trying to use him to hurt Tony is a major factor), it's not "I failed to stop this puppy orphanage from exploding even though there was nothing I could plausibly have done!" It's just--fucking life, everything going wrong, crisis on top of crisis and you're trapped in that fucking airplane seat, next to a woman you think maybe you're in love with but honestly you don't even really know her yet, and you keep lashing out at her without meaning to, and now you're trapped with her on a plane for hours, and you've turned down about a dozen drinks in as many days and all you want is to hit something--he says this--and then desperately suck the spilled gin out of your suit--this is not spoken, but it seems pretty clear.
That's "the beginning of his defeat." And it is also how all my defeats begin: with fucking life.
--oh my god, he just brought out the rollerskates. The jet-powered rollerskates built into the suit. Way to ruin the mood, Tony.
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I was not expecting that.
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