Let’s talk about Iron Man.

[Warning: this gets pretty nerdy. I mean, like, more than the usual amount.]

So, Tony Stark, then. Before Crank started the other night, I was forced to sit through a series of previews for films of dubious merit. There was a loud, overlong trailer Saw III, of course, which I hope is the last, definitive statement in films that involve 90+ minutes of slow torture of various cast members, along with a preview for Employee Of The Month, a Dane Cook vehicle that seemed to involve 90+ minutes of slow torture of the audience. What caught my eye and happened to stop the fast-forward process was a glimpse of the direct-to-DVD animated feature, The Invincible Iron Man.

I’m not really a purist about these things, but it appears that instead of following a tried and true origin story that’s been updated with only the most modest of tweaks, writer Greg Johnson and director Frank Paur have gutted a major theme for the character and instead have Tony Stark creating armor for the purpose of kicking around some spooky Chinese ghosts. That’s not right in the slightest, people. This change, pretty much ruins the appeal of Iron Man for me in a very specific way.

Iron Man, as a comic or film or novel or video game or whatever, should be about more than a guy in a fancy suit of armor that beats up other (generally also armor-suited) guys. It should be about one man – Tony Stark – having his eyes opened wide and spending the rest of his life making up for years of unethical business practices. There’s more to the character of Tony Stark than being a rich drunk who likes to tinker with gadgets. Some people – Warren Ellis and, shockingly, John Byrne (whose origin story for Iron Man was folded into Ellis’s Extremis), to name two – get this. Tony Stark, as a character, should be a driven combination of Bill Gates and George Clooney: a handsome, charismatic, socially-minded technocrat determined to leave the world a better place than he found it.

The most acclaimed stories featuring the character have always featured Tony Stark battling some aspect of himself, be it his creations (Armor Wars) or alcoholism (Demon in a Bottle) and this proves that there’s more to the character than simpleminded slugfests, if only for a few issues at a time. There’s been a sporadic uptick in quality of late – I think Ellis’s Extremis, as a collected work, nicely encapsulates a great deal about the character in a continuity-void sort of way. Joe Casey and Frazier Irving’s The Inevitable carried some of the old-school Marvel flavor and a sense of history while managing to show Tony Stark as a more mature, well-rounded man who finds the parade of supervillains in his life inconvenient. I also found the first issue of Adam Warren’s Hypervelocity miniseries to be great fun and feel that he’s more than up to the task, especially as he’s a premiere technofetishist.

It makes sense that, hand in hand with the technocratic/futurist thing, there should be a liberatarian bent to the character that opens up multiple story possibilities for the character. He’s consistently seen that governments misuse technology and probably wouldn’t trust them. Of course, this would nullify things like the questionable decision to become Secretary of Defense as well as his entry into the horribly mismanaged Civil War event. In fact, I think it’d be much more interesting to portray a conflicted Iron Man siding with Reed Richards (who actually managed to justify some of his actions in the latest Fantastic Four) out of immediate concern for human life and then raising his voice when things like “Negative Zone Prisons” and “Cybernetic/Clone Thor” got brought up in the conversation.

Somebody (and I can’t find who – Paul O’Brien, maybe?) described Iron Man as “Batman with Bluetooth,” and I can see some similarity there, even in such a pithy phrasing. That’s the sort of workable direction I could see the character going in without the extremes that we’ve had of late. What do you want out of Iron Man? Some people say the character is beyond saving at this point thanks to the latest Marvel crossover, others hold out hope that it’s all about Loki or a Skrull or The Hatemonger or whatever. What could Marvel do to make you want to care about the character (again, or for the first time)?