NOTE: After a couple of ill-fated restarts IRON MAN recently celebrated his 400th issue (Volume 3, #55). Tony Stark, returned from the Heroes Reborn Universe and recovered from the writer-induced Iron Boy fiasco, has now reacquired his former companies, dropping his Stark Solutions consulting gig. Despite recently ditching his fortune (don't ask), inheriting someone else's (really, don't ask!), and apparently revealing his secret identity on the five o'clock news (I said, don't ask!!) Tony seems, finally, back to the business of business. But whatever his day job, Tony Stark/Iron Man is a modern day knight, championing good over evil.

Iron Man's backstory is as follows:

While "wunderkind" weapons manufacturer Tony Stark was in Vietnam he stepped on a Communist-planted land mine. The resulting explosion sent shrapnel ripping through his body. He was then captured by fiendish commies, led by warlord Wong Chu, and forced to use his inventive genius to build them a super weapon. Sick and weak, with the shrapnel working its way toward his heart, he constructed a chest plate to keep his damaged heart working. Then, while pretending to build his captors a mighty weapon, he expanded the chest plate, devising a super powered armor suit for himself-- which enabled him to fly and fire repulsor rays. After defeating his communist captors he returned to America to fight crime and the global expansion of Communism as Iron Man, the Crimson and Gold Avenger, lovingly referred to as Shellhead.

In the Marvel Universe, Iron Man is the bodyguard of Tony Stark, a bipolar cover, reminiscent of the Clark Kent/Superman dynamic. In addition, Iron Man acts as the de facto company spokesman and corporate symbol of Stark Enterprises, an international mega-conglomerate on the cutting edge of technological breakthroughs.

Iron Man is a technology-based hero. Unlike other comic book heroes, like Superman and Spider-Man, he is a mortal man, unendowed with the magical, or mutative powers that usually surround superheroes. His strength and greatest asset (billions in the bank aside), is his brilliant mind. He has incredible equipment like holographic emitters, and the repulsor rays built into his different specialty armors, but in the end, his success depends upon old fashioned American know-how.

In keeping with Marvel's character driven comics of the Sixties, Iron Man has fought all sorts of personal battles as a superhero and as his mortal alter-ego. He's battled the Bottle and his own detereating body, having, over time, fought paralysis, a neural virus that caused his "death", and cryogenic suspension. In addition, he has often had to fight for his good name as rival companies sabotaged his corporate holdings and interests.

Recent storylines have had Shellhead shrink down to microscopic size, ala "The Fantastic Voyage," and enter the body of an ailing Captain America--where he had to fight off a monstrous viral infection. He also battled in cyberspace, when he downloaded his consciousness into the Internet to fight an artificial intelligence program that ended up stealing his body. And Tony Stark helped put an end to his Cold War involvement by coming full circle, recently opening a factory inside the old Soviet Union, and as Iron Man, finally defeating his Russian counterpart, Titanium Man, once and for all.

To keep the character fresh the writers have had to keep I.M. moving ahead, evolving into a more and more advanced piece of weaponry while finding new hurdles for him to overcome. The armored suit that allows Stark to be a superhero is always being updated, keeping it on the cutting edge of real and imagined technology. Early models contained transistors, the "miracle" devices that allowed handheld radios and the like. Today, Iron Man's suit contains top of the line computer chips and micro-processors, along with a virtual reality device that for a time allowed the one-time paralyzed Stark to operate the armor by remote control.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN is science fiction, replete with its technospeak and fantastic devices. Each issue is chocked full of words like "inertial dampers" and "magno-hydraulic pseudomusclature," but it is Stark's human qualities that drive the stories forward. While Iron Man is a mighty hero he is also a slave to technology. As the storyline has played out over the years, his body has become more and more dependent upon his machinations, trapping him into the crimson and gold shell he uses to fight evil. The very armor and technology that he harnesses to make himself powerful is, ironically, his master-- since it keeps him alive.

An early enemy of Shellhead's was The Mandarin, an arch-criminal who just happened to be an Asian Communist. From his very start, going back to his creation in the jungles of Vietnam, Iron Man was juxtaposed to Communism-- representing Truth, Justice and the American Way, fighting for freedom and capitalism during the Cold War. Times change, and as a matter of course, The Mandarin has over time evolved from a diehard Red into an Eastern mystical character trading in the Black Arts. He also renounces all technology, again a perfect enemy for our hero.

Stark is, of course, a Captain of Industry, a hardworking American inventor. What better advisary is there for a Techno-Capitalist then a communist turned anti-technology nut--The Mandarin refutes all that Stark/Iron Man is and stands for. There again, Iron Man has kept pace with the times. Where it was once very fashionable for our heroes to be capitalist commie fighters and for our villains to be "Godless Red aggressors," as the world changed so have our society's heroes and villains-- As Communism waxed and waned itself into the history books, so to did the villains of that era, only to reemerge, redefined and ready to fight a new battle. The heroes however, find themselves a bit unsure of where to find their next battles, now that the old ones have passed. Like America, Iron Man, a potential world policeman, is busy redefining himself in a world that is very much a different place from the days of the Cold War.

For further infomation on comic books, as well as biographies of the heroes and villians, check out these books: The World Encyclopedia of Comics, The Encyclopedia of American Comics, The Comic Book Heroes