Charlie Stross v. Tony Stark

[muck_a_luck]

It was brought to my attention by my husband that Charlie Stross apparently declined to write for Iron Man because apparently he hates Tony Stark. Huband had no more details, so I went hunting.

Maybe this is old news to members of this group, but here's a link to me and a friend IM'ing on the topic.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Do you have links to the quotes about this?

The only thing I know about Stross is that he's British and there was the whole puppy pee thing, which I felt he handled with a good deal of class.

[valtyr]

I hit up Google and here. Ctrl-F "Iron".

[muccamukk]

Crt F "Tony" works better. For those too lazy:

I will confess to having turned down the offer of an entry into comic writing a few years ago -- Marvel offered me "Iron Man", but the closer I got to the coal face the more I realised I detested Tony Stark and everything he stood for.

...

Tony Stark is Donald Rumsfeld's Mary Sue. Or maybe Dick Cheney's.

I'd have had to write him as some kind of cyborg Viktor Bout figure, a cigar-chomping kitten-eating villain hell-bent on magnifying his wealth by imposing disaster capitalism regimes on hapless foreign victims via his accomplices minions at the WTO: sort of a modernized version of 1920's Bolshevik anti-capitalist propaganda. I don't think Marvel's fan base would have been too happy with that, circa 2006 (before the wheels had clearly fallen off the Iraq occupation).

I prefer China Mieville's alternative version.

...

are you seriously claiming that you wouldn't want to be a billionaire playboy scientific genius superhero who saves the world on a regular basis? If not, why not??

How about this?

Tony Stark is a dry drunk, and mean with it, prone to outbursts of violent behaviour. He has used his gift for invention to build a large corporate entity to keep him in the style he wants to become accustomed to, rather than, for example, productizing and distributing the power source in his suit in order to give everybody in the world energy too cheap to meter and an easy route to a carbon-neutral future. His idea of "saving the world" generally involves breaking things and beating people up or killing them -- generally people who are members of groups that do not share his elite insider status or who are trying to carve out a niche for themselves outside the framework of capitalist imperialism that he is a beneficiary of. In other words, he's a greedy bully who'd be a lot less objectionable if he did with his wealth what Bill Gates is doing. (It's kind of hard to object to funding the development of an arsenal of vaccines to eliminate childhood diseases in the developing world that kill roughly 70 million people per decade.)

More to the point, the whole superhero shtick? Leaves me somewhat cold.

On the whole, it's probably best that he writes his thing, and leaves superheroes alone, as it's difficult to have it without punching people a lot.

[valtyr]

Yeah, objecting that a character in Marvel or DC superhero comics solves problems with violence and doesn't fix the world with his powers seems... to be missing the point rather.

[muccamukk]

I wonder if he ever read the Brubaker run on Authority where they decided to try to fix the world with their powers.

[valtyr]

There was also an Alex Ross trade where Superman tried to fix the world. It was called Superman: World Peace or some such thing.

[muck_a_luck]

It's interesting the movie is addressing some of these criticisms - Tony *is* working on "productizing" the arc reactor.

That said, teh adventures of Tony and Pepper buidling a carbon-neutral future, while very lovely, are totally different genre of adventure. We don't have comics about Bill and Melinda and their vaccinations, either, and if there was a movie about it, it would be a different crowd.

[muck_a_luck]

OMG, typos, sorry.

[muccamukk]

The movie also has Tony claiming "I privatized world peace!" which Rumsfeld has being trying to do for forty years via corporate outsourcing of the US armed forces. When Tony was secretary of defense in the comics (about when Stross was asked to write him), he was all to happy to see national sovereignty as someone else's problem. This is not the first time I've heard Iron Man generally and the films specifically called neo-imperialist or even racist.

In Avengers he as actually working on clean energy though. And for all you can say about Fraction, he does have Tony exporting medical products across the world, like mini refrigeration units to transport blood and vaccines and such. The problem is for Tony to effect actual change on the world, the whole premise of the universe (that it's more or less the same as ours) would have to change, which isn't that sustainable for Marvel.

[muck_a_luck]

valtyrFound the first item that I found, and I cry to see how much more there was there. Charlie Stross is SO MEAN!!! There was also a second blogh entry, here. This is the one with the funny Rumsfeld Mary Sue comment.

Also, muccamukk, when I found this community I was shocked to see a user name cousin! My immediate thought - "I hope they don't think I tried to steal their name!!!" O.o :D

[muccamukk]

I think he's kind of funny, and may give his books a try at some point. Probably not a great choice for writing Big Two comics though. I think when Marvel was fishing for him (based on what he said about the timing) they ended up picking Warren Ellis, who then wrote the Extremis arc, so that worked out.

User name cousins must stick together!

[grackle]

His books are amazing, I recommend giving his "Laundry" series a try.