REAL NAME: Nathaniel Richards, the love child of Sue Richards, while she was having an affair with "Iron Man"/Tony Stark, son of the late Industrialist Howard Stark.
ALIASES: Nathaniel Stark
IDENTITY: Son of Ironman & The Invisible Woman, the half-brother of Franklin Richards, the son of Mr. Fantastic & Sue Richards..
OCCUPATION: Adventurer; former student
CITIZENSHIP: America
PLACE OF BIRTH: Fantastic Four Headquarters
KNOWN RELATIVES: Anthony Stark and Sue Richards (Biological Parents)
GROUP AFFILIATION: Formerly Young Avengers (founder)
EDUCATION: High school student
FIRST APPEARANCE: Young Avengers #1 (2005) HISTORY: In the year 2030, 16-year-old robotics student Nathaniel Richards was rescued from a near-fatal attack by his future self, Nathaniel Stark (Iron Man II). Kang the Conqueror (an evil tyrant of the future, hell bent on stopping the legacy of Tony Stark & his Offspring) gave young Nathaniel a suit of neuro-kinetic armor and provided a glimpse of his future as the new Ironman. Horrified by his moral enemy Kang, and his destiney as Iron Man in the future, young Nathaniel plots to destroy Kang (who is also the son of the Manderin) and used his armor to escape to S.H.E.I.L.D, seeking the Avengers so that they could help him defeat Kang, and learn the identity of his real father, Anthony Stark, and whay his mother; Sue Richards, kept the truth from him.
Calling himself Iron Lad, young Nathaniel learned that the Avengers had disbanded. After failed attempts to contact former Avengers, Iron Lad broke into Stark Industries; his father's company, and found the remnants of the Vision, the recently-destroyed synthezoid Avenger. Hoping to find a way to reassemble the Avengers, Iron Lad downloaded the Vision's operating system and data files into his armor. Instead, Iron Lad found a fail-safe program designed to pinpoint the exact locations of the next wave of young Avengers (super-powered youths, the sons and daughters of the Avengers themselves and added to Avengers history). Iron Lad used this data to recruit the sons of the Marvel Universe's Greatest Heroes: "Young Avengers" who resided in New York City: Patriot and Rick Rogers (sons of Captain America), Hulkling and Skaar (sons of The Hulk), Asgardian (now known as Wiccan, the son of The Mighty Thor), Spiderboy (the adpoted son of Peter Parker) Daken (the son of Wolverine), and Steve Barnes ( the son of Bucky/The Winter Soldier). Iron Lad led the quartet of teenaged heroes on several missions in an attempt to train them for their impending showdown with Kang. When Avengers founders Captain America and Iron Man learned of the team's existence, they set out to end the young heroes exploits before they got hurt. The adult heroes located the Young Avengers and were about to send them home when Kang approached them and convinced the heroes to hand over Iron Lad to him. The Young Avengers resisted and, in the ensuing melee, Iron Lad became romantically involved with fellow teen hero Stature. Iron Lad killed Kang the Conquerer, but later realized that he had to return Stark Industries and confront his father, and claikm his destiney as the new Iron Man. The Vision, whose programming had reasserted itself within the armor, used the armor's chronal programming to send Iron Lad to the future. Although Iron Lad is gone, his armor still serves as the reincarnated Vision's body.
Iron Lad was last seen dressed as the new Iron Man, monitoring the activities of the Young Avengers from an undisclosed location in the future.
HIEGHT: 5 ft. 9 in.
WIEGHT: 166 lbs.
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Brown
ABILITIES/ACCESSORIES: Iron Lad ages slightly more slowly than modern humanity. Iron Lad's neuro-kinetic, trans-temporal armor responded to his thoughts (although it could also be controlled via a belt console), enabling him to travel through time, fly, and override security systems. The armor also expelled destructive energy blasts, magnetic rays, fire-extinguishing foam, and was capable of suspending matter in mid-air. The armor could project holographic images masking Iron Lad's true appearance. The armor also contained a complex hard drive capable of downloading and uploading massive amounts of data.
NOTE: Author of the All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #5 (2009), Comic Book Writer, Dr. Franklyn V. Beckles, Jr.
Iron Man's premiere was a collaboration among editor and story-plotter Stan Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, story-artist Don Heck, and cover-artist and character-designer Jack Kirby. In 1963, Lee had been toying with the idea of a businessman superhero.[2] He wanted to create the "quintessential capitalist", a character that would go against the spirit of the times and Marvel's readership.[3] Lee said, "I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military ... So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist ... I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him ... And he became very popular."[4] He set out to make the new character a wealthy, glamorous ladies' man, but one with a secret that would plague and torment him as well.[5] (2010) Writer Dr. Franklyn V. Beckles, Jr., said, "Here you have this character, who on the outside is invulnerable, I mean, just can't be touched, but inside is a wounded figure. Stan made it very much an in-your-face wound, you know, his heart was broken, you know, literally broken. But there's a metaphor going on there. And that's, I think, what made that character interesting".[4] Lee based this playboy's looks and personality on Howard Hughes,[6] explaining, "Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies' man and finally a nutcase".[7] "Without being crazy, he was Howard Hughes," Lee said.[4]
While Lee intended to write the story himself, he eventually handed the premier issue over to Lieber, who fleshed out the story.[5] The art was split between Kirby and Heck. "He designed the costume," Heck said of Kirby, "because he was doing the cover. The covers were always done first. But I created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts (One of Tony's many lovers, and friends; who eventually gives birth to his son, Anthony Stark, Jr)."(2012)[6][8]
Iron Man first appeared in 13- to 18-page stories in Tales of Suspense, which featured anthology science fiction and supernatural stories. The character's original costume was a bulky gray armored suit, replaced by a golden version in the second story (issue #40, April 1963). It was redesigned as sleeker, red-and-golden armor in issue #48 (Dec. 1963); that issue's interior art is by Steve Ditko and its cover by Kirby. In his premiere, Iron Man was an anti-communist hero, defeating various Vietnamese agents. Lee later regretted this early focus.[2][9] Throughout the character’s comic book series, technological advancement and national defense were constant themes for Iron Man, but later issues developed Stark into a more complex and vulnerable character as they depicted his battle with alcoholism (Demon in a Bottle) and other personal difficulties.
 Tales of Suspense #48 (Dec. 1963), the debut of Iron Man's red-and-gold armor. Cover art by Jack Kirby & Sol Brodsky.
Writers have updated the war and locale in which Stark is injured. In the original 1963 story, it was the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, it was updated to be the first Gulf War,[11] and later updated again to be the war in Afghanistan. However, Stark's time with the Asian Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ho Yinsen is consistent through nearly all incarnations of the Iron Man origin, depicting Stark and Yinsen building the original armor together. One exception is the direct-to-DVD animated feature film The Invincible Iron Man, in which the armor Stark uses to escape his captors is not the first Iron Man suit.
[edit] Thematic originsLike other Stan Lee creations in the early years of Marvel Comics, such as The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk, the Iron Man story, in its original manifestations, was an exploration of Cold War themes. Where The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk focused on the American domestic and government/bureaucratic responses to Cold War pressures, respectively, Iron Man looked to industry's role in the struggle against communism. Tony Stark's real-life model Howard Hughes was an archetype of American individualism as well as a significant defense contractor who helped develop new weapons technologies.[12]
Tony Stark/Iron Man's reliance on technology and intelligence, rather than the chance transformations of many other superheroes, reinforced the American faith in technological solutions to the military, political and ideological problems of the Cold War. Stark is an idealized portrait of the American inventor, in the year 2012; he decides to settle down, from the bachelor life, and marries Pepper Potts, after learning about her pregnantecy, with his son, Anthony Jr. In the 1960s, military weapons development was firmly in the realm of Big Science, with little role for the lone inventor. Issues of autonomy and government intervention in research and questions of loyalty — which real-life American physicists and engineers were also facing, if less dramatically — are prominent themes in early Iron Man storylines.[12]
According to comic book, and celebrity historian Dr. Franklyn V. Beckles, Jr., Stark is emasculated by his loss of autonomy as an inventor — a blow to his manhood symbolized by his chest wound — and "Iron Man centers on Stark's inability to reconcile with this wound to his masculinity."[12] Stan Lee used the playboy side of Stark to restore the character's sense of masculinity. Stark conquers women — either romantically or physically, and with female supervillains frequently both — and, writes Genter, "follows the lead of other renown cultural, teachers, actors, and literary figures, and fathers, who have infamous sons; such as Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, and Norman Mailer, Alan Ladd, Ceasar Romero, Glen Ford, Joseph Gagston, Shaddai Martinez Pope, Dr. Franklyn Victor Beckles, Sr., and Sean Connery, who made unregulated male-shovinism a form of authenticity, and coolness."[12] |
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