Tony Stark is one of comics’ great super geniuses, a character carefully balanced between accidental terrorist and alcoholic womanizer; he’s a complicated figure whose good intentions are often subverted by an uncontrollable ego.
Perhaps more than some of Marvel’s greatest characters, Tony Stark took a while to refine. His character nuances don’t spring from the iconic basis he is built upon – like stoic and optimistic Captain America – or from his age and inexperience – like Spider-Man. His best-known character traits are not linked to his armor, his invention, or even his corporate wealth. That sort of tarnished-angel nuance took decades to develop.
Marvel
Look no further than Iron Man Epic Collection: Ten Rings to Rule the World, which whiles away the years between 1976 and 1978 with a character nearly as rigid as his metallic underpants. These are ostensibly exciting stories – Stark’s company is overtaken by Midas, the Mandarin makes an appearance, and Iron Man and Jack of Hearts go to outer space – but much of the conflict ignores the internal. The man inside the armor can barely be said to factor into them at all.
This could be said of a lot of book during the Silver Age, but so much of what made Marvel succeed over their Distinguished Competition came from their commitment to “the world outside your window”. Peter Parker’s soap-opera life played just as much into his stories as his conflicts with is animal-centric supervillains. The Thing’s curmudgeonly nature colored the tone of both Fantastic Four and Marvel Two-in-One.
But early Iron Man stories are only loosely emotional. Throughout Ten Rings, Tony is caught up in an affair with ex-crime boss Madame Masque, and though we are often told that they are deeply in love, that love barely factors into the motivations of our hero. Most often, dramatic tension is determined by a super suit that has not yet evolved beyond battery chargers and rocket skates: Iron Man is always at low charge and punished to the armor’s absolute limits.
Marvel
None of this makes Ten Rings a bad collection of Iron Man comics: though these comics don’t feel as vital and foundational as Demon in a Bottle, they do a good amount of work and maintaining the classic Iron Man stable of villains, many of whom are mostly forgotten in modern stories. You don’t see the Unicorn often, and when you do, he is treated as somewhat of a joke.
It gets plenty weird.
Marvel
The treat here is seeing early-career Bill Mantlo stretching his legs as the new series writer. Mantlo had been developing his own small stable of characters for whom he had an affinity while writing Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (which is where Jack of Hearts debuted), and Iron Man gave him a struggling book to begin fleshing out. It would be years before Mantlo would enter his “weird” era – he would go on to create Rocket Raccoon and develop Micronauts – but there are glimpses of the cosmic strangeness at which he would come to excel. These stories see a writer gamely taking on the reshuffling and development of a major character who hadn’t yet become who he was meant to be.
Iron Man Epic Collection: Ten Rings to Rule the World isn’t vital reading to understand and appreciate the Golden Avenger, but it is a testament to how a major character struggled to grow into his own. Compared to similar comics of the time, Iron Man maintained the Marvel standard without excelling at it, and Ten Rings illustrates that muddy middle-ground of the Silver Age.
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