Superheroes Behaving Badly II: Iron Man

A number of impressive achievements in comics decorate the resume of comics writer Dennis O'Neil. In the seventies, his efforts managed to pull DC Comics' Green Lantern out of the fifties and into the sixties. The thematic, if sometimes heavy-handed Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics that O'Neil, with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, produced to great critical success though less convincing commercial results, remain the showpiece of his work in comics, in that they broke ground in placing superhero comics in the tense center of the social and cultural issues of the day.

O'Neil as well produced a lesser-known, and almost certainly less well-received, piece of work in Marvel Comics' Iron Man title where he dragged Iron Man's alter ego, Tony Stark, through ruin, mostly thanks to the contents of a bottle.

As much audacity as O'Neil showed in following this story line wherever it seemed to lead, elements of the story do leave a bad taste in the memory, since it included a run perhaps six months long in which Tony Stark did little more than stagger around in a drunken stupor and a filthy suit. Thus this piece belongs within the series of the "Superheroes Behaving Badly" columns.

Crumbling under Pressure

Although alcoholism doesn't necessarily require a specific triggering trauma, it makes for a more interesting story if a hero's woes cascade like a line of falling dominoes. The picture above summarizes the events that got Tony Stark to dedicate more and more of his attentions to the contents of bottles; a rival industrialist named Obadiah Stane managed to wrest control of Iron Man's corporation, Stark Enterprises, after Stark had spent the years since 1972 trying to direct the company away from military contracts and arms development (a consequence of the revisionist story where Stark decided that the war in Viet Nam served no purpose beyond directionless and nihilistic mayhem directed at fellow beings - a position reflecting the changed views of Marvel Comics' writers and editors, few of whom liked the notion of a hero who wanted to fight the spread of communism).

Whereas Stark, in the past, had dealt with problems by using his head and/or putting on his armor and cracking a few heads as Iron Man, this problem proved altogether intractible by methods heretofore brought into play against political, violent, and corporate threats. For Stark to crumble, Dennis O'Neil had to turn the character on his head. The result sometimes proved distasteful - fans of a more classic Iron Man did not want to see the character give up and have something like booze take control of an increasingly decadent life of a character who once represented something of a wish-fulfillment. The Silver Age playboys mostly had moved on to other things, like marriage (Dr. Henry Pym) or poverty (Oliver Queen). Stark seemed the last to reflect the sixties ideal of the wealthy bachelor who fought crime both as a duty and as a hobby. Even Batman no longer had much fun in either of his identities (thanks in great portion to O'Neil's redefinition of the character in the aftermath of "Batmania").

The Binge on the Edge of Forever

Innovations in comics may seem senseless because new things can't fall back on the balance of an established and time-tested formula. In the late seventies and early eighties, no one really knew how long to allow a superhero to follow a pathetic drunken debauch because, thanks to the Comics Code Authority, such a thing had not happened during the life of the superhero comics medium. Tony Stark, in the immediate aftermath of Stane's takeover, got plastered. He stayed plastered. He stayed away from home, wandering around the city, getting dirtier and more unshaven.

He did this, and just about nothing else, for six months in the Iron Man title. The binge became grotesque. Surely, a reader might have thought, Stark would either pass out and end up in the tank or sober up, at least for a few pages, in the next issue. Yet in the next issue, and again in the third, and again, and again, and again, Stark just wandered around, encrusted with stubble and dirt, in that same dingy suit.

Dennis O'Neil later admitted that this particular binge went on too long.

If, however, Stark got to stagger around Manhattan in an ethanol-induced delirium, other heroes got to deal with the consequences of this default of purpose. In Avengers, various heroes confronted Iron Man for his drunkenness and absenteeism. After he disappeared altogether, his pilot (and stand-in) Jim Rhodes took the identity of Iron Man, a role he would serve more than once. Even after the initial six-month bender, Stark would consistently let himself and his friends down, more so since Rhodes began covering for him as Iron Man. By Iron Man #170, Tony Stark decided that the entire Iron Man business interfered too much with his drinking.

Tony's Choice

The first binge, and some of its more immediate consequences, having passed, and some Iron Man readers having moved on to less depressing and more conventional superhero books, Dennis O'Neil went on to bring out of this thread the resolution that would give it all meaning.

The call of heroism hadn't kept Tony from drinking (he forwarded this call to Rhodey in #170). The reproach of Captain America, the conscience of the Avengers, had failed to reach him in Iron Man #172. Neither James Rhodes nor Rhodes' mother - admittedly an unlikely candidate to incline Stark to straighten out - could talk any sense into him in Iron Man #173. Stark at this point listened to nothing more than his urge to drink.

If Tony's first on-panel binge would fail to compel, and descended soon into a perplexing tedium not characteristic of the storytellers who put it on the printed page, he would subsequently face a crisis that would put the whole thing in context.

Tony had embarked on another binge by issue #176, putting himself to dubious use of his time such as attempting to absorb the philosophy of other drunks, making fifty-dollar bets with cops about how long he could remain sober, and generally acting thoroughly worthless. A little bit of alcohol had stripped away the heroic finish from the man altogether.

Yet in this follow-up debauch, Stark ran into a foil who would cast much-needed light on his new condition. He found Gretl Anders, a fellow boozer late in her pregnancy, with whom he could down a few rounds. Some last trace of his concern for his fellow man inclined him to track her down when she, off on a binge of her own, vanished into the streets of Manhattan in the hours immediately preceding a blizzard.

In Iron Man #182, Stark finally bottomed out. Gretl, ready to deliver, had vanished into the streets; Tony, seeing in her the only friend he had who would not hold his boozing against him, followed, attempting to save her from the oncoming storm. Too late to get indoors, Tony found her, just as the blizzard hit, and the pair sheltered in an alley as she went into a labor that killed her.

The cover read "Tomorrow Tony Stark will be sober...or dead." The this piece of comics art left out an element of the equation: Tony found himself crouching in an alley, his (presumed) only friend dead, with a newborn infant that might not survive the night.

This put Tony in a bind he failed to recognize before. Earlier, he might dissipate and convince himself that he only harmed himself with his booze jags. Giving up, under those circumstances, only meant abandoning himself, an easy task in those days when he did not value his own life. However, the infant queered all of his excuses. If Tony gave up, as he had for almost a year and a half of stories, the baby would die. Tony's abandonment of himself entailed the betrayal of others who had to play the game through no consent of their own.

Tony huddled, freezing through a horrible night, weakened by the destructive effects of long spans of poor sleep, ill-nutrition, and the other baggage left to burden him from his incessant bingeing. The easy path, which he had chosen for some previous months, would allow him to give in to the elements and cease the fighting to live. In the end, the hero in Tony came through. Tony chose to live so that Gretl's child would live, and brought the child to a hospital.

A worthless being, he saw, can redeem himself through his effect on others. The altruism that moved him to heroism in the first place would not let him let others die. Sober for the first time in what seemed like forever, Stark walked from the hospital into a world where he mattered again.

Relapses and Redemption

Alcoholism, as defined by Twelve Steps and the conventional definitions, does not subside. An alcoholic, in this view, never becomes anything other than an alcoholic, although qualifiers may define his syndrome as within the "recovering" or "practicing" category.

Comics, by their definition, do not often portray matters realistically. Men who turn green, fly, or change into various creatures and objects do not appear in the objective world in adequate numbers for a consensus to develop attesting to their existence. However, the consequences differ for different loose interpretations of reality. If a comic says a man can, under some conditions, travel as fast as a wave of light, this does not enable real human beings to rationalize their self-destruction. For those things that do occur both in the real world and in printed comics, however, a greater burden of truth falls on comics storytellers. Therefore, in a superheroic idiom that allows cures for death, writers and editors wisely choose not to allow miraculous remedies to strip the alcoholic character of his enduring affliction.

This therefore obliges all talents handling Iron Man, whether in his own or in tangent publications, to nod occasionally to the topic. Tony Stark recurrently deals with the demons of temptation; further, he presumes to advise the occasional character who walks too near the chemical curse he inflicted upon himself during an earlier period in his history.

This calls for some balance between creating the comics readers prefer to consume and comics that attempt responsible portrayals. Which, after all, works more towards a socially positive end: fulfilling a reader's wish to see all problems vanish by the end of the episode by telling readers something shared wisdom considers untrue ("Alcoholism can completely heal"), or disturbing the reader with tales that reflect a reality more akin to our own ("Alcoholism lingers during the entire lifetime of its victims")?

Given these two options, one need not make a great intellectual leap to suggest that enduring (or bypassing) stories that nod to Tony Stark's alcoholism represents a lesser evil.

After the fashion of good stories, though, this tale did more than dramatize the symptoms of a syndrome that has beset human beings probably longer than civilization has existed. Morbid voyeurism did not move this story, nor the nihilism of a moralistic fable in which a man sins and therefore brings about his own end. O'Neil intended better and he got it, turning a grotesque story of self-destruction into one of redemption and showing that a superhero behaving badly can prove his heroism by his refusal to stay down.