It’s not easy being Tony Stark these days.
He lost his parents, he gets made into a bad guy whenever writers have an opening because they hate that he used to make weapons–which is funny when you hear Stan Lee claims to have done that on purpose to see if he could make a weapons designer pitied in the type of the hippie movement, and Marvel writers don’t seem to know what to do with him outside of making women dump on him or send him into space to die (thank you, MCU). Frankly though…it’s never been a good time to be Tony Stark.
Alcoholism, being paralyzed by his girlfriend, have a girlfriend killed just when they found a writer who can make her a good character, becoming Secretary Of Defense to protect his technology because the current one holds a personal grudge, losing and regaining his company multiple times, that old heart problem returning now and then, his armor turning sentient and wanting to merge with him like a creepy stalker, and that time he was replaced by his alternate teenage self after one of his many turns to evil only to somehow become the Tony again because of Onslaught and Heroes Reborn. It’s kind of a mess, but Owen of Owen Likes Comics attempt to dig through the mud of Teen Tony and the whole Crossing event.
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Let’s see: Tony’s been evil multiple times. Wanda Maximoff has been evil multiple times, not counting her origin of course, and even Steve Rogers joined Hydra while Bucky was a brainwashed assassin for the Soviets. I’m starting to think it’s a shorter list of superheroes who stayed heroes in the Marvel universe. Plus we know the Avengers really aren’t good for Tony given how many times the bad things that happened to him were their fault.
My exposure to this version of Teen Tony is limited to leafing through the occasional comic and the crossover he did with X-O Manowar. At the time Acclaim was doing the Marvel games and had bought Valiant Comics, with their own teenage replacement in the X-O armor and the two part Heavy Metal comic, based on their crossover video game, used time travel shenanigans involving the Cosmic Cube and the Valiant counterpart the Rock Of Reality (or maybe it was just their name for the Cosmic Cube since I can’t find evidence of it existing outside of this miniseries). However, Marvel’s side used Teen Tony while Valiant’s side still used the original owner–you know what I mean so don’t tell me about all the previous owners of the “good skin”–Aric the barbarian turned entrepreneur because comics.
I do know that he was poorly received and I think it’s one of the reasons de-aged Tony Stark and crew in Iron Man: Armored Adventures was so poorly received as well. You know, outside of that whole de-aged thing while Pepper and Happy were so far removed from their counterparts. I actually liked the show outside of that. Also, looking that old review over it’s funny how I complained about purists back then when nowadays things are so far removed from their source material I come off as one. I think now it’s more situational and an overdose of Hollywood not caring about the nostalgic, comics, and video games they so poorly adapt by slapping names onto the script they couldn’t sell to the studio prior while the studio doesn’t care. Am I the hypocrite or has it just gotten so much worse than my old reviews…like the redhead race swap thing that I still say is a result of so few redheaded characters more than a personal attack.
At any rate it’s a footnote in history. There’s a lot of talk about status quo these days but the real issue is that good changes are good and bad changes are bad. Teen Tony and brainwashed again Adult Tony were a bad change regardless of the status quo and it’s better off being a forgotten point of Marvel history outside of not doing that nonsense again. We have all new stupidity to force on Tony Stark.
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