Book Review – The Invincible Iron Man
Unlike other professions, lawyers are often known more by their passions and hobbies than by their law practice. For example, most lawyers that claim to be undefeated in litigation maintain that claim by dumping losers on associates and partners or trying very few cases. As a result, the public and the media often do not know a strong lawyer from a weak lawyer, because they do not know how to evaluate a “win” or a “loss.” This is more pronounced for lawyers that paper transactions and provide consulting services. For that reason, often lawyers are known for things other than their practice.
One of my hobbies started when I learned to read in the 1960s, comic books. Comic books appeal to many different aspects of personality. In my case, the comic books I read appealed to my idealism that there were heroes (my father was a policeman, the archetype of the ultimate hero, as every television season attests), that right and wrong could be determined, and that right would win if it was very, very careful. Marvel Comics introduced the idea that imperfect people controlling imaginable but non-existent power could overcome their imperfections and still be heroic. DC introduced this idea to a much more limited degree and in ways that were only imaginary (kryptonite, for example), which made Marvel’s approach unique and unforgettable.
The Invincible Iron Man was such a character, largely because the armor was invincible but the man inside was very vulnerable. Unlike the Kryptonian, he was that way because he was imperfect, and not because the writers struggled to make him that way. Contemporaneous with the movie, Marvel released a hardback book entitled The Invincible Iron Man. This is a collection of the earliest Iron Man comic books from the 1960s. This wonderful book is over 700 pages long, full color, and priced at full retail at $100. But, the Barnes and Noble website and the Amazon.com website offer it for just over $50 and qualifies for free shipping. It contains about three years of comic magazine issues that came out monthly and annually. If you enjoyed the movie, especially if you missed the Iron Man comics as a kid, and especially if you read a few and missed the rest or have not seen them in thirty or forty years, the volume will carry you back to your youth. (Yes, it duplicates other books issued by Marvel, but this book deserves to be allowed to supplant its weaker and smaller forerunners.)
By the way, stay through the credits at the end of the movie. The film makers threw in a teaser staring Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury (Yes, people ask, “who is Nick Fury?” The same people are likely to ask, “who is Jethro Tull?”) and there is a mention of the Avengers (Yes, people also ask “who are the “Avengers?”).
As the new movies of our era demonstrate, the comic book creators were little known and not fully understood people of genius. My only concern about the movies is that they tend to collapse literally years of plot development and character development into a few seconds. That is the reason some of the movies simply do not work. Contrast the X-Men, Iron Man and Spiderman to the first Hulk movie and the latest Superman movie, for example. Even in an action movie, plot, character development and dialogue still matter, which is why Bill Bixby as David Banner worked week after week for several television seasons, even in the absence of modern special effects.
