One dead parent trauma per customer, please.

I always think it adds resonance to a hero's mission to have some defining element of tragedy in his background, don't you?

The Joker, Batman Beyond: The Return of the Joker

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

When I was a kid, living out in the country, we didn't have access to a wide range of TV stations. We had the CBC and CTV, CKVR out of Barrie, and sometimes if the weather was right we'd get a fuzzy view of a North Bay station. Because of this, my childhood was devoid of very much in the way of animated entertainment, and by way of compensation I probably watch more Saturday morning cartoons than someone in their late 40's should, an attribute I apparently share with my older sister Dorothy.

As a result, I recently had the opportunity to witness the debut of a new animated series: Iron Man: Armored Adventures, wherein we meet a teenaged Tony Stark, whose father dies under mysterious circumstances after refusing a request to turn a standard industrial product into a weapon of mass destruction. The young Tony, who was wounded in the accident and now has a power unit implanted in his chest to keep his heart functioning, is apparently going to use his experimental armor to investigate his father's death, fight crime, do good deeds, and so forth, all while going to high school.

Now, I agree with the Joker in that it does add resonance for a hero to have an element of personal tragedy in their backstory. And, of course, Batman, the Joker's nemesis, is the ideal example. His entire life has been sacrificed on the altar of revenge, revenge on the entire criminal world for the death of his parents. This is why Robin is the perfect sidekick - Batman sees in Dick Grayson the young Bruce, once again deprived of his parents by criminals. But Robin adds additional depth: does Batman have the right to force a child into the same mold that has left him emotionally crippled?

However, having one or both parents die at the hands of criminals doesn't have to be the only tragedy that adds resonance to a hero's mission! It's tempting to categorize Superman as having the same issues as Batman, but it's not his status as an orphan that gives the character of Kal-el its depth, it's his difficulty reconciling his life as Clark Kent with his secret identity as Superman. Bruce Banner's tragedy lies in the irony of an intellectual who transforms into a huge green hulk, a creature of impulse and force rather than thought, when he's overcome by emotion. In his early days, Spiderman was constantly trying to combine his responsibility to fight crime with his need to pay the rent for himself and Aunt May, and still get his homework done. In addition to their individual issues, the X-Men offer a collective tragedy, the tragedy of a group that is considered to be not fully human - in fact, there used to be a Marvel comic called The Inhumans, that dealt with a hidden city inhabited by a race of experimental subjects, possessed of a variety of superhuman abilities but marred by genetic damage.

And Iron Man? Well, it depends which version you want to look at. In the recent movie version, Tony Stark suddenly discovers - forcibly - that his professional life as a weapons manufacturer has consequences in the real world. People, innocent people, die because of what he does for a living, and after experiencing this first-hand, he decides that he needs to take a stand against that sort of abuse.

The comic book character originates in a different time, although, interestingly, he was created in opposition to the prevailing philosophic outlook of the period. When Stan Lee of Marvel Comics created Tony Stark in the 60's, he was intended to be the poster boy for capitalism and conservatism, sort of an anti-hippy, and many of his early opponents were his Soviet equivalents. However, over time Stark became the victim of a variety of personal weaknesses, with a long story arc dealing with his alcoholism.

I can understand the desire to re-introduce the character of Tony Stark to Saturday mornings in a more youth-accessible format. As my friend Chris pointed out when discussing this at the pub, everyone's father dies, and that makes it a particularly accessible plot point for a younger audience, more so than alcoholism and commitment issues. For me, it somehow diffuses the character. However, I can't help but think that if you take this approach too far, it will get out of hand. Imagine: Bambi, shattered by the death of his mother at the hands of mysterious assassins, is transformed by his loss into a dark avenger...

- Sid