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

Have you heard the one about...

"Sorry I'm late, I was doing a Vanity Fair piece."

-Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Iron Man.

Every now and then when someone accuses me of telling jokes all the time, I defend myself by defining a joke as "a structured anecdote with a punch line" - everything else is just conversation. According to that definition, the movie adaptation of Iron Man is a joke: it's a structured anecdote with a pretty good punch line.

I don't mean to suggest that the movie is either an intentional or unintentional comedy, although it does have the usual number of in-jokes (Stan Lee does his usual walk-on, this time as Hugh Hefner, and a shot of a youthful Tony Stark and his first circuit board shows Tony posing with Bill Gates) and a surprising amount of physical humour. Impressively, the humour in no way detracts from the flow of story and never has any feeling of television-Batman-and-Robin parody.

I think that a lot of the credit for the movie's success has to go to Robert Downey Jr. There's been a lot of media discussion about how the choice of Downey was a risk, based on his well-known issues with substance abuse and subsequent imprisonment, but it makes him an oddly apt choice to play a playboy millionaire character whose alcoholism represented a major story arc in the comic book version. In fact, there's even a reference in the movie to Downey's Burger King epiphany. His portrayal of Tony Stark is by turns flippant and earnest, but has an underlying air of determination that comes across perfectly. The script is loaded with tossed-away one liners from Stark that Downey delivers so casually that I suspect an unattentive audience (such as the one I sat in this evening) won't even notice them.

Similarly, Jeff Bridges does a brilliant job as Obadiah Stane, Stark's mentor and business partner, giving the character a chillingly plausible air of corporate evil. I have to say that the shaved head and full beard help considerably, in that he's almost not recognizable in the role.

And the armour itself? Well, really, it IS the main element of the story, and the three versions all perform admirably. (There's an alarming similarity between the armour-assembly process in the movie and the one from the Blizzard Starcraft II trailer, but that's a separate issue.) The "final" model - final in quotes because it's in pieces by the end of the movie, and apparently sequels are planned - is convincingly detailed, articulated and transformable. Full credit to everyone for trying to figure out a plausible system that would allow someone to actually fly in a suit of armour.

All that being said, Glyneth Paltrow doesn't work as Pepper Potts so completely that I tried to ignore her. Terence Howard as James Rhodes felt all wrong too, I would have preferred someone like Gary Dourdan from CSI, someone with some physical presence. There's a clumsy attempt to establish Tony's post-trauma personality as having an element of fanaticism to it, but it only pops up for a single scene and then falls by the wayside.

Regarding the original comic book character, if you'd asked me last week where Iron Man's origin lay, I would have unhesitatingly said, "Korean War, but they updated it to Vietnam sometime in the 70's - probably Iraq in the movie version." Sadly, the weight of online commentary suggests that it was always Vietnam - sadly because it would have been a better comment on American interventionism for them to have updated the story from Korea to Vietnam to, as it turns out, Afghanistan. The joke is that as Obadiah Stane points out during the climax of the movie, the Tony Stark who announces that his company will no longer manufacture weapons then turns around and makes "the greatest weapon of all". Let's face it, when Iron Man fires a missile into a tank and it blows up, nobody inside the tank is walking away from that. I have to wonder if they're going to address that dichotomy in sequels.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the movie version, especially since it takes things back to the basics. I stopped buying comics a few years back, mostly out of boredom, but from what I gather some of the attempts by writers to alleviate the boredom issue have been more creative than intelligent, unfortunately. (Come on, Teen Iron Man?)

Oh, and the punchline? Sorry, I'd hate to spoil the joke for anyone - and it's a pretty good joke.

- Sid