Tony Stark’s Heart - The Early Years
January 15th, 2008
How big a plot point was Tony Stark’s injured heart in the first few years of Iron Man’s adventures? It was rare to find an issue that didn’t mention his heart at least once, if not twice or three times. And not just “mention it” as much as pound home the plot point over and over and over again. That Stan Lee — not much for subtlety, was he?
From Iron Man’s first two years of solo adventures, Tales of Suspense #39 to Tales of Suspense #72, comes a little collage I like to call Tony’s Telltale Heart:
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January 16th, 2008 at 2:02 am
I always liked that about Tony. Every time he went out to fight the good fight, he was risking his life and facing death. His armor was always on the verge of running out of power, after all, and his opponents almost always made him use every last bit of energy in his batteries. He never had to go out there and take the chances he did, but he always did because he could turn his disability into a super-ability!
January 16th, 2008 at 6:39 am
So…Tony Stark has a problem with his heart? Is that what I’m getting? Huh. Who knew.
January 16th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Wow, man. That was a lot of work to make that post!
What with being tied to the need to find an outlet and all, I wonder if Stark has problems in Europe (or is the Iron Man suit universal). Perhaps the new Iron Man suit should be a hybrid.
January 16th, 2008 at 7:53 am
Is there some reason Tony never considered a heart transplant? Other than the Gilligan’s Island rule? I mean, it must be a million trillion times easier to have a pacemaker implanted than wear the Iron Man armor. I’m curious to see how the movie plans to deal with this.
Also, my alltime fav updating on Tony’s suit: coating it with gold spraypaint. I LOVED IT!
January 16th, 2008 at 10:46 am
http://www.marvel.com/i/content/st/2060new_storyimage0341082_full.jpg
Looks like there’s something, er, vaguely around his heart. Chest. Area. (My god, I should just not comment on this blog.)
January 17th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I notice that at few times the writer is confusing what the armour actually does. Few times the comics seem to suggest that the heart *itself* needs the energy keep beating, instead of to keep a piece of shrapnel *off* the heart.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Forget his heart, what about hygine? How in the world did he keep that huge metal wife-beater on for 10 years without getting some sort of infection, or at the very least without it affecting his playboy lifestyle.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Has Tony Stark ever gone to the UK only to find that he didn’t have the right adapter for his chest plate?
MUST… FIND… THE RIGHT… PLUGS
January 18th, 2008 at 4:32 am
I don’t know how reasonable this is medically, but I think the original idea was that there were a lot of little metal shrapnel fragments in his chest that were slowly working their way towards his heart as breathed, moved around, etc. And that there were just too many of them to remove (given the surgical technology of the time) without completely ripping up his chest. The chest plate “magnetic field” kept all the fragments from moving further in or pressing on his heart, but couldn’t extract them. So a heart transplant would just end up with him having an injured new heart as remaining pieces of shrapnel in his chest damaged it.
Something like what happened to the guy who Dick Cheney shot in a hunting accident, where a piece of bidrshot actually moved in the victim’s chest and caused him to have a heart attack later.
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Imagine how effective Iron Man could be if he wasn’t wasting so much time and energy on all that exposition!
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