10 Bronze Age Comics That Changed DC & Marvel Forever
4. Iron Man: Demon In A Bottle
Iron Man #120-#128 (March-November 1979)
Green Arrow's sidekick wasn't the only Bronze Age hero to struggle with addiction. Over at Marvel Tony Stark was about to discover that his greatest battle would not be with the nefarious Mandarin, but rather with alcohol.
Stark had been Stan Lee's attempt to turn everything young 60s liberals hated - a mega-rich arms-dealing capitalist - into a bona fide hero. It was a moderate success and gave Marvel a reliable B-list title, but never one where its hero faced any real challenges or needed to grow beyond his initial capture and construction of the Iron Man suit.
With the Vietnam War - an event deeply tied to Iron Man's origins and ongoing adventures as an anti-communist hero - now in the past, Bronze Age Stark was finally able to become a more complex and multi-faceted hero. Demon In A Bottle turned him into a man with personal struggles and made the character far more popular as a result.
The storytelling may not have aged perfectly, and Tony does seem to kick the habit remarkably promptly in the final issue. But without Demon In A Bottle, Iron Man would almost certainly never have been considered an interesting enough hero to land his own movie franchise.
Even though Iron Man 2 chickened out on doing more than nod toward the story, without this comic the Marvel Cinematic Universe would, then, have turned out very differently.