10 Mind-Blowing Iron Man Facts
9. Stan Lee Created Iron Man To Troll Readers
The best fictional characters take the audience out of its comfort zone, and that's exactly what Stan Lee was aiming to do when he co-created Iron Man in the sixties.
During the Cold War era, war was the last thing anybody wanted to read about. They turned to comics as a means of escapism, a world they could head to and shelter from the endless news reports about mounting international tensions.
Iron Man was the opposite of supply and demand. Lee designed a character who starts out as a weapons manufacturer and an asset to the army in an attempt to stir up controversy, and this form of negative psychology went down a treat with readers.
"It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military ... So I got a hero who represented that to the 100th degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, and shove him down the readers' throats and make them like him... And he became very popular."
Similarly, the first Iron Man movie arrived at a time while the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were dominating the headlines, yet it still managed to strike a chord with the moviegoing public.