Iron Man (comics)

"In everyones life, Peter, theres an it... your wife leaves you, or you get cancer. Theres your life before it and your life after it. 9/11 was an it of national magnitude. And Stamford... is going to be another one."

"I did it all. They just didnt bother to call me up and find out when they wrote up the credits. It doesnt really matter. Jack Kirby created the costume, and he did the cover for the issue. In fact the second costume, the red and yellow one, was designed by Steve Ditko. I found it easier than drawing that bulky old thing. The earlier design, the robot-looking one, was more Kirbyish."

"What about you Tony Stark? Once you were do or die for America and Moms apple pie! You didnt do much soul searching back than, did you? As Iron Man you beat up the commies for democracy without ever questioning just whose democracy you were serving...."

"Kirby designed the costume, because he was doing the cover. The covers were always done first. But I created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts."

"Basically, Im here to announce that were building Iron Man [...] Not really. Maybe. Its classified."

"What if a guy had a suit of armor, but it was a modern suit of armor - not like years ago in the days of King Arthur - and what if the suit of armor made him as strong as any superhero?"

"It could be argued that Tony Stark is not really a disabled veteran because he is not serving in the military. He is a civilian - a military contractor, ho just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, it can be argued that Tony Stark/Iron Man is a soldier-actually, a modern twist of an old soldier-a knight."

"Tony Stark, makes you feel Hes a cool exec with a heart of steel As Iron Man, all jets ablaze, Hes fighting and smiting with repulsor rays! Amazing armor! Thats Iron Man! A blazing power! Thats Iron Man!"

"I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young 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 hundredth 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, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him ... And he became very popular."

"[Kirby] definitely did not do full breakdowns as has been erroneously reported about ... the first Iron Man. [In the early 1970s], Jack claimed to have laid out those stories, and I repeated his claim in print — though not before checking with Heck, who said, in effect, Oh, yeah. I remember that. Jack did the layouts. We all later realized he was mistaken. ... Both also believed that Jack had contributed to the plots of those debut appearances — recollections that do not match those of Stan Lee. (Larry Lieber did the script for the first Iron Man story from a plot that Stan gave him.) Also, in both cases, Jack had already drawn the covers of those issues and done some amount of design work. He came up with the initial look of Iron Mans armor..."

"All of Marvels new heroes of the early 1960s some how reflected and contributed to American perceptions of its Cold War enemies, but none more explicitly than Iron Man, whom historian Bradford Wright identifies as "the most political of Marvels superheroes" (222). Reflecting back on some of his co-creations in 1975, Stan Lee dubiously claimed that "Marvel Comics has never been into politics" or beholden to an "official party line" before offering a near-apology for the moral simplicity of the portrait of the Vietnam conflict in 1963s "Iron Man Is Born!" (Son of Origins 47.) A disinterested observer would find much evidence to counter these claims in the pages of Tales of Suspense between 1963 and 1968."