Not too long ago, Marvel gleefully threw themselves headlong into a pit of nerd rage by radically reworking three of their highest-profile heroes. The role of Captain America was taken over by longstanding ally the Falcon, a black man. Thor lost his Thor-ness (or… something; what actually happened still isn’t 100% clear) and the new Thor was a woman. And Iron Man? Well, Iron Man had already been both a black man and a woman– at least two different women, in fact– so instead they made him a jerk.
You should be reading Superior Iron Man. Tony Stark has always been a bit of an ass, and his alcoholism has been a major facet of the character dating back to the eighties (which is when Jim Rhodes took over as Iron Man in the first place.) But this version of IM, whose personality was “inverted” in what might be the only good thing to have come out of the AXIS storyline, is not only gleeful in his personality defects (and back on the sauce) but rather heartlessly predatory as a capitalist, too. The promos mostly say they’ve “turned him evil;” that’s not the case so much as allowed all of his worst instincts to dominate the character. Writer Tom Taylor is clearly having an immense amount of fun with the character, and artist Yildiray Cinar’s art makes the book look as good as I’ve seen it in years. I’ve been collecting comics since I was nine, and Iron Man #200 was the first comic I bought. I haven’t missed an issue of the series in a very, very long time. If you’re into comics at all, you should be checking this book out.