To be brutally honest, I had never heard of him before this movie. I never read or seen his comics, never saw his cartoons (if they even existed).
sharebefore he was just a comic on the shelf I never read Iron Man except his origins in Son of Origins but I always thought Robert Downey Junior should play Him back in the mid 90's if they ever made a movie
shareIron Man had consistently better comic book sales than Wonder Woman throughout the 80s and 90s. Considering that Wonder Woman was a cultural icon and she had appeared in famous TV shows and cartoons, that's a pretty big feat for a character who never had any of those at the time.
shareI only knew about Iron Man because my obnoxious cousin was a teen when the first edition came out, and he would proudly show everyone his first issue and boast that it was going to be worth money some day. It probably would be, if he'd kept it this long, and what are the odds of that.
But yeah, it turns out that it was very smart of Marvel to use Iron Man as their vanguard film. Tony Stark was always a clever smartass with a wicked sense of humor, the sort of movie protagonist who the mainstream would like, the kind of guy whose company everyone would enjoy for two hours. He was also a polar opposite of Batman, who'd dominated the comic book movie world for a decade or two.
I remembered him from my times reading comics as a kid, and could tell you his alter ego was Tony Stark. That was all I could remember of him, and didn't know any of his villains or anything. So I'd obviously read the odd Iron Man comic, but obviously wasn't a massive fan.
A lot of people I knew had never heard of him before the 2008 movie.
As said, I think he was conisdered b-list.
Popular enough to have a cartoon in the 60s and 90s, which is more than a lot of comic book characters.
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