It was tough being an Iron Man fan back in the day.
While the kids who were into Wolverine got to see their boy slice up hordes of awesome ninjas, Iron fans got to see beads of sweat roll down alcoholic alter-ego Tony Stark's forehead as he fought off Jim Beam. While the Spider-Man crowd was thrilling to Todd McFarlane's exciting new style, we were watching Stark's own armour give him crippling nerve damage.
The indignity extended to video games. During the Atari 2600 era, you could have a bleeping, blorping, barely comprehensible adventure as Superman, or you could scale the Daily Bugle building to do battle with the Green Goblin as Spidey. As an Iron Man fan, I had to use my imagination - I taped a hand-drawn Iron Man logo over the label on my Berzerk cartridge, and pretended the sentry robots were AIM Mandroids. Good game.
