Sure Iron Man is cool. Sure he gets the babes, martinis and is having a blast with his toys. We all want to be like him, especially when he's out having a pork fest with a Russian Black Widow agent! Now, tell me you wouldn't want to tell your buddies about that. Yeah, the stories can suck, yeah writers can do stupid things but hey... Iron Man is cool no matter what. And when he and GL get together for drinks.... Watch OUT! Talk about way too much drunken fun with way to much power! Boys and their toys! Gosh, you gotta love them.
Tony Stark came from NY... not effing Joisey. He entered the undergraduate electrical engineering program at MIT while only 15 years old because he was willing to accept the private tutor lessons from the Catholic Bishop there who happened to be Dean of the school.... so anyway... Tony graduated at the top of his class (no kidding, those priests have a lot of pull...) At the age of 21, Tony's parents died in a freak car accident. He immediately inherited Stark Industries, his father's company, and unfortunately missed his parent's funeral as he celebrated his new inheritance in a drunken stuppor with about 57 lap dancers from around the globe. After recovering from a drunken hangover, the first things Stark did was to buy out the company that made the faulty brakes on his parent's car and correct the mechanical problem.
While on a visit to Vietnam (.. yeah, some of you idiots might have forgotten that the US was fighting in Vietnam for more than 10 friggen years. Remember Vietnam? That little tiny country that kicked the shit out of our American white asses with bamboo, black pajamas and rubber thongs. You know... the country where we supported the French as they enslaved the Vietnamese for close to 100 years, and when those little fellers started getting uppity against the French and kicked their lazy butts from one end of Vietnam to the other, finishing them off with the 1954 massacre at Dien Bien Phu, the French amazingly gave up. Imagine that. See, the French are the only county in the world that have managed to actually lose more wars than the U.S. has ever been in... and that's a lot of wars given that we've been at "war" with someone every year since around the 1920's. How does that suck to be such losers like the French? See, the U.S. never actually loses a war... we just bomb the hell out of them, pop smoke and pull out and say we won and throw a big party, then help rebuild the country we just bombed "back to the stone age" and start exporting their raw resources.
Whatever! Marvel updated the story so that Tony got his rum and Gringo Tequila in Iraq... Gulf War Episode I). So, Stark visits Iraq to see how his new mini-transistors could assist the American war effort. Imagine that. Forget about body armor, forget about decent Hummvees that actually work, forget about getting Tobasco sauce in MRE's (something Cyclops actually did instead of Stark) and forget about even coming up with a decent plan to justify the war... let's focus on transistors.
Stark gets caught in a booby trap. Captured by a Vietnamese (Iraqi) warlord named Wong Chu, (Haji) and dying from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his heart from the booby trap, Stark was pressed into building weapons for Wong Chu, along with a fellow prisoner, the famed physicist Yin Sen (later called Ho Yinsen). However, Stark and Yin Sen used the workshop to secretly design and construct a suit of powered armor — an iron exoskeleton that gives the wearer tremendous strength as well as other abilities — that will not only keep Stark's heart beating, but also allow him to escape and acts as a mini microwave, Holly Hobby oven.
Yin Sen sacrifices himself for the drunken womanizing, war profiteering, military industrialist republican to buy Stark time to charge the bulky suit of armor, and as Iron Man, Stark kills Wong Chu and his men. Huraay! On the way back, Iron Man encounters a wounded American Air Force helicopter pilot, Jim Rhodes. Introducing himself as Stark's bodyguard, Iron Man and Rhodes manage to defend themselves against the pursuing North Vietnamese before making it back to US lines. The US then proceeds to bomb the living hell out of Southern Vietnam to help the local Vietnamese. See... it was for their own protection. You gots to kill 2 million of em so they can appreciate yer help!
On Stark's return to the U.S., he continues to improve the armor and establishing a dual identity as the adventurer and superhero Iron Man. He also greatly expands his father's company, Stark Industries, eventually renaming it Stark International.
Boy, did I get off track. Buy the glass! You won't know if it's available tomorrow. It's awesome, it's cool, it's hip, it's now! It's... the future!
Arse!