“Hello, I’m buying this.”
“Ohhhhhhh, Happy Hogan, huh?”
“Yeah, I mean…”
“Oh, I’d better watch out! Ha ha ha.”
“I just want to buy the new Iron Man.”
“Okay, buddy. Ha ha, Happy Hogan! Ohhhh noooo.”
This was the conversation between a Waldenbooks employee and myself in 1986. Written out, it probably doesn’t seem all that bad. But make no mistake: I was being mocked. There were a lot of eyerolls happening. Look, the cover of Iron Man #210 is not the coolest of comic book covers, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Iron Man is in trouble and his friend Happy Hogan is making threats to a supervillain that he probably can’t back up. But when I was 11 years old, I wasn’t really equipped with the necessary skills to handle a situation like that and explain this all to a person who seemed like an adult. (Funny, back then all I knew was the Waldenbooks employee was “an adult,” but in reality he was probably 22.) It also didn’t help that my parents had just moved, in the middle of the school year, which meant I had zero friends at the time.
(A short aside about that: I am an only child and went to four different school systems between kindergarten and 12th grade. But that year was the worst move: Not only was it in the middle of the school year — when the move is during summer break, you can always seek out the other “new kids” on the first day — but the grade I was in was considered junior high where we had just moved from, but it was elementary school where we had just moved to. So, yes, I had to go back to elementary school and was put smack dab in a room of strangers just one random day. I remember everyone was wearing Jams. Remember Jams? Jams were not a thing yet where I had come from. Anyway, it was awful.)
I don’t want to get too sentimental (yuck), but comic books were the one thing, then, that I had that made me happy and didn’t remind me so much of how I wanted to move back to where we had came from more than anything in the world. And now this Waldenbooks employee had taken that away from me, too. I didn’t even buy the issue. I didn’t want it after that. Everything about Springfield, Mo. was just, at that point, awful.
Later, when I met up with my mother at Dillard’s (or J.C. Penney’s, or whatever department store she was shopping at) she asked why I didn’t buy Iron Man. I told her a quick version of the story, which of course prompted her to march me back to Waldenbooks, buy the comic, then demand an apology — which of course always makes things a little worse.
I think about that day a lot any time one of these controversies comes along in which a small, vocal group is upset over the casting in a superhero movie. It happens a lot. And everyone pays attention to it for a number of reasons: the biggest two being a) genuine outrage over something so obviously birthed in some sort of bigotry, and b) because it can provide attention and traffic for the author to point these things out. I don’t think “B” is the reason these things get written, but “B” is the reason these things haven’t been stopped by editors saying, “Hey, we need you to work on something else today.” And I realize I’m doing it myself right now. And it’s because of “A,” but “B” allows me to do it. What a world. (I do honestly think we give too much attention to these morons, but once it’s “a thing,” it’s “a thing.”)
I still enjoy reading comics: sometimes from that era, sometimes from this one. (I’ve really been enjoying the new DC Rebirth titles.) But I realize comic books aren’t made for me. Now, I still enjoy them, even though I realize they are not for me. They are most likely not for you, either. They are for those kids out there who just want to feel nice about something they connect with for a few minutes every month without an adult fucking it up for them. (And don’t tweet at me things like, “Oh, what about The Dark Knight Returns? That’s not for kids.” You know what I mean here.)
And that’s where a lot of this nonsense comes from, “Well, when I was a child, Mary Jane Watson had red hair. So that’s what I like.” Great. No one cares. This isn’t about you. How does this affect your life in any meaningful way? If I had it my way, in Spider-Man: Homecoming, J. Jonah Jameson would be fighting Spider-Man with his robot. But it doesn’t matter what I want. This isn’t about me.
It’s crazy, but I’m still mad about that day. I’m sure it was just some dumb kid making a joke, but he made me feel foolish for liking what I liked. He made a tough couple of months just a little bit worse. I stopped reading comics like I used to, at least for a while, all because “an adult” had some opinions on Iron Man #210.
EPILOGUE:
This doesn’t have much to do with the larger point, except that I had a happy ending with Iron Man #210, which now hangs in a frame in my apartment. In 2010, I was writing for Vanity Fair and interviewed Jon Favreau for Iron Man 2. During the interview, a truncated version of the Iron Man #210 story came up, which ended with Favreau yelling to his assistant that he needed that issue because Happy Hogan was on the cover (a character he played in the films).
The next year, I spoke to Favreau for a Wired magazine story about Cowboys & Aliens and he made sure to tell me that Iron Man #210 was hanging on his wall.
In 2014, I hosted a Q&A for Favreau’s Chef. After the Q&A, back in the greenroom, for my birthday — knowing now both of our relationships with that issue — my girlfriend asked Favreau if he’d sign a copy of it for me. He did, and it says, “Mike, think of me when you look at THIS,” with an arrow pointing to Happy Hogan’s armpit.
And now when I think of Iron Man #210, I think of that armpit instead of an employee at Waldenbooks.
Also: I started reading comics again.
Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.
