GIANT SIZE MANDINGO: FRO-HEAD BECOMES SHELL-HEAD

I have a friend who is the mistress of finding online personality quizzes that go all over the map, and the latest one she discovered tells you which famous superhero you'd be depending on your answers. Intrigued, I went to http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/ and after I took the test, I came up as Iron Man.



Fucking Iron Man?!? Sure the guy's been a cornerstone of the Marvel Universe since his first appearance back in March of 1963 (see above), even being a founding member of the Avengers (that's "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," not the oddball British secret agents), but he's also a major asshole. Tony Stark is a capitalist scumbag/billionaire industrialist whose primary thrust is munitions (sure, he comes up with a hover-Porsche or the occasional Quinjet, but he still makes most of his cash by engineering high-tech weaponry), a heart-breaking playboy (my fellow comics-geek Jared points out that while Bruce Wayne pretends to be a womanizer, Tony Stark has gotten more pussy than a litter box, thereby making Stark the real deal), and a bit of a domineering control freak, yet he manages to bend over and get willingly pooched by the government at the drop of a hat.



And while I have to give Stark props for his dozens of armors that can handle just about any imaginable contingency (my favorite being the "classic" version seen above), what kind of genius gets liquored-up, straps on what amounts to a tactical assault aircraft and goes flying about firing off repulsor rays and attempting super-feats? Unadulterated hubris, sez I. I've done my share of stupid shit while bombed, but I was never once tempted to pick up a McCullogh chainsaw and attempt to replicate my favorite HUSTLER centerspread as an ice sculpture after downing a tumbler of Maker's Mark. Stark's batttle with the bottle was indeed a compelling story arc, one of only two times in all my years of comics reading that I followed Iron Man's adventures religiously.



And while Stark may have conquered his alcoholism, he has had no such success at conquering his assholism; his actions in Marvel's current "event" series, CIVIL WAR, are nothing short of appalling as he reveals himself to be a thoughtless fascist who pisses all over civil rights, violates the Constitution, and sells his colleagues in the super-human community up the river to a maximum security prison in another dimension if they don't sign up with the government's superhero registration act. The oily, Svengali-like bastard even convinced perpetual innocent Peter Parker to out himself on live national televison as Spider-Man, for fuck's sake! Technically, that act of staggering stupidity falls squarely on Peter's shoulders for going along with it, but you know what I mean.

So the bottom line is: I have always considered Iron Man to be a douchebag, and I'm going to have to figure out where I went wrong to end up with him as my super-heroic avatar. I won't lose any sleep over it, but... Oh, and take the test for yourself and write in with your results. Hey, I'm a nosy motherfucker!