This made me very happy.

In my younger years I was into Iron Man, big time. Then as now, if I had to read superhero comics then the less powerful they were the better. Flawed, troubled, weakened, limited heroes make for better stories. And they don't come much more FTWL than Tony Stark.

When we first encounter him he's fiscally secure but morally bankrupt, selling weapons to fuel the American war in SE Asia (in the forth-coming movie that'll be the Middle East). A shrapnel wound necessitates an improvised mobile life-support system (as pictured), which in time becomes the more finessed suit of armour that serves as his heroic alias.

Iron Man is perhaps the least healthy superhero ever conceived. Following his initial injury, Stark fell victim to depression, developed full-blown alcoholism, succumbed to a heart attack and after recovering was shot by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, shattering his spine and leaving him in a wheelchair. Like the original invention that saved his shredded torso, he invented a spinal replacement that gave him the use of his legs back but left him vulnerable to a degenerative nerve disease that eventually left him pretty much dead from the brain down.

On top of this, the multi-millionaire industrialist has enjoyed all the excesses that lifestyle entails, most especially serial womanising (see above). His moral complexity also marks him out as almost unique in comics. Neither a brooding anti-hero nor a paragon of virtue, Stark is probably best described as believing in the law more than in justice. In his time he's been made US secretary of defence and director of a counter-espionage agency, and currently (under the auspices of writer Brian Michael Bendis) he's been revealed as one of a small group of "Illuminati" who pretty much run the world. His hard-line adherence to government policy has seen him spearhead an initiative to create a registered police force of superheroes.

But all that went over my head as a kid. I just liked the dashing moustachioed guy in the red and gold tin suit, and all the gimmicks... The "uni-beam" in his chest, the "repulsor rays" in his gauntlets ("The further they go, the harder they hit!").

The affair began in the pages of the UK TransFormers comic. Although markedly better than its US counterpart, with more mature writing and often quite painterly artwork, the magazine was still a glorified toy catalogue. It was always a two-hander, however, and the "B" strip was generally reprints of Amercian Marvel strips with a robot/scifi motif: Steve Ditko's Machine Man; Mike Mignola's Rocket Raccoon; the woeful Spitfire and the Troubleshooters; and of course Iron Man. I can still vividly remember Barry Windsor Smith's work in the surreal, maudlin Iron Man of 2020 and an absolutely gorgeous story Ken Steacy illustrated that had Tony facing a gaggle of traditionally Spider-Man villains. I can still picture a sequence in which a stool pigeon is shaken down by Iron Man in an el-train. After he flies off, the weasel, breathless, collapses against a pole, not realising it's one of Doctor Octopus' mechanical tentacles. Cut to the exterior of the train as it rattles off into the night, and the stoolie's screams...

Having described this shambling, whisky-soaked, depressive yet charismatic wreck of a hero, the casting of Robert Downey Jr. in the title role in the movie seems a master stroke. Can't wait!