Just over twenty years ago, at the tender age of eleven, I walked into a newsagents at a local shopping mall and picked up this comic:



It's fair to say it blew my mind. The art was perfect and the writing 100% spot on. There's a good chance that if I hadn't bought this comic that day then I would never have fallen so deeply in love with American comics...and with one character in particular - Iron Man.

I continued reading Iron Man regularly for another fifty issues, and I also dragged my poor father round an endless stream of comic shops in the hopes of assembling  a complete collection of Iron Man comics - something I very nearly achieved (sadly they're gone now, sold on eBay after my ex gave me the "Sell these or I'll throw them out" ultimatum). Or yearly summer holiday to visit my grandparents in Scotland wasn't complete without a trip to every comic shop in Glasgow and Edinburgh, checklist in hand, seeking elusive early seventies and late sixties issues of Iron Man.

Eventually I stopped reading Iron Man, it was John Byrne's "Dragon Seed" saga that finally caused me to put down Iron Man. Paul Ryan's rather pedestrian art wasn't a patch on the Mark Bright/Bob Layton art that had graced the pages of the book when I first discovered it, and I felt that Byrne was taking the book backwards by making Stark reliant on the armour to live again. I understand why he did this - some would argue that Tony's dependence on the armour is at the very core of his character - but personally I felt that we'd been there and done that and that Tony had moved on. For a long time reader (as I had become, having read so many back issues) it had all been done before, and just wasn't interesting. I've just re-read the Dragon Seed saga and it's much better than I remember it, and I'm about to embark on filling in a huge gap in my Iron Man knowledge - what happened next. You see, I didn't read Iron Man regularly again until Busiek took over the book post Heroes Reborn, and so I missed everything to do with War Machine and the whole Iron Lad plotline. Some would say I'm better off for it, but we'll see... I read the new book for a year or so, eventually dropping it as I had to streamline what I was getting due to other commitments, eventually dropping comics altogether as I started a young family. I've been reading Iron Man again for the past year or so, since Civil War, when Tony took over SHIELD. I certainly wouldn't call this a classic run, and I'm not too sure about the current take on the Mandarin, but it is like returning to an old friend.

What's the point of this? Like you didn't know.. Tomorrow, at around 11am, I will be doing something that I've been dreaming of for the past twenty years. I'll be sitting down in a movie theater to watch an Iron Man movie. Words cannot describe the mixture of excitement and dread that I feel. More than any other Marvel movie...I want them to get this one right. By all accounts they have. I'll know soon enough.