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Why Iron Man is an Avenger

Tony Stark is a man fuelled both by his personal demons and his personal idealism.

On the one hand he is the tormented soul who suffered under a brilliant but sometimes abusive father and who never really won his father's respect. He is the inventor who now regrets how his early genius was abused (as a weapons manufacturer - shades of Oppenheimer). His past is littered with fragmented relationships with women, to the point that he finds it very hard to commit himself now. He has been crippled by heart injury and by paralysation. He has destroyed his life with alcohol. And even the very pinnacle of his achievements, his armour, has been misused against him on occasion.

On the other hand he is the romantic young man who dreamed of being a Knight of the Round Table, whose heroes were Edison and Einstein, who eventually took up the challenge of reviving a dying company into a multi-national corporation - twice, and who had the courage to put his philanthropic notions into dramatic practise through the Maria Stark Foundation, through Stark Solutions, and of course through the invincible Iron Man.

It is easy to see why Tony would be attracted to the idea of the Avengers. Not only does it come the closest to a modern day Round Table but it provides him with allies in achieving his objectives; some might even criticise him as seeing the team as another resource at his disposal in reaching his laudable goals. Tony is very task oriented. If he gets beaten, his first instinct is to go away, redesign his armour, and try again. He is a problem solver, seeking to "fix" the world using all the tools in his toolkit (which includes his millions and "the tin suit" - and the Avengers).

Tony is a very private person. He has few close friends, and even those he had tend to get used like commodities by Tony at his worst. Yet Iron Man has constantly enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow Avengers, even (one might argue especially) before Shellhead's secret identity was commonly known to them. A millionaire genius industrialist can have few peers. The Avengers fill that void in Antony Stark's life. Yet because he has such a stylised friendship with the team (he relates to them most when somebody is threatening to take over the planet; that's hardly the basis for a comprehensive relationship) he can still keep them at arms' length and retain his privacy; and that is important to him too.

It also gives Tony a sense of self worth to support the Avengers, as Iron Man and as their financial backer and principal technologist. Somewhere at the very back of Tony's mind is the little voice calling him a weak failure for all those things that have gone wrong in his life. Working with the Avengers is one way of showing himself that his entire life hasn't been in vain.

More than any of the other founders, Iron Man seems dependant on the fact of being an "original Avenger" to retain his status in the group. On several occasions he has attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in pulling rank on his fellows by virtue of being a founder or of being Tony Stark. It seems that behind his invincible façade, Tony has a genuine doubt about his worthiness as a hero amongst heroes. The closest he ever comes to admitting this fallibility is in Captain America #401, the epilogue to Galactic Storm, where he admits to Cap that he believes he will never be the hero Cap is, but like everybody else he is inspired by Steve Rogers. And of course we recognise that Tony IS one of the greatest Avengers, perhaps because he struggles with his demons to uphold his ideals every time he puts on the red-and-gold.

So often it seems as though Thor and Iron Man are doing the Avengers a favour by taking time out of their busy schedules to adventure with the team. This goes way back to the period from Avengers #16-96, when Thor and Iron Man appearances were rare and treated as special events. But I believe that Tony actually needs the Avengers more than they need him (which is quite a lot), and that he is at his best when he is a part of their company.