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Not that I can remember - he originally had a poor heart, that was the reason behind him building his armour - something to do with him being a POW in Japan...
Vietnam, in fact—at least in the original, erm, origin.
Dashing young defense contractor Tony Stark—ah, the early Sixties, when an arms merchant was leading-man material!—was in Southeast Asia to demonstrate some new high-tech weapons for his Pentagon paymasters. The Viet Cong, unamused with being used as guinea pigs, responded by fragging young Tony's position. His escort was killed and he himself gravely wounded—a fragment of shrapnel was lodged PERILOUSLY NEAR HIS HEART!
Tony was taken captive by a VC "warlord," who took him to a hidden bunker (!) and tried to force him to create super-weapons for the Communists—with the assistance of another prisoner, a Chinese scientist who, despite being drawn wearing pyjamas and colored the tint of cornmeal, was a good guy.
Luckily, Tony's new bosses didn't keep very good tabs on his new research, as his first order of business was to design a chest-plate that would save his own life from the ENCROACHING SHRAPNEL! and then build around it a set of super-powered armor with which to kick VC backside.
Through at least the late 60s, Tony literally depended on the Iron Man armor to keep him alive, which added an interesting blessing/curse slant to the stories and made for some tense moments when the armor's power cells ran down, and so on. Later he had life-saving surgery—Dr. Strange did the operation, IIRC—to remove both the pesky shrapnel and the tragic-character aspect, leaving him fit, happy, and dull.
Well, wouldn't you turn to drink after that?
remember some story that just had a drunk tony living as a bum on the streets, having lost the company, the armour, everything
Subtlety, thy name is comics. |
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