Previously

This is the part 14 in my continuing insane effort to try to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER PUBLISHED and write about them. You can see previous posts using the tag "complete-marvel-run". I covered Iron Man v1 in the very first post two years ago and v2 in the Heroes Reborn post. This entry will focus on Iron Man stories from the late 90s up to around 2009.

Comics

Annuals

Iron Man v1 annuals #3-14 (12 issues)

When I started these posts I was too lazy to read the annuals along the way, which was a mistake that I have to rectify starting here. As is typical of annuals from that era though, there is not much to not. Annuals 1 and 2 were reprint issues so I skipped those.

Iron Man/Captain America '98

This was a one-time crossover annual where the plot involved Tony using Mentallo to remove knowledge of his secret identity from people worldwide (essentially cleaning up liberal mistakes from IM v1). Steve does not approve, but they kind of get over it by the end.

Iron Man v3 (1998 to 2004)

Iron Man v3 #1-89, #1/2, 2 annuals (92 issues)

• After coming back from Heroes Reborn, Tony is mysteriously an adult again. Instead of trying to take over his old company, he starts a new freelance consulting company.
• The first 25 issues of this volume are written by Kurt Busiek.
• Issue #4: One of the new products revealed by Tony's company is WebVoyager, a web browser! This was 1998, so Firefox and Chrome were yet to be introduced and Internet Explorer was king. This feels like it would be a totally mundane thing these days, but at the time the internet was just about to explode, so a new web browser must have seemed very "cutting edge"!

• Issue #55: Tony reveals his secret identity to the world by rescuing a puppy about to be run over while at a press conference
• Issues #73-78: Tony finds out that someone inside the DoD has been ripping off his old weapons patents for US gov use. To counter this, Tony gets himself a nomination to become secretary of defense under GW Bush (sliding timeline, etc). The Senate committee almost rejects his nomination, but that is reversed after he saves the capitol from an attack. During this arc, he refuses to declare if he is either a Republican or Democrat.

• This volume ends with the "Disassembled" arc leading into Avengers Disassembled. At the end of it, Tony decides to make Iron Man's identity secret again (apparently it was that easy!)

Iron Man v4 (2005 to 2009)

This volume was renamed a couple of times but retained the numbering, so I'll just cover them all here for simplicity.

Iron Man v4 #1-16

• Issues #1-6: Extremis story arc, adapted in Iron Man 3. When I saw the movie, I had already read the comics, but barely remembered the details. These 6 issues are the only Iron Man issues Warren Ellis has ever written.
• Issues #7-12: Tony's Extremis-powered brain has been hacked, leading to a rogue Iron Man used for assassinations. This leads Tony to support superhero registration leading to Civil War.

Invincible Iron Man v1 #17-28 (12 issues)

• Mostly covers the Civil War / Initiative era. At the end of this volume, Tony is appointed SHIELD director (Nick Fury had left the position after Secret War) and the title changes again.

Iron Man: Director of SHIELD #29-35, 1 annual (8 issues)

• Tony assumes directorship of SHIELD and almost immediately has to deal with World War Hulk.
• After WWH, there's more Extremis nonsense via a plot by the Mandarin. Stark, Duggan, and Hill are almost charged with terrorism.
• The volume ends with a 3-part Secret Invasion tie-in starring War Machine

Progress Bar

Total issues covered in this post: 141.

Total number of titles/volumes covered in this post: 6, counting the v4 title changes separately.

Total issues covered so far: 4,689 + 141 = 4,830

Current total (released) according to the reference reading order: 34,964 (+68 since the previous post.)

Progress: 13.81% (13.43% last post)

Progress for this post is around twice as much as the last one. I think we are on track to finish at around 16-17% at end of year?

Up Next

We'll cover some newer comics in the next post, most likely X-Men books!

The other day some friends and I were talking about the idiosyncracies of websites by Japanese companies, and I remembered a post I had previously shared on this site about how Japanese personal websites had a unique aesthetic as well and I wanted to share it with the group chat. But to my sadness, I found that the article "Browsing the Eastern Side of the Personal Web" originally hosted at https://www.bikobatanari.art/posts/2023/east-west-website-culture was no longer available. In fact, the entire domain is already dead. I shrugged at the link rot and checked the wayback machine and was surprised that the website was "excluded from the wayback machine", presumably at the request of the original domain owner.

I was still able to find an archived copy of the page via archive.md and have backed it up locally. But that led me to asking: is it right for me to keep a copy of this post if the original writer has expressly intended to remove it from the internet? And furthermore, can I put up a copy of the page on my own site for sharing to other people?

I do think we should respect people's "right to be forgotten" and can understand why some people might want to wipe their internet presence completely (though it's definitely not something I would do). But for a post like this that got a good amount of shares (there was even a Hacker News comment thread) and doesn't really contain sensitive personal information, it kind of feels like that kind of content takes on a life of its own independent of the author and that the people who have read it also have a right to preserve it especially if they found it insightful or meaningful. It's kind of like if an author published a book and people enjoyed it and it sold well but then later he didn't like it anymore and wanted people to destroy their copies.

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One thing this highlights to me is how archive.org/the wayback machine can be unreliable as a centralized single source of backups and we really should have more archival sites and maybe more personal archiving efforts like the one I am contemplating. Especially when the Internet Archive might be in trouble because of an unforced error re: Controlled Digital Lending during the pandemic.

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Speaking of archiving other people's posts, niche post-twitter social media platform cohost has announced they are shutting down. My only concern here is that I have a number of links previously shared that originated from cohost, so I probably want to preserve those too, especially this excellent 21-part (so far) series on the history of the MTG metagame. Seems like most of the posts are also on the wayback machine, but as mentioned above it is probably a better idea to have my own personal backups anyway. Will probably look into it once cohost goes into read-only mode in October.

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I am thinking about all of this because ever since Twitter was bought out by EM I have been thinking about having an archive of Twitter threads that I enjoyed and host them here on this website somewhere. I might want to do something similar for posts that have been lost to time like the one mentioned above. What obligations do I have to the original poster, aside obviously from crediting them and maybe linking to their Twitter profile or whatever?

Occasionally I find some weird ad spammy website that mirrors content from this site (probably via the RSS feed) obviously for farming clicks or somesuch. I mostly don't care and just leave them be (and I haven't encountered it again since I delisted from Google), but it does give me a feeling of ick, and I don't want to give that feeling of ick to other people if I host their content here.

Maybe I'll just add a disclaimer and an offer to remove the content if requested? That also feels a bit ick since it is opt-out, which is not unlike the controversy surrounding AI scrapers and such. Except I would be doing the archiving manually as a person (does that matter?) and asking for permission from individual posters probably won't scale. And in some cases like the bikobatanari.art link mentioned at the top of this post it's impossible since without the website IDK how to contact the author.

I don't yet know the answers to the questions I raised here; I need to think about it some more. Worst case is I just archive the content locally and not have it be online, though that seems like a waste.

A September Tradition?

As the title implies, I spent (almost all of last week) in the hospital yet again fulfilling my filial duties as a watcher.

We were admitted Saturday evening and discharged Saturday afternoon, so that is almost 7 full days of a hospital stay.

This had sadly become a bit of a September tradition. Last year, we were in the hospital in the first week of September for a surgery and in 2021 we were admitted in late September for COVID. We managed to avoid the curse in '22 and hopefully again in'25.

Since I was in the hospital all week, my activities were severely limited. And this hospital offers no wifi, which made things more challenging. The last time we were here, I made the mistake of spending my time watching streaming episodes and YT videos and that used up my mobile data allocation very quickly. This time I decided to restrict my internet usage mostly to text/image-based browsing.

Aside from my watcher/caregiver duties, I spent my time mostly browsing the web/RSS feeds, reading comics, and playing Marvel Snap! I opted not to bring my Switch this time as I really wasn't in the mood for it. I also brought a sketch pad hoping to reignite my sketching hobby, but I ended up not cracking it open at all. I did bring a laptop, but given the limited internet availability I only used it occasionally for updating some online things. Not even blogging while I was there! I could have read a book, but noooo comics are much more interesting!

I was sharing the room with someone who was watching cable TV all the time, and that meant I got a greater-than-usual exposure to all the nonsense happening in local news and politics. I mean, I am aware of most of it, but having a daily news show constantly shout details at us reminds us how ridiculous the whole Alice Guo, Quiboloy, Sara Duterte, etc situations are. And also being exposed to so many pre-election "campaign ads". You're not fooling anyone Camille Villar, though your jingle is kinda catchy. The country was also hit this past week with massive rains and a typhoon for most of the week, most of which we didn't feel holed up in our hospital room. (I did have to turn up the aircon temp because the rains were making the nights very chilly.)

Walking and Health

This past week (Sunday through Saturday) Google Fit says I walked around 30k steps. The hospital grounds are fairly expansive and I could have taken longer walks, but I didn't want to be away from the patient for too long. Hopefully I can get back into the regular habit this week!

Some Links of Interest

Still nothing this week. I have saved a bunch of stuff, but haven't had time to process them yet. Check out the linkblog for past links!

This Coming Week

IDK yet what to expect for the week, other than trying to get back into my routines. There are some post-hospital-stay things to be done, we'll need to figure it out.