I CAN TIE A KNOT IN A CHERRY STEM: Comics review. So everyone who knows me knows I couldn’t resist the paperback copy of Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle. This is the early ’80s story arc in which our hero, Iron Man, gained an origin and an addiction. I loved it with a deeply stupid love.

The covers are so bad. The front cover is basically, “John Romita, Jr. Presents: THE HUMAN THIGH!”, and then the back cover is AA Werewolf.

And… I don’t know a good way to put this. All Iron Man origin stories are racist. Iron Man is a white guy who experienced an epiphany in a country full of brown people, and then he came home to be important and have his own comic book title, and sometimes his black sidekick got to tag along. Honestly, there’s no defending it. There are a lot of things I like about the Iron Man mythos, but I don’t recommend it, for exactly the same reason that I don’t say everybody should read Gone with the Wind.

So okay, that said… I thought this book was surprisingly clever and fun and (on a scale of negative-1000 to negative-100) subtle. I really enjoyed this. The art was action-comics standard, but the pacing worked, and the dialogue was what you wanted ’80s comics to be, rather than what you just kind of accepted as the ’80s comics norm.

I can’t recommend this in good conscience. But if you are pretty sure you want the first Tony Stark alcoholism arc, I can tell you this version of it is a lot better than it had to be. It really isn’t lugubrious or pro-forma the way future Tony-drunk comics can seem. And if you liked the movie, I can say that this comic is similar, for good and for ill.