It's not a bad story, establishing Stark as a businessman worried about his company and his private life as an Avenger and hero, but the fact that it's not a bad story doesn't really weigh against everything else. The three-pronged threats of alcohol, Justin Hammer and stock sales for a controlling share in the company all feel a little lacklustre, and could perhaps have been made more of on their own rather than in conjunction.
I'll be honest, and hard-line purists out there won't take kindly to this, but Demon In A Bottle's artwork is a bit too seventies for my liking. The flares, Stark's fashionable pencil 'tache, the lurid colours- it's the exact same problem I had with Frank Miller's rebellious mutants in The Dark Knight Returns, but this time around it's with everybody. It hasn't aged well, in my mind at least, but that may be because I am one of these 'fake fans' who were introduced to the genre through films and cartoons of the characters before getting into comics and graphic novels in a big way. Either way, the seventies sheen sort of takes me out of it as a reader because it's so unfamiliar, which seems an odd thing to say when it's a story about an alcoholic billionaire with an invincible suit of power-armour, but there you are.
In fact, even the dialogue and storytelling felt a little shallow. It's a bit too pacy and dips in and out a bit too much to really be a great graphic novel in my mind, but there's the rub- it's a collections of issues, not a one-shot, and each episode from separate issues has a distinct silver-age feel, despite being released at the very end of that era. The covers are very pop-art, grab-your-attention affairs, the kind that you hear in your head being read in a 50's American radio announcer's voice, and always have to end on a cliffhanger. "Tune in next week to see how, if the man of wonder will survive!"
And having been written in a different era, before the darker landmark comics signalled a turn at the end of the eighties and through the nineties, the issues of a womanising alcoholic are perhaps less realistically portrayed. But the balls to even go there, to show Stark as at once invincible and fallible, make it a great story even if the method of telling the story is a bit too spasmodic and quickly resolved in largely unseen fashion.
The attempts to make Iron Man a sort of Marvel Batman equivalent, with polar characteristics in one man, doesn't really gel- Stark, who I always find much better off in the modern manner of never making any bones about the fact that he is Iron Man, doesn't really work for me being so flamboyant and bombastic while hiding, in such a poor fashion that it's alarming no one has worked it out, his secret identity.
While everyone seems to rave about it as a must-read graphic novel, Demon In A Bottle left me feeling a bit cold. Used to gigantic crossover crisis points such as Civil War, where reading the main release only gives half the story, I expected something a bit less flimsy in terms of plot. All that said though, and even with the art work and dialogue all conspiring to create a silver-age emulation as gaudy as they come, the balls to take an "all-American hero!" and even attempt to flesh out serious flaws in him is inspired, and inspiring. Written at the beginning of the turn for comics, from the light and fluffy heroes saving the day week in, week out to the brooding and nuanced emerging characters from both Marvel and DC, you could say it's among the few that gave us the darker popularity the genre enjoys today. And without it's seed of character diversity being planted, I'm pretty sure Iron Man and Tony Stark would not be the characters they are now.
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