Meet the Portlander who killed Iron Man

(Reuters file photo)

(Reuters file photo)

You may have heard the name Alex Irvine. If not, he’s one of Portland’s most prolific contemporary authors, and I guarantee you’ve heard of some of the main characters of his books: Batman, the Transformer Optimus Prime and Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow are among them.

Christian Bale as Batman in the 2012 movie "The Dark Knight Rises," a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (Ron Phillips/Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/MCT)

Christian Bale as Batman in the 2012 movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (Ron Phillips/Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/MCT)

In addition to his own original works, Alex writes a lot of what is called licensed fiction — in a nutshell, the corporate owners of the popular characters listed above call Alex when they want a new novel written about those characters.

Examples include the novel versions of Hollywood blockbusters, such as “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Pacific Rim,” or those for television shows, such as the newly released “Secret Journal of Ichabod Crane,” based on the popular CBS show, “Sleepy Hollow” (which, itself, is based in part on the 1820 Washington Irving story).

Alex is also the main writer behind a trio of Marvel comics-based online video games, including the wildly popular “Avengers Alliance.”

In fact, in the most recent episode of the Ink & Pine podcast, which I co-host with Maine Digital Press’ Trent Gay and Cat Smith, Alex told us: “I think I’ve probably written more Iron Man dialogue than any man alive. He’s in three books that I wrote and in ‘Alliance’ alone, I’ve written thousands of lines of dialogue for [alter ego Tony Stark].”

Click here if you want to listen to that podcast in its entirety. It’s really a worthwhile listen. Alex tells us in detail about the challenges of writing for ever-evolving online video games, the most fun part of writing a book about Batman, how his Transformers writing fits into the accepted canon for that brand, and many other very interesting topics.

But one thing I wanted to highlight in this blog post was an exchange we had about particular distinction Alex holds: He may be the only writer in recent history to kill Iron Man.

Robert Downey Jr., from left, Joss Whedon, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans are shown on the set of "The Avengers." (Marvel/MCT photo)

Robert Downey Jr., from left, Joss Whedon, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans are shown on the set of “The Avengers.” (Marvel/MCT photo)

For background, Iron Man’s alter ego, sharp-talking genius billionaire Tony Stark, built his signature red-and-gold metal suit and a miniature self-sustaining power supply, in part, to magnetically keep some metallic shards of shrapnel from drifting into his heart and killing him.

The character has been the sole superhero focus of three big-budget movies starring Robert Downey, Jr., not to mention a main draw in the smash hit “The Avengers.”

Here’s what Alex had to say about his run-in with Iron Man…

Question (Trent): Marvel is known for keeping a pretty tight rein on its brand, its characters and what they do. You’ve had what seems to be me to be a surprising amount of latitude, it seems?

Answer (Alex): Each of the characters has certain traits by which they’re known. If you wrote a bunch of stuff about Iron Man where he wasn’t cracking jokes at other peoples’ expense, then you’d probably hear about it. And you could say the same thing about a bunch of other characters. If Nightcrawler isn’t dropping random German phrases into his dialogue or things like that.

… Within those parameters, there’s a lot of freedom. Especially if you can make the argument that you’re engaging those traits that are well established, just in a different way.

I wrote an Iron Man comic one time called ‘Rapture.’ I basically had the idea that Tony would be like, ‘You know what, I can build anything. I’ve got this heart problem, I’m just going to make myself a new heart. Why did it take me so long to think of this?’

So he starts working on new pieces of himself and he kind of gets carried away, and he sort of cyborg-ifies himself a little too much. Then the systems that he’s using to run the cyborg parts achieve sentience, and all of a sudden Tony’s at war with himself — literally, in one body. I got to push one aspect of Tony Stark’s character in a direction that I hadn’t seen done in that way before, and it was pretty interesting, to me, anyway.

Plus, I got to kill him. I think it’s the only comic where Tony Stark dies.

There are scenes where he’s drilling holes in his own head and planting things, watching the whole thing on a monitor to make sure he doesn’t hit the wrong parts of his brain. I had a great time with this, but it was all in keeping with Tony’s character. Eventually, for the master tinkerer, who’s built everything else, the only field left to investigate is himself. So he starts to rebuild himself.

Question (Me): Wait, Marvel didn’t come say, ‘You can’t kill Tony Stark?’

Answer (Alex): … It was a ‘Marvel Knights’ comic, which was an imprint that’s outside the continuity [of the mainstream comic books and movies] so they can get a look at a little different angle of the character, like this one.

Science fiction-fantasy writer Alex Irvine in a 2010 BDN file photo. (BDN photo by Gabor Degre)

Science fiction-fantasy writer Alex Irvine in a 2010 BDN file photo. (BDN photo by Gabor Degre)

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.