Most Marvel Comics readers would tell you that Tony Stark was the near-fascist villain of the company's Civil War crossover, and that Captain America was its martyred hero.

And Steve Jobs has never been a lone inventor who locked himself in a workshop and came out with a brilliant new device. Originally he used Steve Wozniak for that; now he has a lot of engineers on his payroll. He has created styles, and he is a marketing genius.

Otherwise you've captured them both perfectly.

Steve Jobs has never been a lone inventor who locked himself in a workshop and came out with a brilliant new device. Originally he used Steve Wozniak for that; now he has a lot of engineers on his payroll. He has created styles, and he is a marketing genius.

I'll second that, and add that that it's ironic that both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are hailed as inventors when their technical skills are demonstrably modest (Gates) to nonexistent (Jobs). Then again, much the same can be said for Edison, who like Renaissance painters had a cast of thousands laboring away behind the curtain actually creating and perfecting the inventions attached to his name. To put this in class struggle terms, and mix metaphors, it's ironic that corporate overlords justify their positions as a result of their genius, when it's quite obvious that they are just enjoying an outsized share of a pie baked by the labor of many.

That said, the article does highlight the socially ambitious story telling underlying Stan Lee's Marvel universe, perhaps the modern equivalent of the dime store cowboy novels of the 19th century. Rather than making a strained analogy between Tony Stark and Steve Jobs; Larry Ellison laboring for IBM and then turning the idea against them with Oracle is probably a more accurate if not exciting analogy, maybe the exploration of the cult of hero worship around corporate success stories would have been more interesting. I'm not a fan of the Iron Man series, but I understand in later episodes Tony Stark becomes something of a fallen hero, even though others struggle to preserve his public image in much the same way we tear down other corporate supermen, like Jack Welch, once they can no longer wield the reigns of a massive enterprise to protect their facade.

SpectrumRider:

Most Marvel Comics readers would tell you that Tony Stark was the near-fascist villain of the company's Civil War crossover

Probably true, but that just shows that that most Marvel Comics readers misread the story.

Tony Stark is the grown-up superhero. Similarly, his Mighty Avengers are like the 30-something answer to the teenage angst-ridden New Avengers formerly run by Captain America.

Wolverine and Luke Cage and Spider-Man and all those other New Avengers types think that Iron Man is a near-fascist government stooge because he was instrumental in forcing superheroes to become registered law enforcement agents.

On the other hand, Tony Stark looked at a situation where superpowered vigilantes were running around breaking all sorts of laws and . He also recognized that voters and lawmakers in the Marvel Universe do not actually know which superheroes are the protagonists and which aren't, and that, sooner or later, masked guys with built-in WMDs running around and beating the hell out of people just because they're "evil" was bound to end in tragedy (and much more stringent regulation than he proposed).

Captain America was a long-time opponent of vigilantism prior to his appropriation by the Marvel editorial board as a lame anti-Patriot Act metaphor.

You can read the Civil War storyline as a story where Tony Stark is the villain if you want (many do), but you can also read it as a story where one of the superheroes grows up. Cops and prosecutors don't have secret identities at all, and they get by; Iron Man's compromise legislation at least gave superheroes the same protection we give CIA case officers.

Iron Man has been doing as little as he can, given his position, to punish the "good" superheroes since the passage of the registration act. How many times has he let the New Avengers sneak out the back door, now? To call him a near-fascist villain just because he saw the writing on the wall (and the Fourth Amendment...) is to fundamentally misunderstand the character and his place in the Marvel Universe.

I'm thinking Batman (made creative use out of other people's inventions), but I don't know enough comic book lore to be certain.