LogFAQs > #979106486

I remember thinking back when Iron Man came out that they had completely run out of ideas and were scraping the bottom of the bottom.

People are REALLY overestimating how much the average person would have known anything about him back then. The general audience had no clue who Iron Man was. Maybe a very, VERY small portion of people might have seen the 90s cartoon, but that was it. If you weren't a nerd, you didn't recognize him. Back then there was a massive gulf of difference in recognition between a hero like him compared to stuff like, say Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, even somewhat "lower-profile" heroes like The Hulk. No one was like "Eh, I think I'll dress as Iron Man for Halloween" if they couldn't come up with an idea for a costume. Saturday Night Live hadn't done a sketch parodying Iron Man. If you asked a person on the street to name superheroes they wouldn't ever think him up. It doesn't matter how much of a headliner he was in the comics, it doesn't matter what cartoons or video games he had appeared in the prior decade, the point is he had NO pop-culture footprint back then, and in that regard, in the eyes of the general public, he was just as well-known as Madame Web.