Marvel sued over Iron Man movie armor, but does it have a chink?
by Doc on Apr.28, 2015, under Movies
Last week Ben and Ray Lai, owners of Horizon Comics Productions, filed suit in the Federal Court of Massachusetts against Marvel and parent company Disney over claims that Marvel lifted the design of the Iron Man body armor designs from their own title, Radix.
The two allege that after they created Radix in 2001, they worked for a time for Marvel as artists, and that Radix materials had been distributed within Marvel. Then, in 2008 after the Lai brothers left Marvel, the first Iron Man movie came out, with a full mechanized body armor.
In the suit they say that “Marvel’s “Iron Man” comic book character first appeared in 1963. From that time until the first movie in the franchise was released, the comic typically depicted Iron Man wearing simple spandex-like attire and minimal armor.” But with the movie’s updated look and Marvel employees having access to the Radix designs, they believe their designs were lifted for the movies’ more modern high-tech armor.
However, it appears that their description of the “traditional” Iron Man armor isn’t quite accurate. Going all the way back to the first appearance of Iron Man in “Tales of Suspense #39”, we see him in full body armor…pretty clunky, and not unlike the armor Tony Stark built to escape his captors in the beginning of the 2008 movie. And through the years, although artistically you could probably mistake the depiction as being spandex, showing musculature, it was originally stylized full armor. And if you need other examples of full body armor with anatomical design, just do a Google image search for “George Clooney nipple suit” and witness the destruction of a franchise. 🙂
We’ll see what becomes of it. There is in fact a clear resemblance between a poster shot of Stark/Iron Man in a three point stance to a Radix promotional image…