LAST EDITED ON Mar-14-06 AT 05:11 PM (EST)
 
>I'm not as long-time a fan of Tony as you are, so the majority of my
>Happy memories (not all happy Happy memories) are from post-Heroes
>Return.

Yeah, poor ol' Happy was kind of an asshole in Volume 3.

He and Pepper started out, back in the old-timey Tales of Suspense days, as a combination of comic relief and drivers for the Angst Love Plot that all Marvel comics seemed to require back then. Pep was Tony Stark's secretary and, like all the young women working at Stark Industries, madly in love with him. Happy was a Gruff but Honest Ex-Boxer and nominally worked as Tony's chauffeur - Tony gave him a job in return for saving his life after a racing accident - but Tony usually drove himself, so Happy didn't really do much other than hang around the office and occasionally almost get killed saving Tony from the Melter or the Titanium Man or whoever.

So for quite a while they were a set-piece: Happy thought Pepper was worth getting to know, Pepper thought Happy was a punch-drunk idiot with a face like an old boot, and Tony kept angling them together, even though he was in love with Pepper, because - this was 1960s Marvel love plots in a nutshell - He Could Not Get Serious With Any Woman, for With His Heart Condition and His Dangerous Double Life He Might Die at Any Time and That Wouldn't Be Fair to Her.

Eventually Tony's efforts to set them up together worked, they ran off and got married, and Tony went on to have disastrously ill-advised relationships with deeply dubious women like Whitney "Madame Masque" Frost (the head of an organized crime family), Indries Moomji (that creepy "designed to be your dream woman" chick who worked for Obadiah Stane), and Rumiko Fujikawa (all the maturity of a Pikachu backpack with one-tenth the charm). The Hogans, meanwhile, got written out of the original book altogether sometime in the '70s and made only occasional guest appearances until Heroes Return, when Kurt Busiek had the good sense to bring them back and Joe Quesada had the Joe Quesada sense to make them idiots after Busiek left the book.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/