Iron Munro

1900 - Arnold Munro is born on Attabar Teru, his father's hidden island lab, the product of his experiments injecting him in utero with an experimental serum. He grows up inside gravity-enhancing parabolic chambers, unable to touch his parents.

1908 - 8-year-old Arnold's parents are killed in an earthquake. He first emerges from his parabolic chamber, holding his mother for the first time before she passes. He begins to rebuild Attabar Teru with the native tribespeople.

1917 - 17-year-old Arnold departs Attabar Teru for the first time. He arrives in Metropolis where he enrolls in Metropolis University, earning a full football scholarship as a walk-on. He earns the nickname Iron Munro.

1920 - 20-year-old Iron graduates from Metropolis University with a double major in engineering & chemistry. He creates his first manufacturing plant, and begins construction on Munro Tower in central Metropolis.

1922 - 22-year-old Iron earns a masters degree in Physics.

1924 - 24-year-old Iron earns a doctorate in Polymer Chemistry. Construction on Munro Tower is completed, and his designs are used for other buildings across Metropolis, creating the ‘city of the future’

1925 - 25-year-old Iron invents a purified styrene monomer, revolutionizing plastics.

1926 - 26-year-old Iron earns a second doctorate in Nuclear Physics.

1930 - 30-year-old Iron returns to Attabar Teru, building his extensive labs. He begins adventuring all over the world, splitting his time between Metropolis and his Island Laboratories.

1932 - 32-year-old Iron creates Munro Aviation outside Metropolis.

1938 - 38-year-old Iron begins working against Gerald Shugel & his Nazi overlord's attempts to sabotage or steal his work

1939 - 39-year-old Iron constructs the Perisphere for the World Fair in New York.

1941 - 41-year-old Iron is recruited into the Freedom Fighters by Uncle Sam. His manufacturing plants turn to wartime production.

1943 - 43-year-old Iron and Sandra Knight begin their romance as they serve together on the Freedom Fighters.

1944 - 44-year-old Iron's biological sample is used by Delores Winters to create 100 superhuman embryos.

1945 - 45-year-old Iron and the Freedom Fighters go on a mission into Germany to destroy Vandal Savages secret laboratories. Iron is the lone survivor, as Sandra Knight sacrificed herself to save him from an temporal explosion. As the war ends he divests himself of his various companies and returns full-time to Attabar Teru.

50 years ago - Iron Munro is married within the religion of the natives of Attabar Teru to the daughter of their Shaman.

38 years ago - Iron Munro is contacted by the All-Star Squadron, who ask for his help in tracking Vandal Savage. He helps construct their headquarters in the Perisphere, but declines their offer of membership.

27 years ago - Iron Munro's adventures are published as popular novels, which inspire a young Clark Kent.

23 years ago - Iron Munro begins consulting with Checkmate, where he finally reconnects with Sandra Knight.

23 years ago - 60-year-old Sandra Knight helps found Checkmate, a secret, extra-governmental spy organization. She reconnects with Iron Munro when he consults with Checkmate. 24-year-old Amanda Waller becomes one of her best operatives.

16 years ago - Iron Munro consults with Michael Holt on the construction of the Justice League satellite.

14 years ago - Iron Munro joins Amanda Waller's new government-controlled Freedom Fighters, secretly working for Sandra Knight.

12 years ago - Iron Munro's wife suddenly develops an inoperable brain tumor. Iron invents new advances in laser surgery to give her several final peaceful months. Needing to leave their home, he returns to Metropolis and meets Superman.

6 years ago - Iron Munro stays with the Freedom Fighters after it's moved under the control of the DEO.

Iron Munro is not what you'd call a major character in DC. He doesn't have a ton of appearances, and while he's been woven into the history with varying degrees of success, He remains a pretty obscure reference. To those who know what's going on here, however, he quickly becomes one of the most fascinating characters in the DC roster, whose history stretches all the way back to the foundational concepts that define or even precede the idea of superheroes at all.

Iron, as he appears in the comics, is an original character but is steeped in the traditions of his influences, and so we did something similar. Rather than make an exact interpretation of the comic Iron, we made a similar amalgam of influences that we really hope convey just how crucial this character can be.

Iron Munro's Inspiration

To begin at the beginning, our journey starts with the 1930 novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie, which features the character Hugo Danner. Hugo was a young man born with extraordinary strength and invulnerability thanks to experiments performed by his father. It follows him through his life as he tries (and mostly fails) to find some purpose for himself. His abilities perfectly mirror Superman's original powers, and he is presumed to be an influence on the original creation of DC's first superhero. The novel is a lot of fun and is now in the public domain so you can read the whole thing online.

Meanwhile, unrelated to Philip Wylie & Hugo Danner, the future unbelievably influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, John W Cambell Jr, wrote The Mightiest Machine in 1937, an early example of super-science space opera featuring his character Aarn Munro, and would follow with more books in the series. Campbell is a polarizing figure; he helped shape the careers of authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C Clarke... but he was also an outspoken racist with too much power in the world of publishing.

These characters all belong to a certain archetype of a heroic figure from pulp sci-fi, strongmen with torn shirts who solve problems with their fists. DC itself had its share, starting out Detective Comics with Slam Bradley, but perhaps the most famous of these characters is the science hero Doc Savage.

There are plenty of adaptations of characters like Hugo Danner over the decades, but the first to really matter for our purposes appeared in a black-and-white quarterly magazine published by Marvel called Marvel Preview. The magazine allowed Marvel to publish more adult content without the supervision of the Comic Code, and featured the debut of lots of new characters like Blade, Star-Lord, and Satana. Issue #9 from 1976 was an adaptation of the first half of Gladiator, featuring a bonkers painted cover by Earl Norem and character design by Nora Maclin that will become relevant later, as will the fact that it was written by Roy Thomas.

Hugo Danner's story was told in comics one more time, in a four-issue 2005 miniseries, Legend, by Howard Chaykin and classic Sgt. Rock artist Russ Heath. This series was set around the 60s, with Hugo serving in Vietnam instead of World War I. It was published by Wildstorm, which does mean it was technically a DC property, although it skews a little too hard into the more salacious parts of the story to be considered canon.

Iron Munro's Comic History

The All-Star Squadron was a book set in Earth 2 by Roy Thomas, where he created a story using all of DC's Golden Age characters, including the Golden Age Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. It ran from 1981 to 1987, but stopped because the Crisis of Infinite Earths ended the idea of multiple Earths, meaning the Golden Age characters now happened in the 30s & 40s of the main timeline. Characters like Superman could no longer coexist with alternate Earth counterparts, which undid a lot of the content Thomas had created.

His solution was to create a new book, the Young All-Stars, introducing new characters meant to retroactively fill the roles of the Golden Age heroes that were now unusable. In the case of the Golden Age Superman, that meant finding someone who had abilities similar to his original power set. If only a character existed that Superman himself was based on... and whom Roy had already adapted into a comic character for Marvel back in '76.

To his credit, Thomas didn't just transpose Hugo Danner into his new story. He created a new character, Iron Monro, using a moniker that references an entirely separate pulp-era hero. Iron was Hugo Danner's estranged son, and in fact Thomas went well out of his way to explain when and how Iron was conceived during the events of the novel (there are frankly a lot of opportunities. Hugo Danner got around). He also fully adapted the character design of Hugo from the Marvel Presents issue and used it here as Iron.

Iron Monro and the rest of the Young All-Stars were in kind of a weird position. They were meant to patch gaps in preexisting continuity rather than tell their own story and perhaps that left them feeling a little hollow as characters. It's also possible that Roy Thomas wasn't quite as enthusiastic about these new characters as he was when he had the entire pantheon of DC's long history at his disposal. Nevertheless, of the new characters introduced in the series Iron definitely had the most robust history and as a result felt like a character who could find a place in DC's mythology.

The 1994 series Damage was the first comic to use him after Young All-Stars, where we're introduced to the modern day Iron Monro and his absolutely spectacular new 90s look. Iron joined the book early as an ally, possibly even the father of the hero, although this was eventually disproven. We do learn that somewhere in their history Iron and Sandra Knight had a child (Or two children? Honestly it's a little confusing.) This plot point was later picked up in Marc Andreyko's 2004 series Manhunter, where we eventually learn that Kate Spencer is actually their grandchild. Iron did make one more set of appearances in the final issues of the long-running Superman series before it was rebooted with the new 52. As a fun little nod to the role Hugo Danner played in the invention of Superman, we see Clark, a fan of Iron Monro's comic adventures when he was a kid, meet his hero.

Our Iron Munro Story

We're not in the same position as Roy Thomas, we don't need a character to fill in for the Golden Age Superman. We get to adapt Iron Munro entirely on his own merit. We actually considered doing away with the pretense of making him Hugo Danner's son and just giving him the original character's origins, but the reality is that Danner existed in a creative space before superheroes existed. The core of his story is that there's no place for someone like him in the world, but in a world populated by superheroes he in fact does have that, so we didn't want to skew too close to the novel. Instead, we wanted to try to represent the whole idea of those pulp-era strongmen heroes that inspired Superman, and to us that meant looking at an entirely separate character that is fully embracing that tradition. Tom Strong, a creation of Alan Moore in his imprint America's Best Comics, is a fantastic modern interpretation of the classic pulp science hero, and the more we made our version of Iron a reflection of Tom Strong, the more he felt like a character who really found a role to play in our world.

We blended the stories of Tom Strong and Hugo Danner to come up with our version of Iron. He was born on a distant island, created by his father's experiments, and leaves to see the world and have his adventures, eventually joining the Freedom Fighters during World War II. We also included some references to his contribution to science and industry, making him the man responsible for the original rise of Metropolis as the City of Tomorrow. He retreats back to his island home after World War II, but does still interact with the world periodically, helping to build the headquarters of the All-Star Squadron and the Justice League. His modern adventures are tied to his relationships with the Freedom Fighters through Sandra Knight, but there is a lot of room here to keep expanding those stories.

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