Poor Mojo's Newswire

When Iron Man started out, he was very much in the mold of Marvel’s super-heroes. They tended to take a “typical” super-hero concept of the Silver Age, then give him or her a flaw; something that humanized the character, made them a little bit more identifiable to the average reader, and perhaps made them more an object of reader sympathy and less a pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. Everyone who read Superman wanted to be Superman, but when you read the classic Iron Man stories, you were never quite sure that it was worth it to be Iron Man. Sure, Tony Stark got to wear cool futuristic armor (that he was constantly updating, streamlining, and redesigning) and be fantastically rich…but on the other hand, that same armor was the only thing that stood between him and instantaneous death. The armor literally kept his heart beating every second. Iron Man was as much a prison for Tony Stark as a super-heroic identity.

This was a good thing. It added tension to every story; when Iron Man was running out of power, it wasn’t just, “Will he defeat Villain X before his juice runs dry?”, it was “Will he defeat Villain X before his heart explodes?” It gave him a plausible reason to continue being Iron Man, even when the identity became more trouble than it was worth. It also gave him a plausible reason to conceal his Iron Man identity; he doesn’t want people finding out that he’s one ‘low battery’ warning away from dying. It was just the kind of complication that made Marvel’s heroes dynamic and intriguing in a way that DC’s heroes of the same era weren’t. Combine it with jet-setting action, anti-Communist propaganda (this was an era when a weapons manufacturer could be a hero), a solid rogue’s gallery (OK, so the Unicorn and the Melter weren’t great, but the Mandarin was a solid A-lister, and the Living Laser, the Crimson Dynamo, and the Titanium Man all made good B-list opponents), and a fun supporting cast (Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan had a great ‘Moonlighting’ dynamic going), and you have a good storytelling engine.

Jon Scieszka, the author of witty and subversive children’s favorites like “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” and “The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales,” is to be named the country’s first national ambassador for young people’s literature on Thursday, a kind of children’s book version of the Library of Congress’s poet laureate program.

Mr. Scieszka, 53, who has written more than 25 books in the last two decades, is to be named to this new position by James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. Mr. Billington said that unlike the role of the poet laureate, which does not come with specific responsibilities, this one calls for Mr. Scieszka (pronounced SHEH-ska) to be a spokesman who will travel and speak to groups of children, parents and teachers “to evangelize the need for reading.” He will also speak at Children’s Book Week in New York in May and the National Book Festival in Washington in September.

With the new position Mr. Scieszka said he hoped to reach out to children who are considered reluctant readers. “There’s a huge population of kids who would be or can be readers, but just choose not to,” said Mr. Scieszka, who runs a Web-based literacy program aimed at boys called Guys Read. “Kids see it just as a school activity or something that just can’t compete with a Nintendo Wii or just hanging out and text messaging your friends. Parents and booksellers and teachers are dying for some help.”