Quote Originally Posted by Electricmastro View Post
I was going off on how you said, "The movies haven't exactly brought in a truckload of new readers to Iron Man comics."
Well in the 40s you had serials of Captain Marvel and that brought in readers to the comics. In that same decade you had Fleischer's classic Superman cartoons which also increased readership and so on but not to the same extent as Billy Batson. More recently, you had the Raimi Spider-Man movies which engaged new readership like never before (comics sales of Spider-Man significantly rose after the movies came out), with Ultimate Spider-Man and the JMS era doing very well.

Adaptations can bring new readers to comics, so long as the comics reflect the qualities that attracted audiences to the adaptation. The Adam West Batman show for instance didn't bring as many new readers in which is why a few years later, Julius Schwartz and others decided to take Batman comics to a darker place with stories like Joker's Five Way Revenge. The reason is that the Adam West TV-Show had this garish pop-art sensibility and celebrity casting for villains and so on that do not cross over effectively into panels and balloons.

The Iron Man of the MCU is not really faithful to the Tony of the comics. Villains like Justin Hammer who were impressive in the comics in their big stories are made into jokes in the movies. Villains like Iron Monger and Whiplash are totally altered. The Mandarin was removed because the character's a racist caricature and instead you have the great Ben Kingsley as the hilarious Trevor Slattery...and now it turns out that a comics-accurate Mandarin is going to bother Shang-Chi instead. Likewise, in the MCU Tony and Pepper have this love story and commitment that the comics Tony is just incapable of...Pepper Potts comes and goes in stories in terms of importance. Jarvis in the comics is a butler and in the movies he's an AI. So there's nothing to keep readers invested in the Iron Man comics because what they liked in the movies is just not there.