Scrap Iron Man — want!

China Miéville has a modest proposal for a new superhero series:

An extraordinary figure in bizarre makeshift power armour the colours of rust and hazard-warning yellow has appeared, fighting burglars, thieves, drug-dealers, graffiti-taggers. Flashback: he’s Dan, an ex-worker in one of the high-tech heavy defence plants, horrified at the social breakdown, going through the many scrapheaps of the town and cobbling together his suit from industrial junk, trying to save his home.

Dan smashes up a crack house, but while most of those within run, one stays and jeers at him, calls him a bully. Dan knows her: Louise was the union rep at his factory. He’s ashamed: he always liked her. They get talking. ‘You really want to do right by Flinton?’ Louise says eventually. ‘By all the other Flintons? Then quit messing with symptoms. It’s time to take down the real villain.’

[…]

The crew take their places at the controls. Dan puts on the battered welding helmet that disguises his identity and, in a burst of rust, launches into the sky for New York, to face down the sociopathic authoritarian fascist arms-dealing corporate billionaire responsible for so many countless deaths, in the US and around the world: Tony fucking Stark.

Want!