If the Iron Man HUD Were Real

There's a lot of artistic license in the way the movies present Tony Stark in the Iron Man armor. It makes sense, after all, that you'd want to see your star's face, speaking and emoting, and the "HUD view" is a damn sight better than the way so many heroes unmask so incessantly on film and TV (the Spider-Man franchise is a major culprit). And we accept it even though there's no way a camera would be that far away from his face inside the helmet. It's a representation, not the reality.

But what if the helmet was actually designed that way? What might it look like? Well, Jack Kirby already put some thought into it. Check out Captain Victory's "HUD" from his very first issue:
So maybe the movies had the right idea...

Comments

Jeremy Patrick said…
Two things that have absolutely nothing to do with this post, but I didn't want to forget. Someone in a previous comment mentioned you were reading House of Leaves. 1) Are you listening to the album by the author's brother, Poe (Haunted) that is an unofficial soundtrack? Fantastic album in its own right. 2) This is nit-picking, but the one thing that actually drew me out of the immersion of the book was the faux-footnotes. Real scholarship doesn't introduce a whole new source for every reference in a book long study--there'd be a lot more "Ibid.s" and "See above note 34" etc. if it were real!
August 7, 2015 at 1:44 AM
Siskoid said…
Yep, reading it, it's right there in the left sidebar.
1) No, I didn't know it existed, but I'll see what You-Tube has to offer. I can't listen to it while I read, because I read while walking to and from places (that seems to follow the book's theme, come to think of it) and I don't want to "blind" my other senses with ear buds and music.

2) Yes, if it were real, but it can't be. Not when Zampano seems to be believe Borges' Pierre Menard to be real. But in keeping with the book's themes and the ungraspable, the scholarship, just like the house itself, seems infinite and infinitely diverse, and Zampano seems to me the kind of person who would never use the same source twice, a facet of his hoarding compulsion (I'm at the bit with the long exhaustive lists of what the house is NOT). But of course you're right that Danielewski probably out-clevers himself with the scholarship jokes.

3) I think it's kind of appropriate, given the material, that people are talking to me about House of Leaves in various unrelated threads.
August 7, 2015 at 8:32 AM
Siskoid said…
It seems to be the nature of this book that it should respond to the real world. A few minutes' reading after I responded to your comment, the word "ibid" appeared three times in a row. Not in the proper context, but still.
August 7, 2015 at 9:26 AM
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