brevoortformspring:

For its first decade or so, IRON MAN was an overtly political strip, with many of its villains coming from an Iron Curtain/Cold War background. Those villains kind of lost their relevance after the fall of the Soviet Union, and while many of them have appeared since then, without the political aspect to their stories, they all just became guys in inferior armor or with one-trick weapons and not a whole lot more to them.