He is Iron Man

So, a couple weeks back I got an email from a Seattle pal who now lives in Spain while she was on vacation in Denmark (some life, eh?). She wrote:

Look what's painted in the office/guest room in the flat I'm staying in in Copenhagen... I am pretty super-hero illiterate and don't know who this is, but it's still kinda cool, no?

Here's the image she enclosed:

I wrote back and told her that it was Iron Man ("the guy Robert Downey Junior has played in what, four movies now?") and further that (a) I guessed someone had used a seventies-era Gene Colon drawing as a guide when painting the mural and (b) yes, it was indeed major cool.

What interested me most about the exchange was her reply:

I was gonna say Iron Man because of the circle on his chest, but he didn't look like movie Iron Man, so I doubted. Too bad we don't get to see RDJ in *this* get up...

So it seems that now, at least for casual fans, circle-on-chest = Iron Man (maybe). The visual device that the movies created to represent Tony Stark's chest plate dependency seems to have burned at least somewhat into the general consciousness.

And yeah, I'd like to have seen this armor on the movie, too.