Harold "Happy" Hogan

Happy Hogan is an ex-boxer with a fighter's build and a soft heart. When Tony Stark's race car skids up an embankment and bursts into flame, Happy is the one who drags him clear as the gas goes up. Stark offers him a fifty-thousand-dollar check for the save. Happy turns it down flat, waves the whole thing off as plain reflex, and asks only for honest work and a decent car to drive. Stark makes him his chauffeur on the spot.

The next day Happy tours the Stark Industries plant and meets Pepper Potts, who is already rehearsing the name Mrs. Anthony Stark and has little patience for a new chauffeur's flirting. Then, Gregor Shapanka comes for Stark in a freezing suit. Happy, the brand-new muscle of the operation, spends the entire brawl as a Hogan-shaped block of ice. Iron Man thaws him loose with a flashlight turned heat ray. Happy's first instinct is to apologize for being no use at all. Stark answers by calling him his new right arm.

Happy Hogan has been driving for Tony Stark just long enough to wonder about the bodyguard. Riding out to the boss's palatial home with Pepper Potts, he is the one who floats the word blackmail. When Stark bundles them back out the door, Happy agrees the man is hiding something. His car is speeding back toward town when a radio bulletin reports a deadly ray has struck Stark's home. At Pepper's urging he swings around, telling her "easy, Pepper, honey" and holding out hope that it's all a mistake. It isn't. Amid the wreckage, he offers her the only comfort he has left, that maybe the boss wasn't in the room when the ray hit. Then Iron Man's flimsy alibi about fetching some papers tips Happy from worried to suspicious.

With Stark missing and Iron Man gone too, Happy backs Pepper at police headquarters, telling the officers something fishy is going on. The police want proof, and Happy follows Pepper out to find it. The next day, a noise behind the door of Stark's private office has him guessing Iron Man is back. It's the boss instead, and Happy greets the resurrection with a "Holy cow" and the news that everyone thought he was dead. The man who hauled Stark out of a burning race car still can't spot him under a helmet.