>>150059300
Comics have had heavily varying dialogue quality with forced "quip" moments since the 80s, speaking of..
Outside of that Whedon didn't start the problem but shouldn't be credited with pioneering it back when it was good.
He just copied it from mid-late 80s TV shows and serials and even in terms of bringing to the wider landscape. It still wasn't him.
When Die Hard was being made the directors specifically wanted a more "every man" hero akin to the 70s who could feel like he was being tested and pushed to his limits compared to the musclebound badasses of the past decade. This lead to Bruce Willis's casting, who had gained notoriety for playing a wisecracking PI on the comedy-drama Moonlighting at the time. Because of this background, Willis was granted a lot of creative input in his dialogue and a lot of freedom while ad-libbing.
The result was that John McClane wasn't simply a funnier or more entertaining character than what came before but a more relatable one whose trying to put on a confident bravado as a defense mechanism in a situation scaring the shit out of him.
20 years later and no one really managed to replicate what made the McClane character so successful so we didn't see it much outside TV until the first Iron Man.
RDJ had a similar comedic background,
Like McClane, Stark had a sense of using wisecracks to 'defend' himself while winging it both socially and on-the-field. Like before, this was a hit and led into that style being viable again which is why a TV ensemble writer like Whedon managed to briefly go from 'good cult show guy' to 'mainstream darling and director of Avengers'
