If you are a fan of Marvel comics, a little known fact is that creator Stan Lee came up with the idea of Iron Man with respect to a challenge - a personality no one likes yet forced to like. Sounds quite novel, isn't it?
He was quoted in an earlier interview as saying: I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him ... And he became very popular.
While we have indeed come across a lot of super heroes, the fact that a creator has made us fall in love with what he thinks is a negative character is quite an achievement, what say?