Invincible Iron Man (2008) - TV Tropes
- ️Fri May 31 2024
Invincible Iron Man is a 2008 comic book series by Marvel Comics, written by Matt Fraction with art by Salvador Larroca.
Following the events of The Order, Tony Stark comes face-to-face with Ezekiel Stane, the son of his arch-enemy Obidiah Stane, aka Iron Monger. With Ezekiel aiming to destroy him, Tony Stark must face down someone who's younger, faster, smarter, and has access to his own Iron Man technology.
The first issue was published May 7, 2008.
Invincible Iron Man (2008) provides examples of:
- American Robot: The Detroit Steel armor. Developed by Hammer Industries, the armor is huge, loud, has ridiculous amounts of guns and weaponry (including chainsaws), and is painted with the colors of the American flag (though he's first and foremost a corporate tool and other "Steelmech" models can be painted to whatever the buyer wants, namely corporate logos). Matt Fraction conceived him as a mix between the jingoism of Team America: World Police and Tony Stark's worst nightmares about his tech being completely corrupted by the military industrial complex.
- Author Filibuster: The first issue has young villain supergenius Ezekiel Stane, fresh from his latest round of building and selling WMDs to genocidal terrorists, stop to spend four pages testing out his latest weaponry on the board of directors of a tobacco company, while delivering a rant on a) the evils of smoking and b) why, despite Ezekiel's long list of crimes against humanity, he is still infinitely morally superior to people who grow and sell tobacco.
- Becoming the Mask: Spymaster infiltrates Stark Resilient by posing as a scientist. He eventually falls in love with Tim, another Stark employee, and is unable to kill him after being ordered to abandon the ruse. Spymaster is so wracked with guilt by this that he tells the police to apologize to Tim for him right before forcing them to shoot him.
- Character Death:
- The Mandarin is killed by Ezekiel Stane in issue #526.
- Firepower is killed after having his armor torn open and sinking into the ocean.
- Collector of the Strange: Exploited in the story arc "The Five Nightmares of Tony Stark". Tony Stark naturally knows several wealthy people who collect bits of Iron Man memorabilia, up to and including pieces of destroyed suits. When Tony discovers that someone has been buying up these pieces and using them to create one-shot disposable supervillains, he deliberately seeds the market with some choice bits — all of which have been tagged with a special tracking virus so he can find the mystery buyer.
- Custom-Built Host: The Mandarin forces Tony Stark and Ezekiel Stane to build giant many tentacled bodies for the Alien intelligences that exist in the Mandarin's Rings.
- Didn't Think This Through: When Tony’s blanked mind is restored from a ‘back-up’ dating back to his first use of Extremis, allies including Reed Richards note how foolish it was that he never set up a system where his mind was ‘backed up’ on a regular basis, as Tony’s Extremis-enhanced physiology was capable of making that part of his daily routine that would have only taken a few minutes each day.
- Distaff Counterpart: Pepper Potts briefly, when she wore the Rescue armor in Fraction's run.
- Driven to Suicide: In the World's Most Wanted storyline, Tony decides to shut down his own brain to erase all the data in it and thereby foil Norman Osborn, doing so with a big grin, a lot of gallows humor, and a calm explanation to Maria Hill (when she attempts Reverse Psychology) that shooting himself in the head just wouldn't be reliable. Sure, he's fighting evil in a very tight corner, but them's not the actions of a sane and happy man.
- Effective Knockoff: In the story arc "The Five Nightmares of Tony Stark", this is one of Stark's titular nightmares: not someone making a bigger, badder, more powerful Iron Man, but making a cheaper Iron Man that could be mass-produced. Naturally, Ezekiel Stane does just this, buying discarded pieces of Iron Man armor and turning them into implants for suicide bombers.
- Engineered Public Confession: Invoked; while Tony doesn’t explicitly make Norman “confess” to anything, he manages to provoke Norman into attacking him during a live broadcast when Norman’s wearing the Iron Patriot armor and Tony’s not only wearing a version of the original Iron Man suit but was so severely brain damaged by this point he can’t even fight back. Needless to say, Osborn’s attempt to sell himself as a ‘hero’ doesn’t hold up well when he’s shown beating a man who’s legally mentally handicapped and not only wasn’t properly fighting back, but wouldn’t have been capable of doing anything against Osborn using such a basic armor.
- Exact Words: In issues #501-503, Doctor Octopus holds the city hostage with a nuclear bomb, just to force Tony to say he's not as smart. At the end he reveals that it's nuclear, but isn't really a bomb, and points out he always called it a "device". Subverted when a perplexed Tony says that isn't true, and Ock replies, "Who cares? I Lied."
- Faking the Dead: After the Mandarin's machinations have made it virtually impossible for Tony to be Iron Man without government interference, Rhodey fakes his own death as War Machine so that he can take over as the new Iron Man. Once the whole situation is sorted out, Rhodey goes back to the War Machine armor.
- Flanderization:
- Matt Fraction has quite openly done this by very simply stating outright that all of Iron Man's problems boil down to his alcoholism. This was all the more painful for the fact that Fraction himself is a recovering alcoholic, pulling it into Author Tract territory.
- Matt Fraction did something similar with the "Repulsor generator". Repulsors are Iron Man's signature weapons - palm-mounted energy beams which push really hard against things. Possibly in a reaction to the movie's arc reactor, Fraction promoted the repulsor to an energy source instead and not just an energy source for technology - it also turns people into super-people when you implant one in them. Ultimately, the repulsor tech was the root and spine of Iron Man - when it had started out as simply one weapon of many.
- Hero Insurance: Played straight in one issue, when Tony Stark and Sasha Hammer have an all-out brawl in the middle of a busy highway, destroying a few passing cars in the process. Made absolutely hilarious when Pepper shows up and smacks Sasha with one of the destroyed cars, saying the owner gave her permission to use what was left of his car to beat the crap out of Sasha.
- It's All My Fault: Tony chooses the extreme measures of wiping his own brain to stop Norman Osborn because he feels it’s his fault that a psychopath like the Green Goblin has the chance to take power, and he never did anything to prepare a less extreme solution than this because he never thought things would get that bad.
- Lampshade Hanging: One issue in Matt Fraction's run has an increasingly amnesiac Tony recounting his original origin story. After it ends, he takes a moment to mock some of the more silly aspects of the issue, like his covering the Iron Man armor with a trenchcoat and fedora, along with the implausibility of where he found a trench-coat and fedora in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle, or Wong-Chu's "trial by champion" thing.
- Neural Implanting: Tony initially stops Osborn gaining access to the data in the Registration Act by uploading all that data to his Extremis-enhanced brain and then programming his mind to erase that data and his own memories. Once his mind has been blanked, various allies are able to follow pre-prepared instructions to ‘reboot’ Tony’s mind by uploading a copy of his memories that were downloaded when he initially used Extremis on himself (although since he hasn’t updated that back-up since then, there are a few gaps in Tony's memory).
- New Tech Is Not Cheap: This trope is a plot point in the story arc "The Five Nightmares of Tony Stark", in which the villain is getting his hands on old pieces of Iron Man suits — a partially-destroyed chestplate, scraps from a leg, etc. — and turning them into implants that could make people into cheap but extremely effective suicide bombers, powered by the "user's" body energy. Not as powerful as a full Iron Man suit, but far cheaper and easier to produce.
- Required Secondary Powers: Ezekiel Stane restructured his biology so (among other things) he can fire energy blasts from his body. The energy doesn't come from nowhere: He eats a high-calorie paste to sustain his body.
- Retcon: The Mandarin was originally said to be the child of a British noblewoman and a wealthy descendant of Genghis Khan, with his youth spent receiving the finest education money could buy. The series, however, would later suggest that the Mandarin was actually the son of an opium den prostitute, and that he'd been a gangster and smuggler before he lucked out and found his trademark Rings of Power. However, he could easily still be a descendant of Genghis Khan, since his descendants are about 10% of the population of Asia.
- Took a Level in Badass: Pepper Potts takes a massive level in badass, with her gaining a suit of powered armor.
- Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: This idea was played with in the "Five Nightmares of Tony Stark" storyline. In that story, a villain got his hands on some of Stark's tech, and used it to create armies of cheap, expendable Iron Men suicide bombers. Though Tony never fought the knock-offs directly, the situation was one of his titular nightmares: not a better version of his suit but a cheaper one, something that could be mass-produced.