|
|
 |
Name: Anthony "Tony" Stark
Alias: Iron Man (current) , Cobalt Man (imposter), Iron Knight, Hogan Potts, Spare Parts Man, Golden Avenger, Shellhead (former) Identity: Publicly known Family: Howard Stark (father, deceased), Maria Stark (mother, deceased), Morgan Stark (cousin) Legal Status: Citizen of the United States with no criminal record Martial Status: Single Hair Color: Black Eye Color: Blue Height: 6 foot 1 inch Weight: 185 pounds Occupation: Inventor, Industrialist, Adventurer Affiliation: Avengers Location: Avenger's Mansion; 890 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City |
|
Abilities: Tony Stark is a genius who is a responsible for numerous major discoveries, inventions, and other achievements in various areas of technology. Without his armor Tony Stark possesses the normal strength of a normal human man his age, height, and build who engages in moderate regular exercise. His armor magnifies Stark strength to superhuman levels, enabling him to lift (press) roughly 85 times. Iron Man wears a sophisticated suit a body armor containing various offensive weaponry.
History:
Stark entered the undergraduate electrical engineering program at MIT while only 15 years old and graduated at the top of his class. When he was 21, he inherited his father's company, Stark Industries, after his parents were killed in a car accident. One of the first things Stark did was to buy out the company that made the faulty brakes on his parent's car and correct the mechanical problem.
While on a visit to Vietnam to see how his new mini-transistors could assist the American war effort, Tony Stark was caught in a booby trap. Captured by a Vietnamese warlord named Wong Chu, and dying from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his heart from the booby trap, Stark was pressed into building weapons for Wong Chu, along with a fellow prisoner, the famed physicist Yin Sen (later spelled Ho Yinsen). However, Stark and Yin Sen used the workshop to secretly design and construct a suit of powered armor — an iron exoskeleton that gave Stark tremendous strength as well as other abilities — that would not only keep Stark's heart beating, but also allow him to escape. Yin Sen sacrificed himself to buy Stark time to charge the bulky suit of armor, and as Iron Man, Stark made short work of Wong Chu and his men. On the way back, Iron Man encountered a wounded American Air Force helicopter pilot, Jim Rhodes. Introducing himself as Stark's bodyguard, Iron Man and Rhodes managed to defend themselves against the pursuing North Vietnamese before making it back to American lines. On his return to the US, Stark continued to improve the armor, establishing a dual identity as the adventurer and superhero Iron Man. He also greatly expanded his father's company, Stark Industries, eventually renaming it Stark International.
The cover for Iron Man was that he was Stark's bodyguard and corporate mascot. To that end, Iron Man fought threats to his company, Communist opponents such as the Black Widow, the Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man as well as independent villains like the Mandarin. Both the Widow and the Dynamo would eventually defect to the United States, and even erstwhile villain Hawkeye, originally a pawn of the Widow, would reform and join the Avengers. No one suspected Stark of being Iron Man as he cultivated his image as a rich playboy and industrialist. Two notable members of Stark's supporting cast were his personal chauffeur Harold "Happy" Hogan and secretary Patricia "Pepper" Potts, to whom he eventually revealed his dual identity.
The comic took a fairly right-wing anti-Communist stance in its early years, which was softened as the comics readership displayed opposition to the Vietnam War. This took place in a series of stories with Stark profoundly reconsidering his political opinions and the morality of manufacturing weapons for the military. Stark, however, has remained essentially conservative both in character and politics despite his playboy image. He has also often shown himself to be occasionally arrogant and willing to justify the means with the ends. This has led to personal conflicts with the people around him, both in his civilian and superhero identities.
Stark has a vast personal fortune, and is also known as a philanthropist. He donated the use of his boyhood manor as Avengers Mansion, and funded the Avengers' operations through the Maria Stark Foundation, a non-profit organization named after his late mother. The Foundation is not linked to any of Stark's businesses, and has continued to operate even when those businesses have failed. Stark also provides technology to other superheroes, including designing various replacement shields for Captain America, the quinjets used by the Avengers, and the image inducers used by the X-Men.
Eventually, Stark's heart condition was discovered by the public and cured with an artificial heart transplant. However, Stark was also developing a serious dependency on alcohol. The first time it became a problem was when Stark discovered that the national security agency S.H.I.E.L.D. had been buying a controlling interest in his company in order to ensure Stark's continued weapons development for them. At the same time, Stark's business rival Justin Hammer hired several supervillains to attack Stark. At one point, the Iron Man armor was even taken over and used to murder a diplomat. Although Iron Man was not immediately under suspicion, Stark was forced to hand the armor over to the authorities. Eventually Stark and his personal pilot and confidant Jim Rhodes tracked down those responsible, although Hammer would return to bedevil Stark again. With the support of his then-girlfriend, Bethany Cabe, his friends and employees, Stark pulled through these crises and, for the moment, overcame his dependency on alcohol.
Some time later, a ruthless rival, Obadiah Stane, manipulated him emotionally into a serious relapse. As a result, Stark lost control of Stark International, became a homeless vagrant and gave up his armored identity to Rhodes, who became the new Iron Man for a lengthy period of time. Eventually, Stark recovered and started a new company, Circuits Maximus. While Stark concentrated on new technological designs, Rhodes continued to act as Iron Man but steadily grew more aggressive and paranoid. Rhodes's manic mental state was later revealed to be the result of his using armors whose cerebral interfaces were calibrated for Stark's brain, leaving any other long-term user disoriented and confused. Stark had to don a prototype suit to stop Rhodes, who had gone on a rampage. When Circuits Maximus came under assault from Stane, Stark then used the completed next-generation armor to confront Stane in personal combat. Stark's skill proved superior over Stane's unskilled use of his own variant suit, known as the Iron Monger and he regained his company when Stane committed suicide rather than be captured.
In an attempt to stop other people from misusing his designs, Stark then went about disabling other armored heroes and villains who were using suits based on the Iron Man technology. However, these "Armor Wars" had tragic consequences, when he inadvertently caused the death of the Soviet Titanium Man. This also led to a falling out between Stark and Steve Rogers, who at the time had given up his Captain America identity.
However, Stark's health continued to deteriorate, and it was discovered that the armor's cybernetic interface was causing irreversible damage to his nervous system. His condition was aggravated by a failed attempt on his life by a mentally unbalanced former lover which injured his spine, paralyzing him. Stark constructed a "skin" made up of artificial nerve circuitry, intended to assist his own failing nervous system. Stark began to pilot a remote-controlled Iron Man armor, but when faced with the Masters of Silence, the telepresence suit proved insufficient. Stark designed a heavier armed version of the suit to wear, the "Variable Threat Response Battle Suit", which became known as the War Machine armor.
Ultimately, the damage to his nervous system was too extensive, and almost killed Stark. Faking his death, he placed himself in suspended animation to heal as Rhodes took over the running of Stark Enterprises and once again took up the mantle of Iron Man using the War Machine armor. Stark ultimately made a full recovery and reassumed the mantle of Iron Man. When Rhodes learned that Stark had manipulated his friends by faking his own death, he became enraged and the two friends parted ways, Rhodes continuing as War Machine in a solo career.
A schism within the Avengers following the events of the Kree-Shi'ar War ("Operation: Galactic Storm") led to a difference of opinion regarding the future of the Avenger's west coast branch. Iron Man left the team and formed a new superhero group, Force Works, funded by Tony Stark and comprised of ex-Avengers. However, tensions within that team soon led to his resignation from it, and Iron Man attempted a reconciliation with the Avengers.
It was revealed soon after that a traitor was among the Avengers' ranks, and it turned out that traitor was none other than Iron Man himself. It appeared that the villain Kang the Conqueror had been manipulating Stark for years, using him as a sleeper agent, and causing him to push aside his friends and unconsciously serve Kang. Stark, fully in Kang's thrall, killed Marilla, the nanny of Crystal and Quicksilver's daughter Luna as well as Rita DeMara, the female Yellowjacket, then an ally of the Avengers.
Needing help to defeat both Stark and Kang, the team travelled back in time and recruited a teenage Tony Stark from an alternate timeline to assist them. "Teen Tony" stole a suit of Stark's armor to aid the Avengers against his older self, and the sight of his younger self shocked the older Stark enough for him to regain momentary control of his actions, and he sacrificed his life to stop Kang. "Teen Tony" then later built his own suit to become the "new" Iron Man. The teenage Stark remained in the present day and legally regained control of his company.
During the battle with the creature called Onslaught, "Teen Tony" died, along with many of his teammates and allies from the Avengers and Fantastic Four. However, Franklin Richards preserved these "dead" heroes in the "Heroes Reborn" pocket universe, in which Tony Stark was once again an adult and a hero. The reborn adult Stark, upon returning to the normal Marvel Universe, retained the memories of both the original and teenage Tony Stark, and considered himself to have been both of them. With the aid of law firm Nelson & Murdock, he successfully regained his fortune and set up a new company (during his "death", Stark Enterprises had been sold), Stark Solutions. He also returned from the pocket universe with a fully-restored living heart. After the Avengers reformed, Stark demanded that a hearing be convened to look into his actions just prior to the Onslaught incident. Cleared of wrongdoing, he rejoined the Avengers.
At one point, Tony's armor itself became sentient, despite fail-safes to prevent its increasingly sophisticated computer systems from doing so. Stark's safeguards were corrupted accidentally when he used the armor to download the mind of the android Jocasta to save her. Jocasta was the creation of the rogue android Ultron, and unknown even to her, embedded in all of Ultron's creations was the Ultron Imperative, a command that would compel them to rebuild Ultron whenever he was destroyed. The Ultron Imperative acted like a trojan horse, infecting the armor's on board systems. Combined with an electrical attack by the villain Whiplash that sent Stark into cardiac arrest, it caused the armor's computer to become self-aware. Initially, Stark welcomed this "living" armor, as it had improved tactical abilities, but soon the armor's behavior began to grow more aggressive, even committing murder. Eventually, the armor reached the point where it wanted to join with Stark and eventually replace him, like Ultron wished to do with his creator Henry Pym.
Stark could not defeat the armor, but in the final confrontation on a desert island, Stark suffered another heart attack. To save his life, the armor gave up part of its components to give Stark a new, artificial heart, sacrificing its own existence. The new heart did not have an internal power supply, so Stark became once again dependent on periodic recharging.
The sentient armor incident so disturbed Stark that he went back to using an early model version of his armor for a while. He also dabbled with using liquid metal circuitry known as S.K.I.N. that would form itself into a protective shell around his body, but eventually returned to more conventional hard metal armors.
Recently, Stark decided to finally reveal to the world that he had been the man behind the Iron Man mask all along.
|
Rogers, while agreeing with Stark's motives, disapproved of his high-handed methods, considering them reckless and dangerous. The United States government declared Iron Man a danger when he went after their Stark-derived Guardsmen suits and Iron Man was hunted down. Stark eventually had to fake Iron Man's demise and claim that a new person was in the armor. Stark also patched up his friendship with Steve Rogers.