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Today, we see how War Machine sacrificed his alien armor to protect the legacy of Iron Man and Tony Stark in the wake of Iron Man’s sacrifice against Onslaught.
Wrap it Up is a lot like my Provide Some Answers feature, which is about long-running comic book plots finally being resolved. This, though, is a more specific comic book occurrence where the plotlines of a canceled comic book are wrapped up in the pages of another comic book series. This would happen most frequently in Marvel Comics, but other companies did it, as well.
We’re going to be taking a look at the relatively little examined period in the Marvel Universe post-Onslaught and pre-Heroes Return. It was a fascinating period because when Marvel farmed out the Fantastic Four and Avengers titles to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s studios, that inherently meant that Marvel had all of the creative teams from those titles now available for Marvel to use without any books to use them on, so major names were available, which is how we got Mark Waid and Andy Kubert doing a Ka-Zar book, ya know? However, books looking at the overall Marvel Universe in the wake of Onslaught were few and far between, with mostly just Thunderbolts and Heroes for Hire showing what the superheroes who were left after Onslaught were doing. There was a special one-shot, though, leading into those books launching that also wrapped up an era in James Rhodes’ comic book history.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE SUPERHEROES GONE?
I just talked about this in a piece about the Vision’s return to his original body, but to recap, Onslaught was the manifestation of Professor Xavier’s psychic abilities tainted by having Magneto’s personality mixed with the Professor’s (after Xavier wiped Magneto’s mind out during the “Fatal Attractions” crossover). Magneto’s personality amped up all the worst parts of Xavier’s personality and the end result was a psychic being with its own personality – the malevolent being known as Onslaught. It encased itself in a special armor so it could hold physical form and then it started kicking some ass.
The final battle took place in Central Park in Onslaught: Marvel Universe #1 (by Scott Lobdell, Mark Waid, Adam Kubert, Joe Bennett, Dan Green, Art Thibert, Tim Townsend and Jesse Delperdang), where the X-Men are getting destroyed by Onslaught when suddenly, the other prominent superheroes of the Marvel Universe show up to help out…
In the ensuing big fight, the Hulk is able to crack Onslaught’s armor and then the villain’s psychic energy was leaking out there, which was dangerous, as now there was no way of physically harming him. However, the heroes discovered that if humans entered the psychic energy, they could absorb some of his power (mutants couldn’t do it because he would just take over their bodies as a host, which is what he was planning to do with the kidnapped X-Man. Scarlet Witch being able to go in due to her hex), so the heroes all sacrificed themselves to suck away his power, even though it seemingly killed them doing so.
Once he was “anchored” by the humans (and, apparently, the Vision), the mutants then destroyed the energy, but, again, in the process it seemed like the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Crystal, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Namor, Doctor Doom, Giant-Man, Wasp and Falcon were all killed.
However, the Iron Man who died was not the Iron Man that we typically think of.
THE SAGA OF TEEN TONY STARK
What we now call the “Teen Tony Stark” storyline involved us discovering that the “real” Iron Man had been a sleeper agent for Kang for many years, so that the Avengers went back in time and brought back a teenaged Tony Stark from a time when he had not yet been corrupted by Kang and tried to get him to stop his adult self.
In the end, the adult version almost kills his teen self, with the teen once again having to do the whole “his armor is the only thing keeping him alive” story angle. Meanwhile, the adult Tony sacrificed himself to save the world, proving that he was still a hero in the end. So the teen Tony took over as Iron Man and as the star of the Iron Man comic book.
In Iron Man #328 (by Terry Kavanagh, Jimmy Cheung and Mark McKenna), the original Tony’s successors as the heads of Stark Enterprises had a major decision to make…
and it was whether to allow the company to be merged into Fugikawa International…
In the following issue, the deal was done…
This, of course, was a reference to the Spider-Man 2099 comic, where in Spider-Man 2099 #5 (by Peter David, Rick Leonardi and Al Williamson), we learn that in the future world of 2099, Stark Enterprises WAS merged with Fugikawa…
James Rhodes had previously had a suit of armor designed by Tony Stark for him that Rhodes wore as War Machine. He even had his own series..
However, when Dan Abnett took over as the new writer on the book, right around the time that a lot of the Avengers-related books were getting revamped, the idea was to bring Rhodes away from such a direct tie to Tony Stark, so Rhodes lost his original War Machine armor and instead just happened to gain an alien symbiote armor instead…
It was…quite the look.
In Iron Man #330, War Machine takes it upon himself to try to destroy Tony’s collection of armors so that bad guys couldn’t get them…
Former Stark employee Abe Zimmer somehow DIED trying to get rid of the armors, which really seemed like a messed up way to kill off a character like Zimmer. Shouldn’t the dude with the alien armor have been doin this the whole way through?
Anyhow, of course, that’s precisely what happens, as Tony’s jerk cousin, Morgan Stark, tries to take control of the armors.
Ultimately, Teen Tony destroys them all in Iron Man #331 (Joe Bennett on pencils and James Felder now on scripts)…
The series ends an issue later, as Teen Tony heads off to Onslaught and dies. I guess War Machine decided to skip that suicide mission.
In Tales of the Marvel Universe #1, though, in a story by Howard Mackie and Klaus Janson, War Machine decides to protect Tony’s legacy…
So he uses his armor to break into Stark’s highest levels of security…
And then sacrifices his War Machine armor to eliminate all traces of Tony’s technology so that Fugikawa can’t do anything untowards with it (basically a mini-version of Armor Wars)…
So the Stark stuff is now wrapped up and James Rhodes’ alien armor is gone, as well, leaving Rhodes a clean slate for the next writer to do whatever they felt like with him…
Nicely done by Mackie and Janson.
If you have a suggestion for a future edition of Wrap It Up, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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