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Today, we look at how Iron Man’s second company was taken down by the Runaways’ evil parents, the Pride!
This is “Foundationed Deep,” a feature where we look at particular odd/strange/interesting instances of retroactively connecting different comic book characters (for instance, Uncanny X-Men #268 retroactively established that Wolverine knew both Captain America and the Black Widow from World War II).
The Runaways debuted in 2003 in a series by Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, David Newbold and Brian Reber, which featured a group of teens who get together every year when their parents have a meeting. This year, though, the teens decide to actually spy on their parents…
They then discovered that their parents were up to something odd…
That “odd” something was soon clear to be MURDER!!
The teens then went on the run from their parents, who are secretly the Los Angeles villain group known as The Pride, and slowly discovered that there were a whole lot of other weird parts about them (like futuristic technology, magic, a dinosaur and alien powers!), but after their parents framed the teens for the murder that they witnessed…
the teens vowed to take their parents down!
Of course, their leader, Alex Wilder, was secretly working for his parents, but that’s a whole other story!
IRON MAN HAD TO FORM A NEW COMPANY AFTER HE LOST STARK INTERNATIONAL IN A DRUNKEN HAZE
Iron Man #128 (by Bob Layton, David Michelinie and John Romita Jr.) famously saw Tony Stark deal with his drinking problem…
However, the issue basically just has Tony quit cold turkey…
and then everything was okay….
Layton and Michelinie were obviously limited by the era, but there were some, including Denny O’Neil, who believed that they had Tony get sober way too quickly.
So when O’Neil took over writing the book, he quickly had Tony relapse into drinking, as seen in Iron Man #169 (art by Luke McDonnell and Steve MitcheLL)…
Tony is such a mess that he lost Stark International to Obadiah Stane and James Rhodes had to take over as Iron Man…
Things came to a head for Tony in Iron Man #182, with its wonderfully ominous cover…
Tony, by now, is mostly living on the streets as a hobo. A woman he met while on the streets dies giving birth and Tony has to protect her newborn child from the elements…
Tony is admitted to the hospital and presumably went through his detox while possibly unconscious…
By the end of the issue, Tony has been discharged and has stopped drinking.
We see him in the next issue repeating an Alcoholics Anonymous credo to some other unnamed characters, so it is heavily hinted that Tony started going to AA at this point….
Tony then moves to California with Rhodey and a pair of sibling scientists, Morley Erwin and Clytemnestra Erwin, and they eventually form their own tech company called Circuits Maximus…
WHAT DID IRON MAN DO BEFORE THAT COMPANY AND HOW WAS THE PRIDE INVOLVED?
In Iron Man Legacy #6 (by Fred Van Lente, Steve Kurth, Allen Martinez and John Rauch), Tony Stark saves a homeless man from a supervillain, but in the process, he left his bag filled with his makeshift armor, so the Pride was alerted to him being involved in their territory and they were not happy…
Meanwhile, in the next issue, Tony meets the homeless man’s sister, and he learns that the brother is actually a genius who has mental issues. Tony also learns that there is an abandoned factory in the neighborhood and he has an idea…
When she comes back from work, Tony and her brother have come up with a new company!!
Tony’s plan is to produce a small, sophisticated pillbox that helps people keep track of their medicine. It’s cheap to produce and should sell enough to make the company successful….
The problem is that the Pride is using their contacts to make sure that no venture capitalists in the area fund the company, called Imperio Techworks…
Despite all of this, Tony keeps on keeping on by just going to the regular folks in the neighborhood and crowdfunding the company!
Once the company is funded, Reed Richards then donates him some more money (the Illuminati decided that just giving Tony money would have offended him, so they wanted to wait for him to turn things around himself before giving him any help)…
However, even with the company funded, the Pride still makes sure that they can’t get anything done…
The Pride eventually took on Iron Man directly, planning to just kill Tony and be done with it, but luckily, the Illuminati stepped into the situation….
but the Pride were not impressed…
Eventually, Tony decided to cut a truce with the Pride. He would pull out of Imperio Techworks and out of Los Angeles proper (Circuits Maximus was outside of Los Angeles, as it was set in Silicon Valley, and even when Tony took over Stark Enterprises again after Iron Man #200, their offices were also in Silicon Valley, which is a clever bit by Van Lente here to make it all fit into continuity) and he would also make sure that he and his friends would leave the Pride alone for now in exchange for them agreeing to not hurt anyone else involved in Imperio Techworks…
However, even with this setup, Tony’s homeless friend had a mental health setback and when the issue ended, things ended up fairly poorly for him, but really, better than had Tony not gotten involved (as a villain was literally MURDERING him)…
It’s a fascinating twist, though, to learn that the Illuminati knew of the Pride’s existence and let them continue to exist, but it’s interesting, that actually serves to sort of excuse a possible iffy aspect of the Runaways series, which was “How could a supervillain team be in charge of Los Angeles with no superheroes knowing?” Well, now we know – they DID know!
If anyone has a suggestion for a Foundationed Deep (retroactive connections between characters), feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com.
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