NOW FOR THE FUNKIER ARMORS
6. HULKBUSTER
We all know that Hulk is the strongest one there is, and the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. No upper limit on his bench. The only people that tend to fight the Hulk to a standstill are Thor and the Juggernaut, because fans would get mad if one ever beat the other. Perhaps that’s why, when charged with busting the Hulk (believe it or not, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner were never really a bromance until The Avengers movie – and in the comics, they still aren’t), Iron Man decided to ape Juggy’s look with a big, bruiser sort of armor – bringing back some of that imposing bulk from the early days.
The problem here is that there is a whole organization of the United States military known as the Hulkbusters, and they never successfully bust Hulk. The armor what shares their name has a similar success rate. Because Hulk is HULK.
7. THORBUSTER
Despite the Hulkbuster’s lack of success, the name was catchy enough to extend to his armor built specifically to counteract The God of Thunder. Yes, he builds armors to fight his friends. Not a lot of people liked Tony Stark during the Civil War era, where he became The Man – being the U.S. Secretary of Defense, running SHIELD, forcing superheroes to register or be imprisoned, completely not noticing a Skrull invasion… honestly, the Robert Downey Jr. interpretation of Tony Stark kinda saved the character from a pretty bad place and gave him a new outlook that he never really had in the books.
Anyway, Tony built this armor, powered by an Asgardian crystal, to look like The Destroyer, the most feared machine of destruction – well, you saw it in Thor. Seems unwise to insult Goldilocks like that – see the aforementioned ‘fighting Hulk to a standstill’ thing.
8. MYSTICAL WHATEVER-THE-HELL
If there’s one thing Tony Stark hates, it’s magic. He’s a big-time science guy, and they tend to hate magic. Mr. Fantastic isn’t a big fan, either, which is what makes Dr. Doom such a threat to him. Although Doom is a threat to everybody at at all times. Case in point, Iron Man: Legacy of Doom, a Camelot story wherein he beat the snot out of Stark with Excalibur, and in response, Tony’s armor merged with the sword’s scabbard and gave him a frou-frou topknot thing and old-timey knight-lookin’ garb, as you see above. Science that away, Stark!
One more reason that Tony hates magic – during the massive Fear Itself storyline, when Odin’s brother was murdering Earth and Odin was too chicken-livered to help, the only way Tony could get his ear for some kind of aid was to break his sobriety streak as a sacrifice. For some reason. Yeah, that story sucked. However, it also gave Tony (and everybody still alive at that point) some funky, mighty, spikey armor that turned the tide against a bunch of magic-hammer wielding jerks.
Magic still sucks.
9. SPACE ARMOR
These days, Marvel is gearing up to try to turn the Guardians of the Galaxy into a marketable commodity. To that end, they’ve sent Iron Man into space for a while to hang out with them. Now, Iron Man In Space is nothing new – as you can see from the above image, they just closed the mouth crack of the armor (and turned his chest hole into home plate) to allow him to go out Star Trekkin’ at his leisure.
These days, everything’s gotta be slicker than that, so this is what they put him in NOW.
It’s… fine, I suppose. A mix of red and gold and such. It’s just that face that’s silly-lookin’, really. Little yellow horns on the helmet like he’s a St. Louis Ram… it just looks all cluttered. The kicker is that this armor isn’t programmed with the personality of Jarvis, the Avengers butler, but rather Pepper Potts, his erstwhile assistant. Now, the relationship between Tony and Pepper in the comics is different than the movies would have you believe, but this is still a bit odd.
Speaking of Pepper…
10. ARMORS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
Tony Stark is very proprietary about his armor – hell, there’s a whole storyline called Armor Wars where he went around beating the crap out of everybody trying to bite his tech style to make sure it was destroyed and unusable. But he’s not the only guy out there in a suit of armor, and that’s not even necessarily counting his enemies, like Iron Monger, Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, etc. Here are some other folks with legit Stark Technology.
WAR MACHINE:
Tony’s pal James Rhodes got his own suit of heavy-duty, massively-armed badassery, in the original gunmetal grey of the first ever Iron Man suit. It’s the shoulder cannon that makes it sing. We saw this in Iron Man 2, if you recall.
In Iron Man 3, however, Rhodey’s going to turn that armor into the Iron Patriot look, because he’s a military man in service to his country. However, that’s not exactly how Iron Patriot began.
THE GREEN GODDAMNED GOBLIN
In the aftermath of Tony Stark being The Man, as we mentioned earlier, Norman Osborn rose to power – somehow, everyone decided to forget he was also a freak who dressed up like a goblin and threw college girls off of bridges and made Spider-Men cry. That’s how badly Tony Stark is at being The Man. That started the Dark Reign, in which there were Dark Avengers and Dark X-Men and Dark Spider-Man and Dark Freakin’ Everything For Ever and Ever, Amen. It was a dark time. Very dark. Darker than dark. The darkest darkness of dark dark darkleberry crunch – ahem.
Anyway, the Iron Patriot arose out of sheer spite. Osborn – who was also drawn to look like Tommy Lee Jones at the time, apparently – started dressing up in star-spangled stolen Stark stuff, leading a team called the Darkolicious Avengers with bad guys dressed as sort of good guys.
It got so bad that Stark had to go into hiding, but he did leave behind some good guy armor, perhaps appropriately called…
RESCUE
That’s right. Pepper Potts gets her own suit of armor… and of course, it has boobs. This was in 2009, and it was the debut of the J.A.R.V.I.S. personality component from the movie as a guide to help teach Pep how to use it. A few years later, however, J.A.R.V.I.S. goes nuts and takes Pep hostage, and has to be destroyed. Which I guess is why Tony’s space armor is programmed with P.E.P.P.E.R. Regardless, that Dark Reign mess basically made all of Tony’s worst nightmares about the misuse of his technology come true. It couldn’t get worse than that, could it?
DEADPOOL
Okay, it got worse.
In Deadpool #7 – on sale now, and the best issue of Deadpool in years!
So, there you go. A brief, entirely not comprehensive tour through the history of Iron Man armors. Now, you are armed with knowledge that will serve you very little purpose in life! Ta-dah!
