10 Biggest Iron Man Plot Twists

3. Tony's Secret Brother, Arno Stark

Iron Man
Marvel Comics

As it turns out, the baby that Recorder 451 saved was not Tony at all. When Tony's father Howard noticed that 451 had secretly, for some reason, engineered the child so that it would not live past 30, he decided to do some genetic engineering of his own. He injected his wife Maria with a serum of his own making, hoping to counteract 451's meddling.

This had the unfortunate effect of throwing the entire genetic process off balance, and the child, Arno, was born extremely sickly. Howard and Maria knew they couldn't allow 451 to discover what they had done, so they decided they had to adopt another child as a decoy. They would continue to secretly raise the bedbound Arno, while pretending that their new child, Tony, was the saviour 451 had designed.

When Tony discovers this, he tracks down Arno, and finds him still bedbound and suffering from a mysterious illness.

Despite this, Arno Stark is actually the current Iron Man in the comics, known as the timely Iron Man 2020. Why did he take over the mantle? Well, unless you're following the ongoing story in the comics, you'll just have to wait until the number one entry on this list to find out!

This twist opens up a whole new bunch of questions, the biggest being: if Tony Stark was adopted, who are his real parents? Click on to find out!

Contributor
Contributor

Jimmy Kavanagh is an Irish writer and co-founder of Club Valentine Comedy, a Dublin-based comedy collective. You can hear him talk to his favourite comedians about their favourite comics on his podcast, Comics Swapping Comics.