10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About Iron Man

7. The Terrible Ultimate Reboot

Not that Heroes Reborn was the only time a reworking of Tony Stark absolutely failed, no sir. The version of Iron Man readers were first introduced to in the pages of The Ultimates wasn't too far from his depiction in the mainstream Marvel Universe: he was a suave industrialist, more than a little narcissistic and with more than a bit of a drinking problem, and he had an amazing robotic suit that let him do cool stuff. In fact the only real difference was that the armour was a little bulkier, and considering what Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did to every other member of the team, that was absolutely fine. It's when Tony got spun off into his own series that things started to go wrong. Penned by acclaimed sci-fi author and professional bigot Orson Scott Card (best known for his Ender's Game series of novels), Ultimate Iron Man looked back at how Tony got to the point where he was first introduced in The Ultimates. And what Scott Card saw was that he was a Tony Stark who was so smart he turned blue. Sounds stupid when you put it like that although, we assure you, explaining more thoroughly won't make this any smarter. The Ultimate twist on Iron Man was that not only was he the smartest guy on the planet, but he literally had ideas pouring out of him. Because his entire body consisted of neural tissue, making him a giant walking brain, and also making it blue. Also this had something to do with his mother experimenting on monkeys whilst she was pregnant. None of this comes up a lot in the Ultimate universe, surprisingly.