What Happened To Everyone Who Wore Iron Man's Armour?

5. Pepper Potts

Pepper Potts in her Rescue armour
Marvel Comics

The Pepper Potts of the comics might differ drastically to the one seen in the MCU, but given the backseat Gwyneth Paltrow's character has taken since 2008's Iron Man, that's basically a good thing.

For starters, Pepper and Tony aren't as romantically entangled in the comics as they are on the big screen, but they are close. It's the kind of relationship that's led to a lot of tension in the past, but the two are great friends, so much so that Tony created a specific armour for Pepper called Rescue, which may even be set to appear in Avengers: Endgame.

Pepper first takes on the identity in 2009 after becoming the CEO of Stark Industries. She uses it to search for Tony while he's made a fugitive of the law, with Norman Osborn searching for the newly-deposed head of S.H.I.E.L.D. Pepper and Tony get romantic again, and then fight Madam Masque, a recurring Iron Man and Hawkeye supervillain.

As of 2019, Pepper is effectively a fully-fledged superhero. Rescue is an integral part of the Iron Man family, comparable in significance to Rhodey's War Machine, and it's about time.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.