5. Brainboy
The great thing about Iron Man isnt that he has an awesome suit of armor. Of course, that part is very,
very cool, but its not what makes him great. The only true superpower Iron Man has is his mind. He didnt become a superhero because of a genetic quirk at birth or because of a science experiment gone wrong, he became a superhero through hard work and determination. Yes, he was a prodigy, but even prodigies have to work at it. Thats a very big part of the characters appeal, much like Batman. No matter what writers have done to Tony Stark over the years, thats the one thing they couldnt possibly screw up, right? Enter Orson Scott Card, who apparently took it as a challenge to screw that up when he got the job of writing Ultimate Iron Man, a limited series that told the origin of Tony Stark in the rebooted Ultimate Marvel universe. Apparently, Card felt that the only way Stark could create such awesome technology was if his entire body was made up of brain tissue. In this new revised origin, Howard Stark was developing a special kind of dermal armor. His future wife, Maria, is working on regeneration. When a test monkey breaks free and goes crazy, he bleeds into a pregnant Marias mouth, thus infecting Tony with the regeneration virus while hes in the womb. The result is that Tony is born with hyper-sensitive skin since its all made up of brain tissue. So Howard uses the armor he created to protect his son from the world, turning him blue. On the plus side, if Tony is harmed, he can regenerate body parts. You heard that right. Instead of Tony Stark just being a really smart guy and working hard, now hes smart because his entire body is a brain and he also has a healing factor. And with his special dermal armor, hes almost indestructible. Marvel later retconned this as just being something depicted in an animated series. Which is kind of a post-modern way of saying, yeah, we know we screwed the pooch on that one.
Likelihood: Seems pretty unlikely that anyone would be stupid enough to think this would be a good idea.