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  • Technology Marches On: A frequent victim. One early story has him use a counting device built into his armor. That was quickly made obsolete by the real life invention of the pocket calculator. Nowadays he uses an AI for such things. Another major example of early mentions of technology that would now be out of date, is that his suit was powered by transistors.
  • Trolling Creator: The entire reason the character exists. Lee realized a bunch of the readers were left-leaning so he came up with the idea of Iron Man, a character that represented everything they hated and try to make the readers sympathize with them.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • There was an Iron Man issue where Madame Masque was apparently killed and replaced by a new woman who wanted the identity for herself. This famously set off a series of confusing developments, including multiple new Madame Masques appearing, as well as the debut of an Avengers ally named Masque. Kurt Busiek finally Retconned the whole thing away by revealing that all of the women involved were clones of the real (and still-living) Madame Masque, but the original intention behind the story that started the mess was quite different. The idea was that Madame Masque's killer would have been revealed to be Rae LaCoste, who was one of Tony's love interests at the time. Unfortunately, the plan to make her the new Madame Masque ended up as an Aborted Arc, which led to all the confusing attempts to continue the story. Additionally, Rae was going to be revealed as Scott Lang's ex-wife.
    • Dwayne McDuffie once pitched an idea for a mini-series called "The Killing Machine," which would have revolved around The Punisher stealing a suit of Iron Man armor and painting it black. Iron Man and the Punisher would then spend the series fighting for control of the new suit. There were also plans for a sequel which would have seen James Rhodes donning the black Iron Man armor and eventually being spun off into his own title. It never happened, but McDuffie has said he liked to think the pitch had some influence on the eventual creation of War Machine. And then they gave Punisher the War Machine armor.
    • Iron Man 258.1-258.4, also known as Iron Man: Armored Vengeance in trade paperback format, reunited David Michelinie and Bob Layton to tell a non-canon story based on Layton's original Armor Wars II plot that didn't see the light of day due to John Byrne taking over the comic and running his own oddly named Armor Wars II. While a fan favorite in its own right, Byrne's version had nothing to do with the original Armor Wars.
    • Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross attempted to take over the Iron Man title after John Byrne left it. Not much is known of it, but Ross and Busiek co-created the Iron Man armor to be used during that run, which ended up being used by Busiek when he took over the title following Heroes Reborn.
    • Speaking of which, Busiek was supposed to write a mini-series called Iron Man: Look Back in Armor, which would have explained what happened to the teenage Tony Stark from The Crossing. For whatever reason, the series never happened, and Busiek wound up clarifying the final fate of Teen Tony in the 2001 Avengers Annual.

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