International Iron Man #7

[cyberghostface]

Tony Stark's biological parents, Amanda Armstrong and Jude, both undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Or at least Jude appears to be.





Amanda asks that her baby be given a safe home.



Amanda is shocked that her son is Tony Stark. He tells her that he would like to get to know her.

Comments

[capnduckman]

Calling unreliable narrator.... She's actually a hydra agent, and she killed his real dad because he found out, then flipped the script.

[thehood]

Except that was a flashback, she wasn't telling the story.

How can she be an unreliable narrator when she wasn't narrating? No one was narrating.

Also, this was the last issue.

[long_silence]

Bendis seems to be ignoring the story arc that established that Tony was adopted. The scenes with Maria and Howard imply that they were depressed because they couldn't have a child of their own and not that they adopted Tony in secret as a decoy to draw attention away from their biological son Arno

[lbd_nytetrayn]

That was before Secret Wars, right?

Just asking because I consider everything that happened before that to be a "maybe, maybe not" thing now.

[long_silence]

It would be a shame if they completely erased 616 Arno just after introducing him. Especially with 2020 only being 3 and 3/4 years away

[janegray]

...They did what?

Holy shit. I see Tony is not the only Stark who is far more of an asshole in the comics than in the movies.

[long_silence]

Maria and Howard actually did have trouble during their pregnancy with Arno who wasn't expected to survive birth, so Howard searched for a way to save his kid. And found an alien robot who could genetically manipulate the baby in utero to save his life. Alien robot wanted to genetically manipulate the Stark baby from birth to be the ultimate super genius, capable of piloting a Celestial fighting armor called the Godkiller, he also installed a biological kill switch in the kid.

Howard secretly tried to interfere with the kill switch and added his own treatment to Maria. That messed everything up and Arno was born with a ton of complications that basically make it impossible for him to live without machines to keep him alive.

So the Starks kept Arno in a secret hospice, and no one knew he existed. They adopted Tony so that the alien robot wouldn't just kill them all when he found out his experiment had failed. Fortunately Tony turned out to be a super genius engineer who specialized in weapons

[icon_uk]

Yeah, that was the part that seemed a trifle forced to me. After having one genetically augmented supergenius son by the usual organic means, the child they just happen to adopt, by pure coincidence, happens to be one of the most luminary inventive geniuses the world has ever known.

[long_silence]

Well Tony ended up having access to education, resources and technology he would not have gotten otherwise.

And in the Marvel Universe practically every third character is a super genius in some form or another. Villains like Shocker design their own tech, they just don't have the means to sell their tech so they aren't able to innovate as much as Stark

[janegray]

... *sigh*

[thehood]

If you mean Howard, that isn't new.

[silverhammerman]

I really can't say that I'm terribly interested by the idea that Tony Stark's biological parents were SHIELD/HYDRA agents, it's just contrived and unsurprising. I mean, it's not as stupid as when Spidey's parents turned out to be secret agents, but like I said on here when this story first started, it genuinely would have been more surprising if Tony's parents turned out to just be completely ordinary people.

[locuatico]

Yeah. Them being Secret agents, ironically, makes them more ordinary than if they were just ordinary people. Hell, Tony having parents turning out to be shield agents is not even that original because we already had this with MCU Howard.
And it's a shame, because them being ordinary people with more down-to-earth problems would play right into Bendis strenghts.

[icon_uk]

Sort of like the Holmes' on "Sherlock".

Mycroft and Sherlock are perpetually mortified that their parents are perfectly ordinary people, who are intellectually average and enjoy pop culture unironically

There's a scene in one episode when Sherlock gets a phonecall from a desperate sounding Mycroft who is looking after their parents for the day when they come down for a visit, and we realise from background noise that they've dragged him to a performance of "Les Miserables", and he is in his own personal corner of HELL!

[thehood]

But she was an ordinary person, she's a musician. She's just was a SHIELD informant, which isn't the same thing as being an agent.

She's also hasn't been with SHIELD for years at this point.

[silverhammerman]

Oh okay, didn't have the full story from the scans, as usual. That's a little better, but I still think that any SHIELD connection is pretty contrived.

[thehood]

I agree.

I just can forgive it because she was a musician first and stayed one even after she stopped being an informant.

[agharta75]

Tony Stark will turn out to be Magneto's son, or another Summers brother, or Howard The Duck's daughter.

[locuatico]

you mispelled "and"

[tugrul]

So Corsair and Howard did the dirty.

[scorntx]

They met quite by chance. But their facial hair created a strange magnetic effect, and the next thing they knew...

[sarahnewlin]

Then Bucky killed them.

Oh wait...

[dr_archeville]

I was sure they were going to go with Tony being Howard's son, but not Maria's, the result of an extramarital affair he'd had.

[seisachtheia]

I haven't even been following this, but that would have been my bet, too. Oh well, that'll probably end up being used one of these days.

[captainbellman]

Sigh. I miss Arno...