How do we fix Iron Man?

Or is he too far gone? Personally I think he can be salvaged. Just get rid of everything after the Fraction Run, rework his villains, bring back some supporting characters and you're off to a good start.

Incorporate design elements from Armored Adventures

Characters and teams have come back from all sorts of nightmarish statuses. The thing is their has to be a recognition of the problem and the will to address it. So no he's not too far gone, but he and by he I mean Marvel haven't hit rock bottom yet.

Give him a decent villain to fight instead of other heroes. Cap has Red Skull. Daredevil has Kingpin and Bullseye. Spiderman has his rogue's gallery. What does Iron Man have? Some chink stereotype with a fu manchu, outdated soviet villains and his abusive ex-boyfriend.

The only villain Stark has ever went one on one with worth talking about was Doom but he's been used more than a $2 dollar truck stop hooker.

Give him to DC where they would assign actually good writers to bring back some of his original charm and build upon. Not to start a company war but Marvel really has no idea how to keep their popular characters popular.

Look at Spider-Man and the state he's in.

Give him a good writer. I'm surprised that PAD hasn't written him yet. Hire Priest to write him. He always wanted to write Iron Man and is good at putting flaws into his protagonists.

DC gave Superman to Jurgens, Lobdell and Tomasi, and Batman to Tynion.

>Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, and Flash are all doing well despite the writers assigned to them

Well shit, you can put Hopeless on a DC contract and have him write some of the best Iron Man in years.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Humphries and Vendetti have been dead for months and Johns has been writing their books the whole time.

>Doing well
Only if sales is your yardstick for success. The quality on Flash and GL hasn't been good since a decade.

Honestly? I don't hate the idea of Tony being somebody else's supporting character. Riri and Peter are bad candidates, but a Bruce/Terry reluctant mentor relationship would fit him like a glove. Or even just a paternal role for younger Avengers squads. Bring Teen Abomination back into his life. Or an illegitimate son whose mother just died.

Good call. Armored Adventures was surprisingly comfy.

Eh, dunno. Ree-Ree will never leave, and you can't fix him if she's still tagging user.

He has some pretty cool villains. They just need to be reworked.

For example, the Controller could be an Earthbound Darkseid. Obadiah could come back as some sort of Underground Broker. Zeke could return as mix between Lex Luthor & Steve Jobs. The Mandarin could be reworked to have more of a connection with the Makluans, who could use some more revitalizing themselves. Hell, just give him Doom as a reccuring character for a while.

Really, it can be done. You just need folks willing to give it a shot. Put MGS, Deus Ex, System Shock, Bioshock & Mass Effect in a blender, allow Marvel tech to actually change society and the world, and there you have it.

Eh, he'd always be a second rate Batman there.

Priest would write a GOAT IM book.

It's a sorry state that Peter David is the industry's idea of a good author. He's so average.

PAD is a good choice for Iron Man. His run redefined Hulk, Supergirl and Aquaman for their time. He's great for breathing new life into characters who need a renovation, and he's known for long runs, unlike Ellis.

PAD has been a top name since the 90s, when the crop of writers at the big two was a lot talented. If anything, he's fallen more into obscurity recently.

Ghost and that madam mask woman

His Hulk run and the orignal Spider-Man 2099 run are hardly average.

he was good back in the day

Ghost is a very promising villain: He stands at the opposite side of Stark: Everybody knows that Iron Man is Stark, no one knows who Ghost is; Stark is a billionaire leading is own mega-corporation, Ghost does not care about money and throws it away like it would be trash; Stark is capitalism, Ghost is anarchism.
But they have quite the similarities: When both see crime happen, they will act upon it.

A story that I always had in my mind, would be that a group of politican/buisnessmen came together to start a manhunt for Ghost, because he has damaged them. Tony should help them to catch Ghost and so on.

Turns out he wasn't in a coma. He was trapped in cyber space by his AI clone that secretly went bad and wanted to take over his life. He gets a short series where he fights personifications of viruses and depersonifications of internet trolls including Blue Bird the Blond Opinion Demon. Eventually he escapes and finds a way to control his own suit (and body) through the internet, banishing the rogue AI (FOR NOW). Everything is back to normal except Stark needs a constant wifi connection to maintain control...AND HE HAS DEVELOPED AN ADDICTION TO DEGENERATE INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY!!! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW?!?

*lot more talented

I always thought a good way to revitalize Hammer is make him kinda senile and have his family be the ones who uilt the Railroad. Make him a mix of Jerry and en Horne with a cowboy get-up, so to speak. Not that he'd run around with a codename, he'd still be a businessman, just a... quirky one.
Ghost is definitely the one IM villain who has that sweet "underground fan-favorite" spot. He'd definitly be a great reccuring villain.

Personally I'd like to see the Controller turn into a weaker version of Darkseid and become the really scary character he's supposed to be.

...Not that far fetched.

Also, call me crazy, but I love me some 90s hacker cheeze like the movie Hackers. Also, that time Tony got to live through his entire childhood in a digital heaven and then started writting his own "code" in order to wake up was cool as hell.

turn him back into a Howard Hughes type capitalist

Preach it user.

Have Doom Iron Man kill Riri Iron Man. There, fixed.

>Iron Doom kills Ree-Ree
>nobody cares
>Tony comes back
>Tony/Vic buddy-cop book

I'd read that mini.

Riri gets the Jason Todd treatment

>you can't fix him if she's still tagging user.

Sure you can. She's the character you bounce his personality off of, similar to Tony's shifting cast of girlfriends, Pepper, Happy, and formerly Rhodie. Give them something of a tempestuous surrogate parent-child relationship between a charming, extroverted, genius, billionaire superhero with supervillain tendencies and an introverted, supergenius, possibly autistic, middle class superhero with supervillain tendencies.

You're missing a key point though: I don't want to read about a "Quenz" with a 'fro and a 'ttude. She needs to go die in a ditch. or have Zeke Stane give her the Todd, Barbara & Gordon Special.

What exact does Zeke Stane bring to the table that any other evil genius character doesn't?

He is Stark perfect foil.

The fact that he can improve upon others' tch, but isn't enough of a visionary to create his own frm scratch. That makes him have a hate boner for Tony that goes deeper than "muh inventions/muh worl rulling".

Also, he's a young anarchocapitalist. In an era where every teen character is a liberal socialist, he's a breath of fresh air.

In a way he's a younger, "smarter" Stark with no morality, fueled by an abusive upbringing and a hate boner because he's not visionary and will never be a "great" person. Wealthy, or powerful, sure. But he will never go down in history as something.

He needs to update himself with Extremis, again.

So he's the Tinkerer?

>Impling anyone in Marvel can write Transhumanist tories

BOI
I don't see how a young anarchocapitalist with more raw power but less creativity who has a Thawne level hate boner for Tony can be compared to the D-List guy who fixes people's equipment.

Tinkerer is an amoral capitalist who has worked on or designed the gear of a large contingent of supervillains yet stands in the shadow of more or less everyone.

The problem with Zeke Stane is that by giving him a chip on his shoulder for not being as creative as Stark you give him the same motivation as a large portion of his villains. It also kinda flies in the face of the fact that Zeke has bio-engineered his own body to be able fist-fight the Iron Man suit.

Hasn't he been killed like 5 times already?

I'm not too fond of villains getting resurrected, especially when they have had an iconic death like Obadiah. If anything, he should be more closely antagonizing the current evil businessmen like Roxxon. The Mandarin is probably toxic to Marvel and its SJW pandering. I do agree that his villains can be updated though. Hyda, AIM, North Korea or some other organization could mass produce and sell the Titianium Man Armor, creating one of Stark's nightmares.

I don't think Madam Mask has much to offer without major retooling but Ghost may have some potential.

He needs to evolve into more than the intangible hacker the way Stark evolved out of the guy stuck in a suit because of a heart condition. Stark has been at least a national asset at this point while Ghost is still barely above street level. The last time I heard of him, he was messing with Spiderman of all people. Is he still living that unwashed hobo lifestyle that he was during Dark Reign?

He kind of reminded me of Kingpin the way he was always causing mischief in the background.
It is a shame he didn't go the Silvermane route and become a cyborg.

I am thinking he should upgrade his goals. Steal and hoard villain tech before unleashing it in a wave of corporate terror. Him taking control of all the Doombots in Latveria without getting BTFO by a vengeful Doom would definitely raise his profile.

I had the idea of Titanium Man being a Russian deniable asset. The original Titanium Man's origin is kept intact and Russia just runs with as the result of a single rogue military officer. Anyone could be in the Titanium Man armor, anyone can build the Titanium Man armor because the blueprints are on the internet. Whenever Russia needs a show of force that can't be traced back to them but everyone knows it's them, there is Titanium Man. Coup in Africa? There's Titanium Man. Political violence in Central Asia? Look kids, it's Titanium Man! Open warfare between Central American crime syndicates? Titanium Man is fighting for both sides. And you never can pin anything on Russia, because anyone can spit out a crude Titanium Man suit in a suitably equipped machine shop.

Ah. So Titanium man would become the equivalent of the AK-47 of super villains. It would be funny seeing street level capes getting their asses handed to them by mooks in armor. Stark would have a heart attack.

Sort of. A better comparison to firearms would be that your mook Titanium Man armor is a Sten gun while your high end suit is a RPK with a spectrum of quality and firepower between the two. Your mook TM would give Daredevil trouble, but Luke Cage could fuck it up.

Honestly, I think they should ditch the RDJ persona. Marvel should reshape Tony into a vengeance seeking missile. Also they should reshape it to where he has a secret identity.