FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: An ill-fated all-ages comic pitch from 2007, part 1! (Patreon)

So! A few years after 2005's miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, I was given an opportunity to pitch for a four-issue arc of Marvel's all-ages title Iron Man Adventures. As was usual then and now for my sporadic brushes with the mainstream, nothing came of the proposal; alas, I no longer recall which writer actually wound up with the gig. (Fred Van Lente, maybe?)

Note #1: I'm not sure if the pitch required the clarifying "moral" riffs after each story idea, or if I was adding those bits as an "all-ages" affectation.

Note #2: I attached the Hypervelocity issue #1 cover rough above as a generic image to accompany this text piece, though I should probably clarify that the pitch that follows would obviously have used more conventional Iron Man armor designs (and, well, would definitely not have featured a sadistic, potty-mouthed, tatted 'n' pierced upload like Hypervelocity's virtual villainess "Absynthe," as seen at upper right).

IRON MAN ADVENTURES

A four-issue proposal by Adam Warren

Okay. The concept, here, is WAY-over-the-top action with a strong high-tech flavor (but avoiding use of my beloved technojargon, which seems to confuse some older comics readers even more than the young). Much as I loved Iron Man as a kid, I still thought the book was way too stodgy, stilted, and stinting with the action... You can’t have too many wild action setpieces or too many crazy ideas in an Iron Man book, IMHO, even one for a younger audience. 

Given my distrust of most American artists’ abilities to depict action sequences, I’d probably want to do prelims or layouts for the book (but NOT like the ultratight IRON MAN: HYPERVELOCITY layouts, needless to say). While keeping the storytelling clear and legible as possible, I’d still like to see some high energy and heavy-duty dynamism in the visuals; the artwork on all too many “adventure-style” books seems blah and wishy-washy, alas. There’s nothin’ blah about how, say, the great Bruce Timm does his comics work... but too many of his imitators lose out on his work’s crazed energy.

Anyhoo... A few more introductory details, before we get to the four synopses:

Tony summons the IM suit to him via his aggressively cool-looking cell phone, and can even remote-control the armor (to a limited degree) with it. Note that, to preserve the conceit that Iron Man is Tony Stark’s bodyguard, the armor can move around on its own semi-autonomously... It’s likely that Tony would either have “empty IM” parrot prerecorded phrases or, more amusingly, he might speak into his cell phone (presumably out of earshot) and have his disguised voice broadcast from the suit.

Also, I’m seeing “Pepper” Potts as his mildly snarky but terrifyingly efficient Executive Assistant, with Jim Rhodes possibly also on board as well. I’d eventually want to work in some SHIELD personnel and affiliations, but prolly not in these first few issues.

Next, the four issues’ synopses... #4’s prolly the weakest, and most likely to be changed. I’m kinda fond of the seriously bizarre #1, even though it may take the “over the top” dictum, well, a bit TOO “over the top” for you. Well, lemme know what you think.

ISSUE #1

From his skyscraper office window, Tony Stark idly watches the commissioning ceremony for a truly exotic, moveable new bridge across town; this articulating, bizarre-looking, aggressively modern structure is a source of some annoyance to Tony, as Stark Industries was cut out of the bidding to work on it. He skipped out on the ceremonies, but may have sent his assistant Pepper (and perhaps a few other Stark employees)...

Shockingly bizarre crap ensues! The bridge suddenly tears loose from its groundings on either shore, unmoors its bases, and begins striding down the river, with a bridgeful of hapless civilians trapped on its disconnected roadway surface! Exotic weapon turrets spring out of its towers, manned by... those yellow-suited, high-tech scoundrels from Advanced Idea Mechanics! Yep, turns out that AIM seized control of the bridge construction effort, secretly built a robotic weapons platform disguised as a hyper-modern-architecture bridge, and are now holding hundreds of innocents (and the rest of the city) hostage! The brilliant part is, they ALREADY got paid millions/ billions for building the bridge in the first place! Double-dipping villains, ahoy!

We get a nice, clear scene of Tony suiting up in the Iron Man armor, then bootjetting off to battle with AIM. Wild aerial flight/ fight scenes ensue as IM flies in and around the bridge and towers with repulsors blazing, rescuing buses full of civilians falling off the bridge, possibly pinioning the bridge’s “legs” with its own cables (too Empire Strikes Back?), etc. 

Fun suit stuff: to address the hostage crowds, Tony makes the armor’s outer shell vibrate like a giant speaker, blasting out IM’s message at 100+ decibels. Later on, he uses this “sound resonance” effect inside the bridge’s towers, deafening and disorienting poor AIM guys. Also, he uses electromagnets in IM’s boots and/or gauntlets to scamper up the sides (and along the underside) of the bridge and its towers... AIM is defeated in the end, but we’re still left with a possibly mobile and rather untrustworthy bridge in the middle of the river.

Moral: Hmm. Might be that Tony could possibly have participated in the building of the bridge, but didn’t, as he wanted to be the sole builder... Thus, his ego and lack of cooperation (as pointed out by Pepper) led to AIM getting its opportunity to mess things up...

ISSUE #2

As a promotional stunt, Tony is flying a monstrously huge Stark Industries prototype military transport jet (I mean HUGE, twice the size of a C-5A) crosscountry, carrying ALL of his notoriously vast collection of exotic and vintage sports cars in the airplane’s huge cargo bay. Action erupts when the armored mercenary Titanium Man(?) boards the aircraft in mid-flight, and tears the fuselage open in the process of hijacking it... which gets poor Tony sucked right out of the airplane!

In mid-freefall, a frantic Tony has to recover his plummeting cell phone and summon the Iron Man armor to him (possible humor: he hits the wrong speed-dial button in the process? “Sorry, Pepper, dialed the wrong number”)... and THEN, once the armor flies down after him (it was either trailing the plane, or hidden aboard it), he has to hastily cram himself into the suit in mid-air, as the ground races up at him! Of course, IM pulls out of the dive at the last possible moment, and roars after the distant cargo jet.

Aboard the jet, Titanium Man turns out to have been hired by an Unnamed and Jealous Billionaire Rival of Tony’s not to steal the prototype aircraft (as we’d think)... but to snag one of the ultra-rare jewels of Tony’s sports car collection! (A ’58 Ferrari 412 S, say!) Oh, those billionaires and their wacky obsessions! When Iron Man returns, he and Titanium Man quickly get into a rather demented tussle... while clambering upside-down on the jet’s underside with their magnetized boots in the roaring 400mph airstream!

Unfortunately for both armored warriors, their fight damages the aircraft’s cargo bay, causing the bulk of Tony’s sports-car collection to go tumbling out into the sky... including the mutually prized Ferrari 412 S! At first continuing their airborne battle around the plummeting Ferrari, IM and TM are finally forced to work together (both have damaged bootjets now) to try and land the sports car, and themselves, on the ground in one piece. A wild set-piece ensues, with the struggling duo managing to land the Ferrari atop a looming mesa, rolling JUST to the cliff’s edge at brisk 150mph as they slam on the brakes and bootjets. Bitter ending: Clambering out of the Ferrari to fight once more, the boys are dismayed when the mesa’s edge collapses and sends the sports car plunging to a FERRIS BUELLER-esque demise. Ba DUM bum. Cue Tony sniffling.

Moral: As hammered home by an unsympathetic Pepper, the vanity and greed of materialistic desires, etc.

Anyhoo, stand by for the rest of this defunct proposal on some future Friday down the line, dear Patrons!

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?