(ONLY PARTIALLY) FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: A three-part pitch of which only one part succeeded, pt. 1! (Patreon)

So! For today's desperately pressed-into-service installment of Failed-Project Friday, we'll be taking a look at a rather sweeping proposal I made to Marvel back in 2004 for a lengthy run writing Iron Man. The SF-skewing pitch featured three different ambitious story arcs building on each other, and wound up being partially successful as only the first arc was approved, culminating in the 2005 miniseries Iron Man; Hypervelocity (featuring art by the great Brian Denham).

[Note: the image above was my cover rough for Hypervelocity issue #2, BTW.]

Anyhoo, our first pitch excerpt of three, originally titled Iron Man: Obsolete, runs through five pages of blather setting up the concept that wound up seeing publication in considerably different form as Hypervelocity. Take it away, 2004 Me:

IRON MAN (VERY) ROUGH SYNOPSIS

What I have in mind is an overall arc of 13-15 issues, made up of three connected story arcs that build on each other. I had originally planned that, by the end of the overall arc, the original status quo could be restored, but that outcome is certainly flexible…

ARC ONE (4 issues): OBSOLETE

This initial arc contains a considerable amount of misdirection, in an attempt to seriously mislead the reader as to where the hell the narrative’s going…

The story opens several months after the previous issue, and we’re immediately flung into a fast-paced, paranoid “nightmare scenario.” First off, though, we’re introduced to a host of recent improvements and augmentations Tony’s made to the latest iteration of the Iron Man armor. Initially, at least, it will seem as if the “big change” within this story arc is merely yet another upgrade and redesign of the armor; but, as we will see, something considerably more radical is in store…

As for the newest armor, it’s larger and more intimidating than previous incarnations, packing considerably more mass and greater capabilities… BTW: The fact that Tony’s been “outed” as a superhero might have some important consequences for the armor’s design. Presumably, one of the main reasons for the armor being concealable in a suitcase was to preserve Tony’s secret identity; if it’s now known that he’s really Iron Man, then the armor can just follow him around more or less in public (though it would more likely shadow him in a “stealthed” mode, ready to open up and enfold him in case trouble arises). This means that the armor can mass FAR more than the eight or so pounds it weighs in its the current, “foldable” design, which opens up ALL sorts of possibilities for weaponry, computing power, fuel and power generation capacity, and so on.

The armor’s new abilities include: A), a radically increased wireless “C2” (communication and command) suite, so that Tony can be constantly “online,” websurfing for data, linking to satellite recon feeds, videoconferencing with allies, or controlling slaved automata; B), expanded “augmented reality” systems, in which the armor’s hypersensitive multispectrum sensors overlay relevant data, graphics, and analyses over Tony’s field of vision via a virtual retina display (scanning and ID’ing people and weapons, highlighting points of danger, pointing out that “voice stress analysis indicates the target is lying,” etc.); C), new weapons systems, including nonlethal options such as “sonic incapacitation” (the armor can resonate at earsplitting and/or ultrasonic volumes to take down unshielded humans, for example); and D), perhaps most critical of all, extensive new levels of “combat automation” programming. This comprises not only an autotargeting mode, in which the armor’s software aims and fires its weaponry with inhuman accuracy, but a complete “combat autonomy” mode, in which the armor can fight hand-to-hand with programmed martial arts and combat moves at superhuman speeds far greater than anything Tony could possibly manage… (I should note that the new systems are a bit “buggy,” with occasional computer problems leading to complications at inopportune moments, such as the autotargeting locking up in battle, or Tony having to frantically reboot the armor’s OS as it (and he) drop out of the sky…)

All of these abilities are made possible by the suit’s hugely increased computing power, which is many times greater than that of previous armor iterations. This may be due to new and different computer hardware designs, such as quantum or DNA-based computing, nanoelectronic machinery, or that weird new “programmable matter” concept… Anyway, the armor’s systems are constantly scanning Tony’s brain via MRI and PET-scan variants (including a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, perhaps), so that not only can Tony issue certain commands mentally (as well as by voice input or sensors in his gloves), but the armor’s “neural net” can teach itself to model his thinking and anticipate what he wants ahead of time. Gee, I wonder where THIS is going… 

(Wacky sidenote: the new armor finds odd new ways to input data to Tony by synaesthetically “hijacking” his other senses, taking over nerves normally used to convey tastes or smells and stimulating them to trigger alternate forms of “vision” or other spatial awareness in his brain. Believe it or not, this concept has been seriously discussed in the real world…)

So, anyway… The armor’s clearly new and improved, so Iron Man should have even LESS trouble than usual in battlin’ the bad guys, right? Not quite, though… For very quickly, over the four issues of this initial story arc, Tony Stark begins to realize that there’s a weak link in IRON MAN’s chain: namely, Tony himself. The human body inside the armor is, in fact, a serious limitation on the armor’s true capabilities. On one occasion, Tony blacks out repeatedly as the armor pulls heavy gees during high-speed maneuvers and the ensuing rigors of combat, forcing the suit’s automated mode to activate again and again… Not only is Tony’s body becoming a drag on the armor, but so is his mind, for with the blinding speeds and incredibly brief reaction times involved in high-tech mechanized combat of the sort he finds himself caught up in, Tony literally cannot think fast enough. Hence the arc’s title, “OBSOLETE”…

Now, for a brief sketch of the overall plotline… A stressed-out, increasingly unnerved Tony Stark is finding out that Stark Industries, and indeed much of his life, is beginning to spiral out of his control. He uncovers the fact that elements of the company’s farflung empire have been creating and manufacturing all sorts of disturbing new hardware (which in turn immediately disappears from the factories); apparently, shadowy “superhackers” with seemingly unlimited time and resources have functionally “hijacked” parts of Stark Industries, creating false paper trails, faking plausible commands and purchase orders, and hiding (almost) all signs of their work. Moreover, his shadowy enemy’s manipulations extend to SHIELD, where many of the organization’s formidable Stark-manufactured military assets have been deployed on counterfeit orders… (I’m using SHIELD as a stalking horse for the U.S. military, as having U.S. cruise missiles, Predator drones, automated tanks and attack aircraft on the loose might be a tad unpalatable.)

Thus, a more and more paranoid Tony Stark frantically races around the globe to various Stark Industries assets in an attempt to uncover what the hell’s going on (perhaps zipping about via a huge, stealthed “scramjet booster” that attaches to his armor and flings him about the world in hypersonic ballistic arcs). His reputation, his credibility and even his sanity are soon brought into doubt, as a faceless enemy with unlimited resources and ability to cover its tracks goes after him on every possible level. The media are flooded with brilliantly faked footage of Iron Man atrocities and Tony Stark sexual misadventures as well as bogus, Enron-like revelations of Stark Industries corporate malfeasance, while his friends and allies are alienated by appalling (though simulated, of course) telephone or videophone rants and raves. Memorably, the shadowy enemy hacks into his AI assistant “Friday,” with distressing and even horrific results, as she’s used as a mouthpiece for the enemy to briefly address Tony directly… before, that is, the enemy permanently crashes all of the facility’s systems and (mis)directs SHIELD cruise missiles (or orbital weapons, perhaps) to destroy Stark headquarters.

I should note that much of the action of the first few issues comes from Iron Man having to fend off attacks by enemy-manipulated SHIELD military assets and rogue Stark-produced hardware… but eventually, Tony starts to catch a glimpse or two of the enemy’s own assets. He barely survives skirmishes with several mysterious humanoid machines, creatures that pop out of holocamouflaged disguise to attack at insanely high speeds; only Tony’s hasty, on-the-fly programming of a “power mix” of assorted martial arts moves (including some sampled from other superheroes), carried out at superhuman speed by his armor’s automated combat mode, enables him to survive one such encounter. Speaking of encounters, Tony (both in person and online) repeatedly runs into an enigmatic young (if not teenaged) woman named “Mercy,” a heavily pierced, hard-drinking and possibly not entirely sane “technofetishist” who adds a skewed bit of sexual tension to the story while dropping hints about what’s really happening…

[Note from 2023 Me: "Mercy" was the name of the heroine from an older pitch for a Matrix comic; the character was renamed "Absynthe" for the final miniseries.]

In time, Tony discovers that he’s up against foes who are “The Uploaded,” who have had their human intelligences encoded into electronic matrices as humanized forms of artificial intelligence. Nothing new, there, but some of the implications are reasonably novel… Most striking is the fact that, having left the organic brain’s grindingly slow electrochemical functions behind, the Uploaded can increase their “cognitive clock rate” at will, so that they can process thought at many, many multiples of the “processor speed” of a normal human’s brain. In combat, this translates into nerve impulses traveling at the speed of light (as opposed to the human nervous system’s roughly 300mph); anything human will seem to be seem to be moving in slow motion (if not “freeze-framed”) by comparison. Future combat machines, in effect, won’t be lumbering, Terminator or RoboCop-style lummoxes, but rather will be blindingly fast monsters far, FAR too fast for anything human (including most superheroes) to deal with…

Nonetheless, by the final issue of the initial story arc, despite the intimidating odds stacked against him, despite the fact that his career and life are rapidly falling apart, despite the fact that his experimental new armor is starting to behave rather oddly, Tony Stark finds an opportunity to strike back. With information provided in part by the enigmatic and unstable Mercy, he discovers a way to ambush the shadowy mastermind, the so-called “Alpha,” who leads the Uploaded. As the end of the issue and the arc’s climax approach, tension builds, suspense heightens, the music swells. Time for Iron Man’s big confrontation with the forces lined against him!

Well, not quite. Tony’s been betrayed, finding himself to be the one being ambushed. Moreover, the Uploaded mechs he tangles with are only engaging with him to stall Tony and confirm his exact position; in fact, he’s being targeted by a monstrous Stark-designed electromagnetic railgun originally created to launch payloads into orbit (the existence of which was established earlier in the arc). From fifty miles away, using a high-energy laser to blast open the atmosphere so its projectile can travel in the resulting, split-second vacuum, this huge railgun blasts Iron Man with a hyperdense round traveling at over Mach 30…

The railgun’s projectile tears through the armor like tissue paper, vaporizing Tony’s long-suffering artificial heart. The holed armor, massively malfunctioning, flees on autopilot, its life-support systems struggling to preserve the mortally wounded Tony… and failing. By the time the armor disgorges its wearer at a medical facility (or somewhere more story-connected), Tony is already dead. And that’s the end of “OBSOLETE.”

Additional narrative sidenote: I probably should make clear that the stories will rely heavily on first-person narrative captions from Tony, this being the only way to clearly and quickly convey some of the complicated action and technology involved, here. It’s also an easy way to convey character, which is a critical part of this first arc as I try to delineate and “humanize” my particular version of Tony Stark. Numerous brief flashbacks and youthful memories are brought up to define his character (such as comparing and contrasting his recollection of an early, fumbling, awkward teenage dalliance with a by-the-numbers, nearly unthinking and automatic seduction of a supermodel by latter-day, arguably “grown-up” playboy Tony). Also, the issue of his alcoholism is an important element, though it won’t be handled in quite the same manner as usual. While he still never drinks, he certainly thinks about it a great deal…

[Note from 2023 Me: In fact, Original Tony wound up getting taken out by railgun before the Hypervelocity narrative even started; yeahp, this germ of a story concept was altered considerably in the final miniseries.]

NEXT TIME ON FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: At some future Friday within a few weeks, we'll move on to a shorter text piece detailing the next Iron Man arc I had in mind, which was titled Iron Man: Clockspeed. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: In all likelihood, next you'll probably be seeing a series of posts featuring my just-finished workflow test for the opening five pages of the first story from fantasy project The Chaste and the Chained, which I'm hooping to finally scan this weekend if a seemingly unending stream of thunderstorms allow. Yay, once more?