(ONLY PARTIALLY) FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: A three-part pitch of which only one part succeeded, pt. 2! (Patreon)

[Check out our previous installment here.]

So! For today's desperately pressed-into-service installment of Failed-Project Friday, we'll be continuing our 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 at least 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 an unused cover rough for Hypervelocity issue #3, BTW.]

Anyhoo, our second pitch excerpt of three, originally titled Iron Man: Clockspeed, runs through comcepts that wound up seeing publication in considerably different form as Hypervelocity. Take it away, 2004 Me:

IRON MAN (VERY) ROUGH SYNOPSIS, continued

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. And now, on to arcs two and three!

ARC TWO (5-6 issues): IRON MAN: CLOCKSPEED

This arc opens with a mixture of media coverage of Tony Stark’s funeral, profiles of the late industrialist and superhero, and so on. Interspersed with this are moments with his superhuman friends at a private service, this footage apparently taken by microsurveillance devices hidden in the room with them. One of the Avengers mentions an interesting fact: that the new Iron Man armor disappeared after dropping off the dying Tony…

The previous scenes are intercut with five very odd sequences… We see black panels with first-person captions, as a narrator, presumably Tony in some form, has his five senses come back online one by one. As his final sense (vision) returns, we now see a nonplussed Tony in a hospital bed, watching the earlier media coverage of his own death on his room’s TV screen. But then a grinning Mercy enters the room dressed in a PVC fetish version of a nurse’s outfit, and we begin to find out what’s happened…

As you may have guessed by now, Iron Man’s upgraded armor has managed to construct its own version of Tony’s brain, recreating his personality and memories, effectively “uploading” an emulation of its now-dead wearer’s mind into the matrix of its huge-capacity computer systems. (Note that Mercy herself may have contaminated Tony, or the armor, with nanoagents or other “wizard tech” to bootstrap the suit’s OS into the capability to upload Tony’s personality…) The “hospital room” we’re seeing is a virtual reality environment, where the uploaded Tony (whose mental image of himself remains human) is quickly brought up to speed by the helpful and informative Mercy. As it turns out, she’s part of a splinter group of the Uploaded, working against the main force of Uploaded led by the Alpha… I’ll call the latter group “the Emergent,” for the moment.

The Emergent feel that they represent a radical leap forward in human evolution (as indeed they do), and have an extremist scheme to establish a power base before the outside world can strike them down… They plan to use the hijacked resources of Stark Industries and SHIELD to trigger a carefully planned chain of worldwide destabilization and chaos, throwing off the attention of superheroes, governments and the various Powers That Be long enough for the Emergent to build themselves into an unassailable force. Now, not surprisingly, it’s up to the empty shell of the Iron Man armor to stop the oncoming cataclysm…

The exposition soon ends as we’re soon thrown directly into the action; we find out that the previous, seemingly lengthy VR sequence took place in only a fraction of a second in real time, as Mercy and the uploaded Tony have the previously mentioned ability to hyperaccelerate their cognitive “clock rates” at will. Back in the real world, Mercy (her Uploaded mind housed in a human-camouflaged set of Stark-built armor, perhaps?) is struggling to reboot the badly damaged Iron Man armor as Emergent forces close in. Needless to say, hyperspeed mechanized mayhem soon ensues, with the empty Iron Man armor now able to move and battle at insane, beyond-superhuman speeds without the worry of a human body inside it being mashed to a pulp by gee forces. [Side note: Just to be colorful and visually striking, throughout all of this arc the Iron Man armor continues to sport the pair of gaping holes blasted through its chestplate by the railgun round that killed Tony…]

And so, the rest of the arc deals with the Uploaded Tony struggling to beat back the Emergent’s already unfolding scheme, as mayhem starts to mount worldwide. At least he’s on a more even footing with the enemy now, as he’s capable of the same inhumanly fast thought processes and combat speeds (and, BTW, can now manipulate computers just as skillfully and speedily as the Emergent’s ultrafast, unsleeping “superhackers”). In fact, he’s particularly formidable as a Upload given that he was an engineering genius before his “death and resurrection”; his skills and abilities can be even further magnified by the fact that Uploads can manipulate and alter their own mental structures at will, “tweaking” their software-construct minds to optimal, even inhuman modes of thought, rather like street racers tinkering with their jacked-up cars for maximum performance…

Anyway, a brief listing of possible story elements include the following: extensive and often very bizarre VR encounters (so we get to occasionally see the virtual, human-form Tony), as the Uploads battle each other electronically, trying to hack into each other’s systems; exotic environments, from orbital dogfights to Emergent battles in the ocean depths, leading to colorful scenes of Iron Man hurtling about underwater at near-supersonic speeds, using “supercavitation” technology to shroud himself in a frictionless cocoon of bubbles (this is real military tech, believe it or not); electronic struggles over hardware as Tony and the Emergents cybernetically wrestle for control over whole arsenals of remote-controlled future-tech weaponry, with fleets of lethal, automated cruise missiles, drones and interceptors being bounced about wildly; creepy sexual overtones between Tony and the semi-unhinged, possibly treacherous Mercy, as Uploaded minds would be constructed with software analogs of brain chemistry and hormones, and thus could be fully as sex-driven as organic minds (if not more so); and high-tech, high-speed battles galore, of course. I’m particularly fond of a new-model SHIELD helicarrier becoming an ill-fated battleground for Uploaded foes, with SHIELD troops standing around dumbfounded as blindingly fast blurs of mechanized mayhem tear the doomed carrier to pieces while bashing away at each other. Or how about super-long-range sniping battles via hypersonic railguns, with foes sniping at each other from twenty miles away, or blasting at each other through dozens of intervening buildings?

Also, I should note that there are considerable pop culture overtones to what’s going on, especially with Mercy and the Emergents. Most of the Uploaded were created while still young; in fact, the worst of the Emergent’s sociopathic mech-housed thugs were Uploaded as children, with the thinking at the time being that younger and inherently more flexible minds could adapt better to the process. Anyway, this means that some of them see their violent work almost literally as a Mech-based videogame like ZONE OF THE ENDERS or ARMORED CORE or whatever… Many of the Uploaded act like Net-addicted “yutes” taken to the extreme, trading video and audio clips in battle, tailoring sigs and animations, sending ultra-tech IM equivalents back and forth, and overall acting like ADHD poster children at hyperspeed. Not only do Emergent mechs boast about having such-and-such hardware, they also crow about having “50,000 MP3 files in memory, and I’m ripping more of them RIGHT NOW!” (This also means that they enter battle with tunes a-blastin’, BTW…) Anyway, the point is to have a somewhat different spin on the usual, sterile, by-the-numbers “BWAHAHAHA!” types of bad guys… Trickier still, this would possibly mean getting a look at Tony’s own pop-culture background, which would be a sticky issue given that he’s been 35 years old since well before I was born… Hmm.

Finally, I should note that this arc’s epic series of battles unfolds in less than a day (if not a matter of hours), given the Upload’s ability to radically upshift their “mindspeeds,” the fact that many of their struggles occur cybernetically (and therefore can unfold in only seconds in real time) or via remote control of hardware, not to mention that they can rocket about the globe at hypersonic speeds, ignoring gee forces that would mash superheroes… Speaking of which, humans and most superheroes are not only practically useless to Tony, they actually become liabilities, due to their snail-like slowness and utter vulnerability… In truth, I’d like to see if we can kill off a few IM background characters and even several lame, second- or third-tier superheroes or villains, to let the readers know that this is all a serious threat. In any event, the Emergent problem is dealt by the end of this arc amidst a series of plot twists, startling revelations (for one thing, Mercy really isn’t what she seems), treachery and betrayal… Cue this arc's exciting finale, before we head off to even grander action with the next arc!

[Note from 2023 Me: Another Friday hence, I'll put up the rest of the proposal, which will feature the evocatively titled arc IRON MAN: SINGULARITY. The action takes on a bit of a progressively expansive Gurren Lagann flair as Tony 2.0 heads offworld though, of course, I should note that I wrote this pitch three years before the GL anime debuted.]

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?