WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Iron Man #12, on sale now from Marvel Comics.
Ever since the start of writer Christopher Cantwell's run on the main Iron Man ongoing comic book series, the Armored Avenger has had to contend with the resurgent cosmic supervillain Korvac. Determined to forcibly interface humanity into a single collective conscious by his design, Korvac formed his own supervillain team that saw him as a god and carried out his orders with a deadly, religious zeal. And after enduring numerous setbacks, including a strange detour to a faraway planet ruled by Stilt-Man, Tony Stark stands alone for his final showdown against Korvac, with a potentially lethal development robbing him of any hope of victory.
While pursuing Korvac through deep outer space in a race towards Galactus' abandoned spaceship, Tony endured several grievous injuries before being teleported across the cosmos to a backwater planet that was home of the Ultimos. In order to function, Tony had his Iron Man armor's medical system dose himself heavily with morphine to dull the pain. Given Tony's personal history with addiction, this problem this presents has steadily increased, even after Iron Man took down Stilt-Man and resumed his mission to thwart Korvac. However, it leaves Tony at the end of his rope in Iron Man #12 by Christopher Cantwell, Angel Unzueta, Frank D'Armata and VC's Joe Caramagna.
Iron Man beat Korvac to Galactus' starship, with the obscure superhero Avro-X in tow. The two men barely evade all the fearsome obstacles and traps the World-Eater has programmed as part of his security system in his absence. As the two heroes manage to earn a breather from all the cosmic mayhem trying to kill them, Tony quietly admits to Avro-X that he is currently on a considerable amount of morphine, suggesting that he has continued to dose himself even after leaving Stilt-Man's domain. This revelation is cut short by the arrival of Korvac and his allies, wth Avro-X moving to disable the security system before it kills the heroes as Iron Man moves to personally greet the coming supervillain at the docking bay.
As cocksure as Iron Man presents himself when the villains enter Galactus' ship, it's clear that Korvac is in no mood for games and that he has Iron Man completely outnumbered and outgunned. And as Iron Man is easily overwhelmed, Korvac quickly detects that his old adversary is near death anyway, either from the enormity of his untreated injuries or the dangerous levels of morphine coursing through his veins. And since Iron Man has been a particularly annoying thorn in his side for so long, Korvac decides to give the defeated Avenger a front-row seat to the final stages of his master plan before he shuffles off of this mortal coil.
Tony has always been a man well aware of his inner demons and fallen into cycles of substance abuse before. But with the odds so heavily stacked against him and the persistent injuries putting his body through unrelenting agony, he has turned to morphine to help himself face the cruel inevitabilities ahead of him. Potentially impairing his judgment with the fate of the Marvel Universe hanging the balance, Tony is not going into his final showdown with Korvac with his full faculties intact. Even with the cavalry of superhero reinforcements on its way, Tony's actions may have doomed him and the universe to Korvac's conquest.