WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Darkhold: Iron Man #1, available now from Marvel.
With the dark god Cthon trying to make his move against the Earth, the Scarlet Witch had no other choice but to demonically empower five select superheroes -- Spider-Man, Wasp, Iron Man, Blade, and Black Bolt. Unfortunately, the Darkhold proved far too effective at corrupting the five heroes and transformed them into terrifying variants of themselves.
This seems to have also affected their origins at least on the short-term, as Darkhold: Iron Man by Ryan North, Guillermo Sanna, Ian Herring, and VC's Clayton Cowles reimagines Tony Stark's Silver Age origin with some terrifying twists.
In his original incarnation, Tony Stark was seriously injured after being captured overseas. Escaping thanks to the suit of armor he constructed out of desperation, he returned to America and began the process of becoming the heroic Iron Man -- turning the machine designed to save his life into the beginning of a heroic career. But in Darkhold: Iron Man, this evolution proved to be radically demented -- resulting in a Tony Stark that was arguably no longer a man. In this version, Tony tried quickly to improve his armor to save himself following his injury. But in this world, the suits increasingly bond to his actual body, staring with the skin of his arm being caught against the metal and ripping when it's taken off.
Tony and Pepper work around the clock to save his life and help him escape the armor -- and Tony ultimately shares a kiss with Pepper, promising to figure out how to free himself from the suit. But Tony can't stop himself from donning the suit again, and this time, it fully eradicates his skin, dissolving it through the cracks and seams in the metal. Making matters worse, Tony can't imagine not wearing the armor, indicating something is influencing his mind. The suit is eventually revealed to have fully fused with him, wires reaching into his brain and dissolving much of his body into "undifferentiated meat." It doesn't take long for Tony's mind to descend into darkness, as he seemingly decides he wants to spread this newfound metal body to others and free them from their original bodies.
Tony quickly knocks out Happy and Jarvis and inserts them into their own suits -- which melts their skins into goop and reduces their bodies to mush. After they seemingly perished, they begin to silently help Tony in his work in their new forms, shambling around his lab as a horrified Pepper watches from the security camera. Tony then turns his attention on the public, convincing them to rush into suits of their own free will to cure their afflictions and illnesses. It isn't long before even Pepper is led into one by Tony -- now speaking in the demented voice of those who have been corrupted by the touch of Cthon.
It's a horrifying turn, especially how it more or less redefines the original bulky Iron Man armors as caskets where skin and tissue are reduced to mush by the metal. It's a particularly gruesome take on the early days of Iron Man, and shows how just a slight nudge could have turned it into full-body horror. Tony becomes a genuine monster over the course of the story, losing any and all connection to his humanity and effectively giving in to the iron instead of remaining a man. As its own terrifying one-shot, it's more frightening than even some of the more gruesome What If...? stories. If the rest of the Darkhold stories are anywhere near as frightening as this one, then they might be some of the most demonically charged scary stories to ever come out of the publisher.