When you pull quintuple duty as a genius engineer, billionaire philanthropist, playboy, entrepreneur and superhero, there's a good chance your days are pretty busy. Just ask Tony Stark, who at this point probably has life-model decoys to give a break to his life-model decoys. As Iron Man, he's expected to be at the top of his game as a superhero, and as Tony Stark he's expected to give one hundred percent to all of his designs -- both as an engineer... and because it's the best way to stay alive.

But the truth is, there's no way all of his designs are going to be a slam dunk, not when he's handling hostile takeovers in Stark Enterprises one day, and trying to take out the Mandarin and his goons the next. Plus, lately it seems like he's designed a new set of armor every other month, which means occasionally something about his suits has to fall through the cracks. Of course they're always the cutting edge in terms of technology, but that doesn't keep them from being... weird. Sometimes they're aesthetically hideous, other times they're just illogical, and occasionally they just come packed with some off-the-wall ideas that probably seemed like a good idea to Stark when he was pulling yet another 4AM engineering jam session. So for this list, we decided to look at some of the weirdest designed armors Tony Stark's ever come up with. Most of them are from the main universe, but we've also pulled in a few of the alternate universe armors just to see how weird the Armored Avenger can get.

20 ULTIMATE IRON MAN

The Ultimate Universe was meant to be a more realistic portrayal of our favorite characters. Of course everything still got a little ridiculous because it’s superheroes, but they tried to reinvent characters as best with some manner of scientific, logical basis ... mostly.

In Iron Man’s case, he was rewritten to be born as a kid who’d been born with neural tissue covering his entire body, making his every waking moment extremely painful until he was given a unique bio-armor that would destroy normal human tissue but had no effect on his constantly regenerative neural tissue. Oh, and it’s also capable of building new organs and limbs to replace those damaged in battle.

19 MODEL 50/SUPERIOR IRON MAN

After Dan Slott’s Superior Spider-Man turned out to be such a popular idea, Marvel decided to duplicate the idea on a much larger scale, and the superhero event "AXIS" would see heroes and villains alike have their personalities “inverted” and turned on their heads. By the end nearly everyone was restored to normal aside from a small handful of characters, shielded from the switch back thanks to an invention from Tony Stark.

And so, thus was born the “Superior Iron Man”, a version of Tony Stark just as much of a risk-taking daredevil, but without any of the benevolence or philanthropy. With this new Iron Man came a new armor, which was half-symbiote, half-metal and “bonded” with Stark whenever he summoned it.

18 IRON KNIGHT

Coming out of Heroes Reborn, Marvel went for a “back to basics” approach for several of their major properties -- including Iron Man and the Avengers. During that early period, Kurt Busiek brought the Avengers back to the Marvel Universe in grand fashion by… shifting them to an alternate universe. There, classic villain Morgan Le Fay had used her magic powers to alter reality itself in order to revert time to pre-history “knights and magic” days.

In that world, the Avengers were her loyal servants, and Iron Man became Sir Anthony of Cumbria, the Iron Knight, complete with an old fashioned armor to match. Well, at least it was better than his awful Heroes Reborn suit.

17 IRON MAN 2020

The victim of sliding timescale, Iron Man 2020 is supposed to be a character from the “far future”, in which Tony’s company finds itself in the hands of a corrupt descendant known as Arno, who’s much less of a superhero and much more of a mercenary. He eventually finds his way into being a hero, and that’s if we ignore the character’s been effectively retconned into being Tony’s brother, but what lands the suit a spot on this list is just how comically evil it looks.

Like, everything from the buzzsaws it’s using as shoulder guards to that twisted metal face that looks far more Ultron than Iron Man, Arno wanted to make sure people knew he wasn’t there to help anyone at all.

16 MODEL 19/S.K.I.N. ARMOR

So after Tony had an armor turn sentient his next major thought was apparently not to build another suit of armor… but just go straight to a mini-mecha. The Model 19 was known as S.K.I.N, named because the suit’s golden sections were liquid metal that were like a literal skin over the body, which could change densities at the user’s will.

While it often looked like it could barely hold itself together, the suit was stuffed to the gills with weapons -- smart bombs, pulse bolts, even an energy blade. Too bad Ultron took over the suit and used it as a W.M.D.. Jeez, Stark has the worst luck with armors.

15 MODEL 23/ABLATIVE ARMOR

The Model 23 was introduced in Iron Man vol. 3 #71 by Robin Laws and Robert Teranishi. This armor was specifically designed to be the prototype for a new space armor, and had a distinct honeycomb-like shape. Covered in a forcefield, the suit was supposed to replace tiles with new ones after suffering damage.

This was supposed to be a good idea, but ultimately it just looked like a mess of a suit that was barely holding itself together, even though it was a good idea to have the tiles on the suit double as projectiles and chaff depending on the situation.

14 TEEN TONY ARMOR

After the original Tony Stark went crazy, the Avengers thought the best thing they could do to fight old, evil Tony Stark was to grab a young Tony Stark from another dimension. Despite starting out with a rather cool looking retro version of the classic suit, young Tony eventually “upgraded” into this monstrosity -- matching oversized gauntlets like the Model 15, and huge shoulder pads for no reason other than it was the '90s.

Fortunately this suit didn’t last very long, as Marvel would give a soft reboot to Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and the rest of the Avengers with Heroes Reborn... not that that suit was much better looking.

13 STEALTH ARMOR

Back in the early '80s, writer David Michelinie got the genius idea that Tony Stark wouldn’t just have a single armor, but multiple versions that would each specialize in certain abilities. One of those specialized armors he had was the Model 7, a suit that excelled in being stealthy. When Stark needed to head into the Heaven’s Hand fortress in East Germany, his ties to the U.S. Government made it impossible for him to actually be seen there, so he went in his stealth armor.

This is a pretty cool design overall, but unfortunately he was forced to stuff so many components in it to make sure he was invisible the suit literally had no weapons in it -- not even his patented repulsor rays.

12 THE CROSSING

In the '90s, Tony finally started to lose it. It’s easy to understand -- between the demons in a bottle, running a business, fighting off supervillains, being a member of the Avengers, and people trying to take over his company, eventually it all became too much to handle. Y’know, particularly when there’s a time-traveling monster of a villain all in your head on top of everything.

Right around that time, Tony started wearing the Model 15 -- a twist on his classic Iron Man armor, only with gigantic, honking gauntlets. The suit was stronger than ever, but also looked more imposing and out of sync with his more heroic looking armors.

11 1602's LORD IRON

In Neil Gaiman’s awesome alternate universe story 1602, the Marvel Universe began 400 years before it was meant to thanks to a strange anomaly. For Tony Stark’s part, he found himself captured during the English-Spanish War and forced to make weapons or be tortured at the hands of David Banner.

Eventually this torture wore out Anthony’s heart, and he was forced to construct Lord Iron, a monstrous contraption that resembled more giant robot than suit of armor. Powered by “lightning” bottles, this version of the armor is packed with steampunk-styled weapons that make him just as dangerous in the past as Tony is in the present.

10 BLEEDING EDGE

As cool as Warren Ellis made Extremis look, the idea of reprogramming one’s body with a virus that could be hacked by someone else at any time probably wasn’t a good idea. So after Secret Invasion forced Tony to eject all of the Extremis virus from his body, he went about a different way of being the Iron Man of tomorrow.

Instead, the Model 37 is made up of nano-machines that exist inside of his bones until he summons them to turn into his armor. This is probably the furthest a modern day Tony has ever been from realistic -- this is just straight up science fantasy.

9 MODEL 12/TELEPRESENCE ARMOR

The Telepresence Armor is an example of fantasy eventually becoming reality, as Tony Stark becomes one of the first people to introduce drones to the world. After years of attacks both in his civilian life as well as in the Iron Man armor, Tony was left paralyzed and unable to defend himself from the enemies he’d amassed over the decades.

Rather than try to hand the role of Iron Man over to someone else again, Tony instead developed the NTU-150, a unique headset that allowed him to mentally command a suit of robotic armor. The Telepresence suit took advantage of its lack of a human occupant to store additional weaponry and deal with situations Tony simply couldn’t have.

8 COLD IRON ARMOR

After Malekith the Accursed got involved in Tony Stark’s business by chopping off a girl’s hands and stealing several of the Mandarin’s rings, Tony took it upon himself to personally retrieve those rings before they were misused by an absolute madman. Still, after his attempt at stealth failed Tony decided to become a bit more… hands on.

Teleporting in a suit made entirely of Cold Steel, he became invulnerable to the magic of the elves, and capable of dealing damage to them merely by touching them with his suit. One of the rare times Tony created an armor to fight one foe/group and it worked, he made quick work of his opponent and got back to the human world with the rings in tow.

7 THORBUSTER

One suit of armor we never talk about very much is the Model 23, often referred to as the Thorbuster armor. In the Avengers crossover “Standoff”, Thor started taking his role as “god” too seriously, intervening on behalf of a group of people worshipping him in Slokovia.

Juiced up on the power of his father Odin and nearly causing an international incident, Tony was forced to take a special metal given to him by Thor as a means of creating a clean energy source and use it as a reactor to create a special armor capable of battling Thor on equal terms by absorbing the energy created by his hammer.

6 MAINFRAME

In one of the very few Marvel Universe futures that isn’t a dystopian alternate timeline, Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz created the future version of Iron Man in Mainframe. Mainframe is an android created by Tony Stark that’s patterned after his personality as Iron Man.

Alongside Cassandra Lang, J2, and a new version of Thunderstrike, the group formed the second incarnation of the Avengers, A-Next. Mainframe is simultaneously a great idea and a sign of Tony Stark at his most paranoid -- instead of having his legacy carry on with children like everyone else, he creates a robot clone that’s permanently stuck inside of an armored shell.

5 IRON PATRIOT

This is kind of sketchy -- the Iron Patriot armor was certainly built by Stark and he almost definitely wore it, but long before it was ever repurposed by painting it in the colors of the American flag and misused by Norman Osborn. During the “Dark Reign” period, where Norman was in control of S.H.I.E.L.D. and turned it into H.A.M.M.E.R., he couldn’t exactly go out dressed as the Green Goblin.

So he took a suit of Tony’s that was remaining after the Invasion and started wearing it, becoming a symbol for America as the Iron Patriot -- a perfect combination of Captain America’s colors and Iron Man’s weaponry. Too bad it’s being piloted by a psychopath.

4 TRANSFORMER IRON MAN

Nearly every one of Tony Stark’s one appearance (or one arc) armors are weird in one way or another. At the start of 2015’s All-New, All-Different Avengers, Sam Wilson was convincing Tony Stark of the need to create another new Avengers team when they caught Miles Morales being tossed out of a window by a Chitauri.

After making sure the pint-sized Spider-Man was fine, Stark rushed into battle… but rather than using a briefcase or the many other ways he’s armored up over the years, he chose instead to transform his own car into a suit of Iron Man armor! Bulky and not particularly visually distinctive, the suit would get melted to slag the same issue.

3 ARCTIC ARMOR

Around the time Stark started to go a little crazy thanks to the machinations of Kang, Tony donned this new suit of armor in Iron Man vol. 1 #318. Much larger than his normal suits, the armor takes on a blue-white color scheme to blend into arctic environments easier and keep him warm.

It was only ever used once, in order to help Tony reach his arctic base, which raises the question: why have an arctic base to begin with? At some point, as cool as the specialized armors are, it’s impossible not to realize these things cost millions of dollars to assemble and Tony’s just cranking them out like toys.

2 PROMETHEUM ARMOR

In the mid-'90s, Marvel decided to give its comic line a shake up by tossing it’s core characters into a pocket universe, where they would experience a full on, '90s style reboot from some of the most famous creators in comics. In this universe, Stark was again a wealthy billionaire weapons tester, and the Prometheum armor was meant to be the latest in a line of great inventions…until the prototype blew up, killing the test pilot.

Still, Stark would later be forced into this monstrosity of a suit… and ugh, does it look terrible. A mess of twisted, exposed wires -- it lacks all of the sleek appeal of most of Tony Stark’s usual armors.

1 PROTO-CLASSIC ARMOR

This is arguably one of the weirdest armors Stark’s ever had. Introduced in Tales of Suspense #48, this was the first suit Stark created after he was done with the bulky, behemoth look he’d had for Iron Man when he first escaped from captivity. With this design, Stark tried out a lot of different ideas before he finally settled on the design and abilities of the Model IV/Classic Armor.

This is the armor that had a nose, and the one that used rocket-powered rollerskates before the writers at Marvel realized it’d be fine if he could just fly all the time instead of just over short distances.