There's a new Iron Man skin coming to Marvel's Avengers, this one straight from the comics. Revealed in Crystal Dynamics' latest developer stream, the Superior Iron Man's armor will be added to Avengers' marketplace next week.
An unmasked Tony Stark with glowing eyes and white and black armor certainly stands out, but even more interesting is the suit's comic book history. The "Endo-Sym" armor is a combination of liquid metal and the Venom symbiote, but due to his brief tenure in the armor, even the most dedicated comic readers may not be familiar with the villainous Iron Man who wore it.
Using the naming convention established in Superior Spider-Man, Superior Iron Man spun out of the 2014 crossover Avengers & X-Men: Axis by Rick Remender, Adam Kubert, Leinil Francis Yu, Terry Dodson and Jim Cheung. The mini-series saw a group of heroes and villains morally "inverted" by a magical spell. In Iron Man's case, his personality's negative aspects were amplified, making him greedier and more arrogant. Though the spell was reversed at the end of the series, returning most characters to normal, Iron Man refused to return to his old self. Shielding himself from the reversion spell, Tony slipped away thanks to a distraction from the still inverted Havok.
In his solo series by Tom Taylor and Yildiray Cinar, Superior Iron Man set up shop in San Francisco. He offered a free version of the Extremis virus as a mobile app, Extremis 3.0, to everyone in the city. It allowed anyone with a smartphone to modify their body to their liking.
Pepper Potts noticed the changes in Stark's personality. What's worse, Tony was also drinking again, throwing away years of hard-won sobriety. Confronting Stark, she pointed out the consequences of giving Extremis away to smartphone owners. He had created a new class divide between people who had access to Extremis and those who didn't. Potts calling him on his hubris is the kind of thing that would give Stark pause under normal circumstances, but the inverted Stark revealed it was all part of a wider plan. Free Extremis was a trial version. Forcibly extracting the virus from everyone's who downloaded it, he informed them that continued access cost $99.99 a day, creating huge profits for Stark Industries.
Potts wasn't the only one who noticed Stark's heel turn. Daredevil, who had returned to San Francisco after years in Hell's Kitchen, confronted Stark. Daredevil would be in over his head in a battle against Iron Man under normal circumstances, but he really bit off more than he could chew against the Superior version. Stark used Extremis to briefly restore Daredevil's eyesight before ripping it away from him. When Daredevil condemned him for playing God, Stark responded that he'd actually been playing at being human with all of his gifts. Daredevil left their encounter with light brain damage, keeping him from revealing to the public that Stark had added Extremis to San Francisco's water supply.
The inverted Stark wasn't completely without sentiment. He took the novice supervillain Teen Abomination under his wing. After Abomination revealed that Extremis had failed to help him change his monstrous form, Stark attempted to cure him. Teen Abomination was later revealed to be the son of Stark's old friend and Pepper Potts' former husband, Happy Hogan. However, that sliver of humanity didn't stop Potts from opposing Stark. She attacked Stark with an A.I. based on his pre-inversion mind. The A.I. uses Stark's old armors against him but is ultimately defeated and deleted from existence. Realizing that he's become Stark's greatest fear, Pepper vowed to expose his sins to the world through the media so people would see him as the monster he's become.
But...that's all there was for the Superior Iron Man. The solo series ended as it crashed headfirst into 2015's Secret Wars event, which temporarily destroyed the Marvel Universe. When the universe was restored, Stark was back to his normal self with no real explanation. Still, Superior Iron Man is an interesting addition to the game; perhaps Crystal Dynamics could even cast him as a DLC villain like they did the Maestro. For now, though, the skin serves as a reminder of the most villainous era in the character's history.