Ever since the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, we have been fascinated by heroes in suits of armor. What is interesting, though, is that it took a number of years before our thoughts about technology caught up to the point where we could come up with the idea of people wearing super-powered suits of armor. People often make fun of Stan Lee's use of transistors in the early days of Iron Man, as pretty much any new power that Iron Man displayed was explained as being due to the transistors in his suit, but it is fair to say that up until the invention of transistors, no one could even conceive of power suits in comics.
Once the miniaturized technology cat was out of the bag, however, the idea of heroes wearing power suits became prevalent. It got to the point where there really isn't a single prominent superhero who has not worn a power suit at one point or another. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Wolverine -- they have all found themselves wearing special suits of armor at one point or another. However, the reason that they wear these costumes so much is because they generally work very well. They might be just for a single usage, but that single usage tends to go well. That is not always the case, though, as with any technology, there is always the danger that something might go wrong. Here, then, are 20 instances where comic book power suits proved to be extremely dangerous to the people wearing them.
20 IRON MAN (TONY STARK)
When Tony Stark first invented his Iron Man armor, it was specifically to keep him from dying. For years, he had to wear a special chest protector that kept his heart beating. Over the years, technology improved to the point where Tony's heart was fixed.
However, he was then shot by a deranged former lover. He was paralyzed until he built a special new cybernetic central nervous system. The problem was that the bad guys gained access to it and then used it to eat away at Tony's central nervous system. Now, every time he used his armor, it slowly killed him. Eventually, he faked his death and put himself into cryogenesis so that doctors could cure him.
19 IRON MAN (JIM RHODES)
Tony Stark is an alcoholic, and during one of the worst binges of his life, he lost control of his company and had to give up being Iron Man because he was just too inebriated to perform his superhero duties safely. Luckily, his head of security, James Rhodes, who is also one of Tony's best friends, took over as Iron Man for him.
"Rhodey" became very good at the job, but the problem was that the Iron Man armor was specifically built for Tony's neural system. The connectors slowly ate away at Rhodey's brain, giving him severe headaches that made him believe that he had a brain tumor. Luckily, Tony had sobered up and he took the job back.
18 DOCTOR DOOM (VICTOR VON DOOM)
While certainly not one of their biggest arguments, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did have a difference of opinions when it came to Doctor Doom, namely, what did he look like under his mask? Kirby liked the notion that the explosion in college that Doctor Doom blamed Reed Richards for had only left a small scar and Doom was just so vain that he kept it covered up. Lee, though, explicitly said in a comic that Doom's face was hideous.
John Byrne combined the two by establishing that Doom's face initially was only slightly scarred, but when he had a special armor made for him by a group of monks, the mask burned his face horrifically.
17 BATMAN (JEAN-PAUL VALLEY)
Jean-Paul Valley first met Batman when the college student discovered that he had been brainwashed since he was a small child into becoming Azrael, an assassin for the Order of St. Dumas. Batman helped Jean-Paul break his programming. He then began to train Jean-Paul as a superhero.
Sadly, in the middle of the training, Batman had his back broken and Jean-Paul was forced to take over as Batman. He built a special power suit and slowly, but surely, the power suit began to re-enforce the assassin training that Jean-Paul received when he wore his Azrael suit. He snapped and a healed Bruce Wayne had to return to reclaim the Batman name.
16 LEX LUTHOR
After wearing a variety of power suits over the years before Crisis on Infinite Earths, Post-Crisis, Lex Luthor was revamped as a corrupt businessman who fought Superman from behind the scenes. Most of the people in Metropolis saw Luthor as a hero, as well. Eventually, Luthor became popular enough that he ran for and was elected President of the United States!
He ultimately could not keep himself from a return to outright villainy and built a special Kryptonite-powered suit of armor that involved him pumping himself up with dangerous Kryptonite steroids and Venom, and by the time Superman and Batman defeated him, his mind was nearly gone.
15 SPIDER-MAN (IRON SPIDER)
For years, Spider-Man was a lone wolf and did not join any teams, except as a reserve member of the Avengers. Once the Avengers disbanded and then reformed as the New Avengers, though, Spider-Man finally joined up. While on the team, he befriended his teammate, Iron Man, who gave Spider-Man a job working for him in their civilian identities of Tony Stark and Peter Parker.
Tony even built Peter a special new "Iron Spider" suit of armor. When Peter turned on Iron Man, though, during Civil War, Iron Man shut his armor down. Spider-Man, of course, built a back door into the armor, but he was forced to abandon it after that.
14 DOCTOR DOOM (KRISTOFF)
Doctor Doom is one of the more egotistical supervillains in the Marvel Universe and he was particularly obsessed with his legacy. Therefore, when he was seemingly killed after a battle against Galactus' herald, Terrax, Doom found a way to transfer his memories to a young Latverian boy named Kristoff.
Kristoff was then trapped in a Doctor Doom suit of armor and forced to live his life as, well, Doctor Doom. Luckily, eventually his programming was altered enough that he could begin to live his own life, even though it would be tinged through the Doom memories that remained in his system.
13 ANTAEUS
Mark Antaeus was a fireman who was experimented on as a child by his father, who used experimental steroids to make Mark as strong as humanly possible. Mark became obsessed with Superman. He sort of cursed himself for not being as strong as Superman, something that came to a breaking point when he failed to save a family.
He volunteered for a special experiment to give him a powerful cybernetic armor. It made him almost as strong as Superman. He joined the JLA, but soon became unstable and killed the leader of a Middle Eastern nation. He was shocked that things got worse in the country after he killed their despotic leader. He allowed his armor to explode, killing him.
12 GUARDIAN (JAMES HUDSON)
When Wolverine first debuted, he was an agent of the Canadian government. He quit to join the X-Men, but then Canada sent another hero, Weapon Alpha, to bring Wolverine back. Wolverine fought him off, so the agent returned with a whole team of heroes, Alpha Flight, to bring Wolverine home. The armored hero was Wolverine's old friend, James Hudson, now calling himself Vindicator and later Guardian.
John Byrne launched an Alpha Flight ongoing series and, as a major shock at the time, had Guardian's armor be damaged and explode in front of his wife, Heather, in the 12th issue of the series! Heather took over as the new Guardian.
11 RHINO
One of the more inconsistently applied armors in comics has got to be the Spider-Man villain, the Rhino. For years, writers have gone back and forth on really just how devastating his situation is, as a number of writers have established that he is trapped within the powerful suit of armor while other writers show him as being able to remove the armor.
In one storyline, he was able to get the armor off and got married, but then a new Rhino debuted and tried to get him out of retirement so the new Rhino could prove himself against him. When the new Rhino killed his wife, he voluntarily agreed to re-bond with the armor to kill the usurper of his name.
10 GUARDSMAN (KEVIN O'BRIEN)
Kevin O'Brien was an engineer who worked for Tony Stark and impressed Tony with his repeated acts of bravery where Kevin helped Tony in both of his identities. He eventually revealed his secret identity to Kevin and began to build a new suit of armor so that Kevin could help him in emergencies. The new suit of armor was called the Guardsman.
The problem was that the neural connectors on the armor slowly drove Kevin insane. He became jealous and thought Tony was his enemy. They fought and Kevin was killed in an explosion. Tony covered the death up as an accident to not besmirch Kevin's good name.
9 NITE OWL (DAN DREIBERG)
Dan Dreiberg was a fan of Hollis Mason, the original hero known as Nite Owl. He asked Mason for permission to become the new Nite Owl and Mason agreed. Dreiberg was a genius who made striking innovations in a number of fields, especially aeronautics, where he built a powerful flying mechanical Owl ship.
Dreiberg built a number of specialty Nite Owl suits for specific missions. He built an exo-skeleton, but it proved to be too dangerous. The first time that he used it he accidentally broke his arm! When he abandoned his home to go on the run, the only thing he left behind was the exo-skeleton.
8 TITANIUM MAN
Over the years, the Soviet Union tried to create a number of different armored heroes of their own to compete with Iron Man. Their two most famous ones were the Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man. After the first Titanium Man was supposedly killed, the Russian mutant known as the Gremlin took over the armor.
During Armor Wars, Tony Stark tried to eliminate any suit of armor that was built using retrofitted Stark technology. He was able to "negate" the Crimson Dynamo armor, but the Titanium Man destroyed his negation pack. During the battle, though, his rocket boots caught fire and his whole armor ignited, killing him.
7 AZTEK
Aztek was introduced working as an operative for the Q Society, a group that worshiped the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and built Aztek a special power suit designed to ultimately allow him to stop their enemy, the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca.
Aztek, though, discovered that the Q Society was actually controlled by Lex Luthor and thus Aztek joining the Justice League was Luthor's attempt to get a mole in the League. During the League's battle against the seemingly omnipotent being, Mageddon, Aztek helped turn the tide by allowing his armor to explode, rocking Mageddon. As it turned out, it was Mageddon that he was destined to defeat, not Tezcatlipoca.
6 GUARDSMAN (MICHAEL O'BRIEN)
Now, when you try to cover up the death of someone, even if you're Tony Stark, there are going to be people who are suspicious, and in the case of Kevin O'Brien's death, his police sergeant brother, Michael, did not believe the explanation for his brother's demise. Michael looked into things and discovered the Guardsman armor.
After putting it on, it began to drive him insane just like his brother and he fought Iron Man, blaming him for his brother's death. Luckily, Iron Man was able to defeat him and fix the armor finally. Michael became a respected security expert using the Guardsman armor. The United States government later adapted the armor to use as prison guards in the Vault.
5 BLUE DEVIL
Dan Cassidy was a respected stuntman and also a brilliant special effects specialist working in Hollywood. During the filming of a movie about a Blue Devil, Cassidy built a special exoskeleton for the movie that he would wear as the stuntman in the film. However, the filming awoke an actual demon. When it saw Dan as Blue Devil, it tried to attack him with magic.
The resulting attack bonded the armor to Dan and caused him to become a "weirdness magnet," drawing crazy problems into his life from that point forward. Years later, the demon Neron turned Dan into a literal blue devil.
4 CONDUIT
Following Zero Hour, the DC titles each had #0 issues that would tell origins of the main characters. Since there were four Superman titles, that was too long to just re-tell his origin, so instead they introduced Kenny Braverman, a young boy in Smallville who learned Clark Kent's secret identity and resented him for it.
He eventually built a special Kryptonite armor to become as powerful as Clark and called himself Conduit and began to attack Clark Kent's friends and family. Conduit's armor could suck out energy from other sources to power it. He got greedy and overloaded his armor. It exploded and killed him.
3 PROMETHEUS
The villainous Prometheus's power suit was really more of a power helmet. You see, with the use of special computer discs, he could "load" any sort of skill into his helmet and they would give him the abilities by transmitting the information into his brain. He even downloaded special fighting skills that allowed him to defeat Batman in hand-to-hand combat.
However, it is still a power suit since the helmet sends signals to his entire body. That proved to be a problem when he had a rematch with Batman a few years later. Batman out-thought him and managed to load a special disc into the helmet, giving Prometheus the physical skills of Professor Stephen Hawking. Batman then defeated him easily.
2 RUIN
Emil Hamilton had long been one of Superman's closest friends. The brilliant scientist was Superman's chief science adviser for years. At one point, though, Hamilton discovered that Superman was actually slowly draining solar energy from Earth's sun. He calculated that eventually Superman would drain the sun entirely and doom the Earth. The problem is that the "danger" was billions of years away!
Hamilton went insane, though, and built a powerful suit of armor that projected Kryptonian red sunlight that could damage Superman. The armor needed so much power that it was poorly designed in other areas and when it was removed from him body, it would explode!
1 VIC CHALKER
Peter David had a "fan" character named Vic Chalker in his "But I Digress..." column in the Comic Book Buyers Guide that he used to to make fun of the sillier types of fan behaviors. When David took over writing duties on X-Factor, he brought Chalker into the Marvel Universe as a potential villain for the mutant team.
Slowly but surely, Chalker would build his imposing suit of armor to kill X-Factor. When he finally debuted it in X-Factor #77, though, he had some exposed wiring and when it began to rain, he was electrocuted and killed! David then invented a brother and a cousin of Chalker with similarly moronic deaths.