The Marvel Multiverse is home to various dark realities where a single event could lead to unimaginable repercussions. The speculative worlds of What If…? often focus on how a single alteration in one hero’s personal timeline often leads to an unimaginable dystopian timeline for the rest of the Marvel pantheon. Iron Man’s fate is of particular interest to the series, as the hero and his technology are of vital importance to the fabric of the Marvel Universe.
One What If…? scenario speculated what would have happened if Tony Stark had taken a different approach with the armor he created. Though he never intended to take up his alter ego as he does in most continuities, events in the story lead Stark to create one of his most terrifyingly powerful Iron Man armors in the entire multiverse.
A lot of speculative stories have been written on what would happen to the Marvel Universe had Iron Man died before key storylines. What If..? #64 by Simon Furman, Geoff Senior, Sara Mossoff, and Richard Starkings instead imagines a world where Tony Stark never becomes Iron Man after he was captured and instead makes his technology available to the public. This leads to a boom in technological advancement in the United States, with the military, police, medical, and construction industries all using Iron Man technology. Due to a nationwide force called the ‘Iron Guard’ who handles most meta-human crime, many heroes such as Peter Parker, Matt Murdock and Elektra retire from crime-fighting to live normal lives.
But like most What If…?’s, the timeline is not without its hardships and dark turns. As Iron Man never existed, the Avengers are never formed to find the frozen Captain America. The Stark technology is also eventually used by America’s enemies such as Russia and Colombian Cartels. Doctor Doom also uses his own version of the Iron Man technology to successfully kill the Fantastic Four. Perhaps worst of all, Stark’s technology is used to create even more advanced Sentinel technology that ends up nearly decimating most of the Mutant population, including Professor X. Tony Stark mostly hides away from the public, ashamed of helping bring about the current state of the world.
The mutant genocide naturally earns the ire of Magneto, who attacks the United Nations over revenge for the acts of the Sentinels and shows how his powers of controlling magnetism make the Iron Guard effectively useless against him. As Magneto and his acolytes plan to wipe out humanity, the few remaining X-Men and a make-shift Avengers made up of Thor, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Electra, Ant-Man, and the Wasp try and stop Magento and his followers from succeeding.
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Stark meanwhile, decides to come out of hiding as he dons a new suit of armor that he had secretly been working on. This Iron Man Overload armor is incredibly large, able to turn invisible, and made out of polymer so that it is impervious to Magneto’s attacks. Its most powerful and dangerous ability though is how it is designed to take all of Magneto’s magnetic energy, where it will eventually explode. This explosion would not only kills Tony Stark inside but unleash all the magnetic energy into the satellites across the globe and render all technology on Earth useless, sending humanity back into another dark age.
James Rhodes a.k.a. War Machine dons an alternative version of his armor and goes to stop Stark from his suicidal plan that will also see humanity sent back centuries. He tries to tell Tony that it’s a coward’s way out and that there has to be another way. Iron Man then uses the Overload armor to fight Magneto face to face, eventually grabbing hold of the rogue mutant with the intent of crushing him before he is stopped by Thor, still recovering from his defeat by Magneto and reminds Tony that’s not what heroes do.
While the Overload armor did not make an appearance outside of this What If..? storyline and there have been even more powerful Iron Man armors over the years, the Overload armor and the storyline it was introduced in go onto show the potential danger of Stark’s technology and how the ways it is utilized can have unimaginable and terrifying consequences for the entire world.