Superior Iron Man

From the same crossover that brought us The Kluh comes Tony Stark's Htlaets Armor. Psychic fallout from a battle with Red Skull leaves Iron Man a changed man, causing havoc among humanity in Symbiote-infused armor. As you may be able to gather from that bio, this armor came out of the Axis event, when the villains became heroes and the heroes became villains, with the implication being that the line between the two is nothing more than a question of selfishness vs. altruism - for most of them, their personalities didn't change, just the way they interacted with others. Tony was egotistical and driven before, and he was egotistical and driven after; the only sign that he'd changed was a willingness to utilize his tech any way he liked, and to make big money off the public for doing it. In case there were any question that Capitalism is not a good thing. Superior Iron Man was sculpted by Dennis Chan, who's done so many of the Iron Men recently. We're not complaining, he does great work. Tony Stark, meanwhile, apparently took the idea of "inversion" a little too seriously, because before getting his world flipped - turned upside down - he was wearing black and gold and he changed that to white and blue. It means the details in the sculpt are hard to see (and even harder to photograph, sorry about that), but the general vibe is a lot like one of the movie armors, but a bit sleeker. Unfortunately, as good as the sculpt is, the paint is incomplete. Surprisingly, they didn't skip on painting the back, like they've done for other mostly-white figures, choosing rather to skimp on the front. There's a black section right above the waist and stretching up toward the armpits, but if you look at the source art, the black (or at least dark grey) section is meant to wrap all the way around the abdomen and ribs. On the other hand, the light blue is entirely like what we saw in the comics, but the lack of black lines around everything, as there would be in art, mean the blue looks too indistinct, and would certainly be served by being a darker shade. Being turned evil made Tony even more vain than usual, so there was no way he'd be happy hiding his face behind a normal Iron Man helmet. This armor does include one, for the times when he's in a particularly vicious fight, but for general public appearances and low-stakes conflicts, he designed a transparent graphene shield that could protect his face and allow him to still be seen. The figure includes an alternate unmasked head, with teh face framed by the armor and his hair sticking out the top. The toy definitely looks more "correct" with that head on, and outside any time the armor is supposed to be empty (standing in the Hall of Armor, for instance), I'll be using this head as the default. We also get our choice of closed fists or open repulsor blast hands. Those latter ones are very specifically meant for repulsor blasts, because they're designed to flex back more easily than they can flex forward: as far "down" as they can go they just hang in a normal relaxed position, unable to move any further than that. Fittingly for an armor that takes some design cues from movie armor, the chest joint is a balljoint rather than a hinge, just like most of the movie toys have. There's no Zabu Build-A-Figure piece included here, just a pair of dark blue blasts. At the end of Axis, three characters were left inverted: Havok, Sabretooth, and Iron Man. Havok got fixed by Emma Frost going in and manually reordering his brain, Sabretooth's just kind of wore off (maybe a "healing factor" thing?), but Iron Man never actually came back from it; he was still evil at the point when every Earth was destroyed leading into the 2015 Secret Wars, and thus died that way, fighting Captain America; it was only when the universe was rebooted after that event that we got the "real" Iron Man back. The Model 50 armor is a unique entry, with its white coloration setting it apart from all the others. -- 08/05/24

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