Say, if Marvel hired you to write Iron Man, how would you create new villains for him?

A radical nudist

Gay

no u

Don't even like shellhead but someone like a lex luthor/kingpin type of guy. A crazy billionaire that he can't just punch and laser blast away. Someone he'd have to fight with stark industries and business tactics in money fights.

The problem with Big 2 A-listers is that any "new" villain is almost inevitably going to retread the same ground as a villain they've faced in the past.

That said, a business rival who uses his wealth to investigate the occult, eventually performing a ritual that symbiotically bonds him with an Eldritch creature that also grants him superhuman abilities. So Iron Man but like, with way more tentacles.

I don't know much about where Tony is in the current Marvel comics. So, I'm not sure if this has already been done or if it disregards modern, established canon but here's what I would do:

>After years of developing hyper-intelligent A.I for armor and nanomachines, Tony decides that the next way that he can use his tech to help the world is to use the A.I that he's developed to help people with depression and other mental health issues that have been on the rise lately.

>Tony develops a small device that can be attached to eyewear, watches, computers, and other technology that contains a program for a customizable A.I friend and confidant. Initially it's a huge success and begins to lower the rates of suicide and reported depression and anxiety related incidents.

>To be Continued

>Eventually, the A.I. shown to be so good at its job, that some hospitals want to get it approved as a sort of "prescribed therapy" for those with suicidal thoughts or tendencies because it may reduce the dependency of patients on their potentially addictive drugs

>Most places begin approving it. However a hospital director (or whatever they're called) over one of the major hospitals in New York refuses to allow the doctors there to prescribe it. She worries that should the A.I be hacked or its network be shutdown that the patients would become panicked or worse--leading to many horrible situations. She's especially worried because her only son is severely depressed and has previously attempted suicide.

Captain Hydra (Or I guess Nu-Red Skull? I haven't kept up with Captain America since Hydra Cap got his face burned off).

The Weird Scientist, A man that can change the chemicals something is made up of so long as he is touching it

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Using the technology of the ancient ChessMen from Obidiah Stane, they come back reformed as the Checkers Men

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>Months pass and the world is thanking Tony Stark for his contribution to mental health awareness--all the while the patients of that woman's hospital are constantly asking for the A.I prescription to be made available. Eventually, it gets out that the director is the only one keeping the deal from moving forward. The media and civilians start to harass her.

>Still, the hospital director holds to her belief and refuses to allow the A.I to be prescribed.

>One day, as the director is being harassed by reporters and booed by civilians, Iron Man heroically swoops down and pulls her from the crowd. He flies her to a nearby rooftop and comes out of his suit. The director believes that he's there to attempt to bribe her. Tony insists that he just wants to talk.

>Tony reveals that he's done some research and that he knows about the director's son. He's a smart kid with a solid future in computer science. She doesn't like that and gets defensive for a moment. Tony apologizes for snooping. He just wants the opportunity to show the director that his invention can help her son without the risk of addiction or the side effects that come with a permanent routine of pills.

>Tony gives her an early model of the next version of the A.I. technology to let her son test out. Initially, the director attempts to refuse, but Tony counters all of her arguments. The new model is solar-powered, can be charged with any form of light, runs on an indepent network, and is essentially the most secure software next to his own personal Iron Man suits. He assures the director that it's perfectly safe and challenges her to allow her son to use it for a month (with minimal medication) and see the results. If she sees considerable improvement, Tony asks that she consider approving it for prescription therapy since many middle class people can't afford to purchase it.

>The director reluctantly agrees.

Iron Man is at his best as an international man of mystery, which is why his best villains are spies or foreign terrorists/crime lords.

So if I made new villains, I'd draw from current events.

In the 60's, Tony's Russian adversaries were spies like Black Widow and arms race metaphors like Crimson Dynamo.
Now in 2019 the US has a lot of tension with Russia about hacking, social engineering and general interference, so I'd probably make something that was a combination of Ghost and the Technovore.

There's a lot of fear in America about China, whose massive population and socialist, Big Brother government make us think of hives, maybe a villain could be made to represent that tension. Fraction already reimagined the Mandarin to represent modern fears of Chinese business threatening the US's economic dominance, I'd probably update that even further to include stuff like data collection.

And of course North Korea has replaced Cuba as the small country ruled indisputably by one possibly unstable man, so something could be done with that, as well as replacing Russia as the source of the knock-off Iron Men.

the problem with Iron Man is that you can't really give him gimmick villains since he can always create armor that does X to deal with it.

Bless you.

>Over the next month, the director's son uses the A.I companion and reduces the amount of medicine that he takes daily. His A.I has helped him fend off the dark voices that often tell him that he's worthless and should off himself. He's also had fewer side effects and has even been able to have a few beers with his classmates. Normally his medicine doesn't allow too much alcohol. So, being able to get drunk and have a good time with his friends was fun.

>He's also found himself more focused on his work in designing software. He's working on the program for a new software as a part of his thesis.

>One night, he has his A.I backup his work on its network. During the backup, his computer crashes. The A.I crashes for a moment too, but it quickly restarts. The director's son thinks that everything is fine and goes to bed.

(Note: I know nothing about how computer programming works. Sorry if this part is unrealistic or something)

>The son dreams that he's a kid again. He's playing baseball with his father. The son hits a "homerun" over the fence. The ball rolls into the street. His father is proud. Wanting to further impress his father, the young son insists on retrieving the ball from the street and proceeds to climb over the fence. The father insists against it and goes after him.

>The young boy retrieves the ball from the road and looks up to see a car speeding towards him. The boy is frozen with fear. Then, he feels strong hands push him to safety.

>The son awakens. He's drenched in sweat and hears horrible whispers. "It's you're fault." They say. "You should have been the one to die." They're louder than ever.

>The panicked son activates his A.I. companion so that it might comfort him. Instead, he's greeted with a message that reads: Startup Registry Error. Repairing and Reactivating in 30 minutes. A holographic clock shows a status bar and a clock that begins to count down. The voices get even louder and angrier.

>The son remembers his medication. He sprints to his bathroom and flings open his medicine cabinet. He has no medication left.

>The voices grow louder still.

>With no other options, the son retrieves his phone and calls his mother--the director. She answers.

>The director listens to her son explain his situation and quickly begins the drive to her son's apartment with more medication. She keeps her son on her personal phone and uses another to call 911. The operator says that help is on the way.

>Meanwhile, her son is in agony. He just wants the voices to go away. The director tries her best to calm her son, but things only get worse.

>Eventually, the director's son stops responding. Instead, she hears an odd, rhythmic thumping. She soon realizes that her son is attempting to knock himself unconcious to stop the voices.

>She pleads for her son to stop. He doesn't respond,

>Eventually the thumping stops.

A Captain Caveman type

Okay, here's a counter question: Why do I need to create new villains for him? His existing rogues gallery has been underutilized and misused more often than not in the past couple of decades. I'd rather focus on them more and actually let them do stuff again.

Almost every writer in the past two decades have been trying to give Iron Man new villains, and most of them feel phoned in, uninspired and uninteresting--which is ironic, given that some of those writers, like Bendis, slammed Tony's older villains.

The Unabomber type villain

I would just make a Mad Stan clone and call it a day.

Evil train

We must first get to the core of "good-taken-out-of-the-ass-villains".

Examples would be Doomsday and Bane. Their sole purposes was to completely shatter the heroes where it hurt the most, them not being capable of dealing with shit they were good at. And what is Tony good at? He always have new armors, tons of armors, tons of money, he have resources.

So, the villain would be a highly organized military-like institution that would not attack tony directly, but would rather hit his resources so he can't fight back.

The history starts with an AI telling Tony that a "trigger" has been release, cargo related to tony's stuff (rare metals or components he uses in his armor, things he transfers from place to place for whichever reason) are being atacked in rates slightly higher than usual. Tony would go to check and discover the trigger is saying that the patterns are too "natural", as being forced to look normal.

He investigates, is hit even harder as times goes by (company offices blows up, armors are stolen) and in a very descentrilized way, across the whole globe. As Tony is discovering things, a normal-ass old villain of tony appears, they spare a little, tony wins but gets his armor fucked up, and the military-boys launch a full scale attack that takes everything he have. Now he don't have any rare material to build things up and has to fight a increasingly better armored elite team, broken, injured and poor.

Tony beats them at the end unarmored, starting to understand how they operate and sending friends to fight for him, taking off the armor for a while after it and operating as a intel-guy for a while.

>The director arrives at her son's place and nearly breaks the door down to get in. But, she's too late. He's on the bathroom floor lying in a small pool of blood.

>The director holds her son and begins to weep as she waits for assistance to arrive.

>Breaking the sound of her crying, the director hears the A.I activate on her son's bed.

>The director's son is pronounced dead by the morning. The funeral is held a few days later. Iron Man is busy overseas with the Avengers. In his stead, Tony sends a stand-in, a card, flowers, and pays for the funeral in full.

>The director is numb to these gestures. After the funeral, she's not seen much at the hospital or anywhere else.

An easily bored Mandarin and the growing shape shifting Fin Fan Foom from 90s Iron Man. Every time a story requires Iron Man to beat the Mandarin instead of coming up with some reason why Tony wins I would just have The Mandarin get bored and walk away. Each ring would give him a different super power from unbreakable skin to super speed. Tony would just be completely out classed. Sometimes when Tony got particularly annoying the Mandarin would just rewrite just the little bit of reality around Tony and degrade all technology so would have to reinvent it from scratch rediscover the methods of find different work arounds the newly formed reality.

I'd just adapt Superior Iron Man and have him fight the Nu Avengers in the MCU
>Brings up alternate realities
>RDJ can go full HAM
>Powerlevels
>Can even throw in Reed Richards

How about Africa, Saudi Arabia, Israel and India?
I feel like maybe Killmonger could be good for Africa.

The problem with Iron Man is that he already has villains that cover most bases. He’s got business competitors. He’s got armored villains that are affiliated with some country or are rogues. He’s got an extremist each from most major political causes. He’s got government stooges wanting to take his tech. The only way to move forward is to reinvent them a bit and then start adding him to the X-aside of the Universe so that he can tackle Bio-Problems. Consider that Post-2000s Transhumanism is a major part of his character, just focus on that. Have him go against the U-Men and work with Fantomex. Have him rework The World. Have him go intergalactic and start getting into cosmic problems.

Iron Man’s got a whole lot of potential as a brand, but nobody’s creative, or cares, enough, to make the leap forward.

Make the series a completely separate universe from MCU/616(whatever the fuck it is now).
The series takes on Tony in new ways and each issue would be like an episode from a cartoon.

>Tony builds a time machine armor and ends up getting stuck in the 1600s due to having to his armor having to recharge before another time jump.
>Tony's armor gives off strange energy levels for the time, which catches the eyes of aliens whom originally were to just pass by Earth.
>Tony has to defend Earth from a small scale invasion and while trying to keep his armor from being damaged, as there's no way of repairing it during the time period and it's his only way back to his time.

>Tony's bank account get's locked due to an compromising attempt, leaving Tony with no money, as all his funds were on card or digital.
>Skips to a month later and Tony is working as a street performer with one of his armors, he works with a group of other performers, though due to Tony's Armor it causes him to get more money resulting in a civil war between him and a newly created group.
>Tony's group and the new group end up having a war with each person using their own talents against each other while Tony dispatches them without harming the others, as they're just normal people.
>Due to the chaos, Tony failed to realize that his account has been back for for several weeks.

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Alien has galactic patent on powered armour and sues him in space court

He really doesn't need new ones.

He has a pretty rounded rogues' gallery.

It;'s just that most modern writers are so shit they can't do anything with them.

>Evil young mastermind counterpart
Ezekiel Stane.
>Evil old mastermind counterpart
Justin Hammer.
>Insane greedy fat mastermind
Mordecai Midas.
>Insane super-genius woman racked by tragedy who wants revenge
Vitriol.
>Insane criminal genius woman who is in love with him in her psychotic way and wears a mask to hide her disfigured face
Madame Masque
>Insane criminal genius woman who loves to yank him around and wears a mask to hide her identity
Madame Menace
>Insane SJW who would destroy society to create better one on the ashes
Firebrand.
>Insane wannabe SJW who could physically destroy society and is too stupid to build anything
Firebrand
>Insane maverick scientist disfigured by his own experiment who wants revenge on the man responsible
Vibro
>Insane inventor with phantom powers who is sworn to destroy all corporations
Ghost
>Cipher who can go anywhere and be anyone, syeal anyone's secrets and sabotage anything
Spymaster
>Supervillain who can freeze anything
Blizzard
>Supervillain who can also freeze anything
Frostbite
>Classic armored counterpart from Soviet Union
Titanium Man
>Classic armored counterpart from Russia
Crimson Dynamo
>Towering super-robot hell-bent on destroying all life anywhere
Ultimo
>Alien Godzilla-level dragon, marooned on Earth
Fin Fang Foom
>Oriental genius psychotic sociiopath with globe-spanning criminal network who wields alien weapons of unknowable power
the Mandarin

>Paranoid psychopath who has the means and desire to make anyone into a mindless slave or battery to feed his crazed lust for power
Controller
>Inhuman who has the ability to psychically control and meld with any technology in her range and intends to take complete control of Japan by killing of any and all other parties
Tomoe the Techno-Golem
>Giant alien robot created to brainwash humanity to prepare for the invasion and conquest of the planet
Gargantus
>Inventor who was consumed by the weapons he created and now exists as several separate versions of himself, made of self-aware light
Living Laser
>Psychotic sadist employed as enforcer by criminal organization, wielding primitive hand-held weapons with murderous efficiency
Whiplash.

Not to mention Doctor Doom,Ultron and MODOK who are more enemies of everybody, but have a special relationship with Tony.

Didn't Ellis do a similar story in Ultimate? Ultimate Human, with Hulk and Tony?

Consider the following: Crimson Dynamo as a nickname for the military computer virus, capable of slicing into the toughest of security. Maybe with a team of keyboard jockeys to utilize it. Full Mirrorshades.

>Implying Firebrand wouldn't be rebranded as a hero these days.

Master thief, specifically targeting him. Tony cant get PR from beating them since he isnt saving anyone, and every loss is personal. His money dwindles away, his armors come up missing and resold to competitors, his files are hacked and copied and auctioned off to foreign investors, and Tony can never manage to pin them down to punch and repulsor blast them into submission.

Like Justin Hammer? Or Obie Stane, until they decided to go the easy way and sweep him under the rug in #200.

Biopunks, technomancers, magical dorks, 8th dimensional fuckwits, corporate commanders.

Alternatively: cyberpunk reboot. Stark has to defend his AAA megacorp against a very hostile takeover in order to keep funding his pet projects.

I got this
iron Man Vs purple iron man, iron Man Vs blue iron man, big iron man Vs iron man

But how about a doctor doom/tony team up with tons of banter while they also throw shade at other geniuses? Worked great the first time.

A multiversal corporation who want to enter the markets of 616 by trying to sign a deal with Stark industries.

Evil Guido van Rossum

when did this happen?

When they traveled back to Arthurian times together. There was even a callback to it recently.

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I’d make it the head of a corporation that is planning to buy out stark industries and all its assets.

the destroyer armor from Thor?

Probably already a character, but I was thinking of a guy who has a somewhat similar suit to Tony, only it's completely manual and has electricity generators in it. Have the dude shoot lightning from his hands that's strong enough to trash Tony's armor's computers. So basically MK I with lighting guns. Have the guy inside be a disillusioned fan of Iron Man after he failed to save his family.

Probably not. The first one alienated all his followers and the second one was bugnuts.

I'd write a woman trying to #metoo Tony and a black director trying to take over his company.

>Another billionaire
Justin hammer?

But Stark is a pragmatist pur sang, he would absolutely give up his humanity if it gave him an edge and he believed it would save everyone

Boronman

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super alcohol man
a normal dude with alcohol and vodka

I would just bring back Ghost. Anarchist hacker disassembly of Stark tech combined with a campaign of slander