Iron Man has had a rough year… and not just for the reasons everyone else has. Over the past 12 months, Tony Stark has been grappling with his own death and resurrection as an artificially-generated being. His best friend Rhodey, aka War Machine, had taken the same issues even harder. When the last issue of Iron Man 2020 capped off with Stark saying he was done with 2020, it resonated on many levels. But, in the end, the pair’s emotional issues that had been the foundation for the entire two-year run of Iron Man were explained away in a fashion that wasn’t just unsatisfying, but downright dismissive.
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This character arc began in 2018 with Dan Slott and artist Valerie Schiti’s Tony Stark: Iron Man. Fitting the title, the series focused on Tony questioning who he is. Was he the real Tony Stark, or a digital clone with Tony’s mind downloaded in? Was he a human or an AI? Tony took the latter side and renamed himself “Mark One”, thinking of himself as just a creation of the real Stark. Meanwhile, Rhodes’ trauma stemmed from being killed in the War Machine armor. Using it gave him panic attacks, so he found other ways to help Iron Man out. The specifics of these issues were pure science fiction, but at their core, they relate to real post-traumatic issues: dissociation, survivor’s guilt, and panic disorder caused by life-threatening situations.
But the finale did away with all that in an instant. In Iron Man #6, after Tony defeats his brother Arno Stark, the denouement cleans everything up: henchmen turned in, robot lovers reconciled, and Stark and Rhodes in a lab undergoing treatment. Tony officially forgives Captain Marvel for killing him in Civil War II and kicking off the Slott/Schiti series, doing away with their lingering animosity. Then Stark’s peers reveal that Iron Man and War Machine’s post-traumatic issues are completely gone. As Tony explains, their mental health disorders were “aberrations” caused by “minor deviations” in their artificially-reassembled genetic code, and they were now repaired. No more phobia about being War Machine, no more anxiety about being Iron Man. Problem solved.
But that’s not a conclusion. It’s a reset button. Tony and Rhodey’s issues weren’t just programming errors, they were completely reasonable story consequences. Tony Stark had been murdered by Captain Marvel and was now in a new body that had been made in a tube. James Rhodes died in combat with Thanos and couldn’t put himself in that kind of stress again. Of course, they would have lingering issues. To explain them away as “genetic errors” paints PTSD itself as a biological failure caused by bad DNA and retroactively destroys the emotional stakes of the series. If the story doesn’t take these problems seriously, why did we?
There’s no one person to point to as responsible for this story decision. Slott left Iron Man with that issue and it’s customary, from a writing and editorial perspective, to end a long tenure by putting the main characters back where they started. But it also doesn’t make sense for Marvel in the context of where Tony went post-2020. He spends the Empyre storyline in the midst of a breakdown in confidence; the new Iron Man series is also all about Stark’s identity crisis. Despite the reset, those issues didn’t even go away. Marvel Comics is very capable of depicting mental health issues in a smart and respectful way, so this moment lands as a totally unnecessary stumble in an otherwise compelling character arc.
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