(ONLY PARTIALLY) FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: A three-part pitch of which only one part succeeded, pt. 3!

[Dagnabbit, over a g-d month has lapsed since our previous installment in this FFF dealie!]

So! For today's notably belated installment of Failed-Project Friday, we'll be continuing our look at a rather sweeping proposal I made to Marvel back in 2004 for a lengthy run writing Iron Man. The SF-skewing pitch featured three different ambitious story arcs building on each other, and wound up being at least partially successful as only the first arc was approved, culminating in the 2005 miniseries Iron Man; Hypervelocity (featuring art by the great Brian Denham).

[Note: the image above was an unused cover rough for Hypervelocity issue #5, BTW.]

Anyhoo, our final pitch excerpt, originally titled Iron Man: Singularity, runs through five pages of blather setting up the concept that wound up seeing publication in considerably different form as Hypervelocity. Take it away, 2004 Me:

ARC THREE (4-5 issues): SINGULARITY

Well, after the end of the previous arc, Iron Man’s empty armor, as animated by the high-tech “ghost” of Tony Stark, has become incredibly powerful. Conventional baddies would be no particular threat to him, needless to say. So the point of this arc is to take IM out of the “small pond” that is the Earth, and toss him into a more challenging milieu: namely, outer space! Wheee!

To start out with, Iron Man becomes aware of some ill-defined threat to some “deep black,” top-secret military (or SHIELD) satellites, which may have been built by Stark Industries. Given the wackiness of the Marvel Universe, it seems certain that the orbital region around the earth must be absolutely infested with all sorts of high-tech artifacts, remnants of supervillainous schemes and leftovers from alien races (did Galactus leave some gear behind, perhaps?). In fact, the problem might be that a SHIELD automated “scavenger satellite” designed to discover and catalog just such artifacts might have stumbled across some Big Bad Secret, rather than vice versa… In any event, IM goes into orbit to check things out, very likely boosted aloft by the same monster railgun that once blew a hole through his armor… and adventure ensues! Yay!

[Random side note: IM would be likely to put the empty space inside his armor’s shell to good use, by filling it with useful stuff such as extra fuel, gallons of colloidal supercomputing gel for extra processing power, liquid (or fuel-air) explosives, or even nanomechanical “assembly gel,” in the most extreme version…]

The first few issues of this arc may well stand alone as single-issue stories (for a change of pace from the previous bunch), albeit a chain of connecting stories. The stories definitely build on each other, ramping up the threat level as they go along. Iron Man goes from brief adventures in near-Earth orbit to some colorfulness on the Moon, which is a prime environment for high-tech forces (or alien cultures or whatever) to have been working (underground) for some time. Then we get more and more cosmic, as the threats IM faces get larger and larger scale. By the end of the arc, Tony’s developed the ability to transmit himself as a high-bandwidth burst of data, allowing him to send himself (and reassemble himself) deeper into the solar system, assuming there’s some appropriate medium to receive him on the other end, of course. A likely candidate for this trick might be an adventure in and around Jupiter, where (for example) nanomachines might be mass-converting the gas giant into a giant weapon or “hypercomputer,” the so-called “Jupiter Brain” of SF lore. Maybe. The point is to expand the scale larger and larger, possibly to the “cosmic” level… Ooh, ah.

But how to wrap this whole thing up? Good question, for Iron Man’s become too damn powerful by this point to fit into the “regular” Marvel Universe. It might be possible to send the Uploaded Tony out into space, never to return. (Remember, BTW, that all of this takes place over several days total, so the very fast changes in IM continuity wouldn’t necessarily have to affect, say, the Avengers.) Another intriguing possibility is that, to paraphrase, “reports of the death of the original Tony Stark may be greatly exaggerated”… If the end of the OBSOLETE arc is handled cleverly and ambiguously enough, this might actually be possible. Could the remains of that wacky artificial heart have pulled something crazy? Did Tony have plans in mind for his own death? Could this set up a colorful “Tony Stark versus Iron Man” plotline? Alternatively, if active nanotechnology is encountered and used by the end of this arc, it’s entirely possible that Iron Man could nanoassemble a perfect recreation of Tony Stark, complete with new body and downloaded memories and personality, and dump this “Tony Stark ver 2.0” back on Earth to restore the status quo. (That’s a blatant rip of the end of Yukito Kishiro’s BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, but let’s ignore that.)

Anyway, the preceding are several possibilities to restore the status quo… On the other hand, the book might be successful enough to keep on rolling as is, but I’m doubtful about that possibility.

So there you have it: a very long, rambling synopsis that’s awfully specific in some places and maddeningly vague in others. (Such as: “What the hell is the real identity of the Alpha leading the Emergents? Who created these Uploads in the first place?” I, uh, haven’t worked that stuff out as yet.) Anyway, this is the basic concept I’ve come up with… One of the most obvious problems is that the overall plotline’s rather reminiscent of Alan Moore’s SWAMP THING—not to mention GHOST RIDER 2099, come to think of it, though my recollection’s a bit unclear on this point. Certainly, the “accidental upload” concept is more than a tad on the tired and clichéd side… Though it pains me a bit to use the “hyperaccelerated cognitive clock rate” gimmick, which is the centerpiece of my long-delayed original project CANNIBAL SUN. Or maybe this characteristic could be kept within reasonable bounds (for some technical reason, such as the hardware or software burning out at high speeds or whatever), so as to keep IM from becoming too godlike. Well, that’s all fer now.

<END OF PITCH>

And that was indeed all, folks. If the Hypervelocity miniseries hadn't been such a complete sales disaster, maaaaybe I could've continued the adventures of Tony 2.0, but I doubt it; note that Hypervelocity sadly predated the Iron Man renaissance that the movie would soon bring about. (Oh, well.)

I did get one more stab at an Iron Man project with a one-shot story I wrote for an annual a few years later, a project which I might well discuss here someday. Wheeeeee?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?