Iron Man (2026 series) #4

Madame Masque and AIM kidnapped all the contenders for the Tony Stark Award for innovation, hoping to force them all to invent new weapons for them. But last issue she also captured Tony Stark himself.

Alongside a flashback as a teacher we see the Award winner Adam Ware inventing a helmet that allows him to escape from his room, only to get electrocuted. Fixer is monitoring everything, but Masque complains about his methods even though this scheme was all her idea (although she maintains it was Stark who inspired it). Meanwhile Fixer has some of the inventions already created and thinks he can combine them into a new armour. Whitney Frost insists that the aim is to find the 1 who will be *their* Tony Stark, able to keep generating new inventions. Fixer says that's why he needs to motivate them with the threat of death. (And as we saw in #2 he thinks *he* should be their Stark.)

Last issue ended with Tony in stealth armour falling into a psychedelic prison.  He's now realised that the weirdness is illusions generated by tech developed by Spider-Man's foe Mysterio. So he's cannibalised his armour to fight back against the illusions, which now generate Spidey to fight him in an extreme spider form. He tries multiple times to escape and is met in turn by lightning, fire and sharks.

Then he's contacted via his helmet by Adam who uses a shared memory to confirm he's real. He says he's hacked AIM's system to prevent them from noticing the conversation. While the other abductees were concentrating on building weapons for their 'masters' he's been trying to contact the outside world, and he's developed a mind/machine interface which is probably similar to the way Tony controls his armour. Tony dons his helmet and they start an audiovisual conversation.

Adam says his parents left him much to his own devices and he didn't really have any other family so his world was books and his schoolteachers. They inspired him to his line of research in communication. Tony thinks he was right to give Adam the Award, and confesses that it's all his fault that the candidates got kidnapped. He also admits that he's not invented anything truly new for some time, but Adam has inspired him and he's going to get them out of here.

Meanwhile Melinda May and Pepper Potts have met up at Stark's latest Iron Man workshop in the old Gamma Base (where Hulk was born). Melinda says she tracked Tony to AIM's modified Helicarrier but then lost contact. Pepper thinks they should call in the Avengers but Melinda reminds her of Tony's 48-hour rule. Then they are confronted by the new person in the Citizen V mask who says he 's here for something of his that Stark stole. May draws her gun but he uses a smoke bomb to escape. They wonder who would be able to get past Tony's security.

In the helicarrier Fixer is building something and Masque is watching Stark at work when suddenly Tony is able to chat with her through her monitoring system. Whitney asks him to work with her and together they can use AIM to change the world, and in return she'll let the surviving captives go. Tony queries the word 'survivors' and she says they had to 'push' them to the limit as he was when he created the 1st Iron Man armour.

This triggers Tony to take the gloves off (or rather put them on) and he arrives in full armour at her side. But she leaves him to fight AIM troops and rushes out of the room to Fixer's lab. Iron Man follows her but she grabs a plasma weapon that 1 of the captives invented and fires it at him. IM falls and she orders AIM goons to get the armour off him before the plasma eats through it to the man inside. But they find there is no man inside and it's remotely operated.

Stark himself is running to free Adam Ware from his cell - and it seems it was him in control of the armour. Adam then triggers all the other cells to open but there are only 5 other survivors. The big guy we saw in #2 belligerently claims he didn't need rescuing because he created a weapon that will make the whole place go boom ...

... which is what happens as a large explosion rocks the helicarrier and it starts to fall out of the sky. AIM pilots try to regain control as Stark and the 6 captives race towards an escape pod. Tony says when they're safe he'll go back in to make sure there really are no more prisoners alive. But then a blast hits Adam's head and he falls apparently dead in Tony's arms. The shooter is Fixer in a bulky weapon-toting Advanced Iron Man armour.