Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Aging mad scientist Dr. Donald Birch, living in an undersea lair, served by a staff of robots gives the order to launch several robots into the sky. Elsewhere, Tony Stark is hosting a charity event which is attended by Danny Rand and Luke Cage, the latter still resenting the role Stark played in the recent Civil War. While the three heroes are chatting, Birch’s robots arrive and easily take down Cage and Danny. Tony instantly dons his Iron Man armor but a sudden pulse from the robots disables the armor and they carry him off….
Tony awakens in Birch’s undersea lair. Birch reveals who he is—the Phantom, from the earliest days of Stark International, and still hostile toward Tony for what he considers Tony’s theft of his work and the ruination of his career. Revealing he is dying of cancer, he tells Tony he has brought him there to watch his final revenge: having reconstructed Dr. Doom’s time machine from components scattered all over the world, he has his robotic minions bring Dark Phoenix from the past. The robots fire upon Phoenix, making her angry enough to—and Tony leaps to try to stop it—destroy the world. Which she does: the entire Earth explodes in a fireball….
But Tony has fallen through the time platform to sometime in the past and he sees the platform dissolve behind him. He finds himself in a Manhattan alley with his shirt on fire in a pouring rain. Wrapping himself in a discarded blanket, he heads to his penthouse, passing an unsurprised guard, and enters to find an earlier Tony Stark, wearing the Iron Man armor, and drunk out of his mind….