Synopsis
Invincible Iron Man (1998 series) #71 synopsis by
T Vernon
Rating:
At a Las Vegas hotel, a green ooze has animated the Iron Man armor and now it’s trying to kill Tony Stark. Tony finds that the ooze adapts to any of the fail-safe measures so he hits the self-destruct button which kills it. He has his hazmat team scoop it up….
Tony meets with his partner Saige Kaufman and shows her his new ablative armor, covered with polymer tiles that pop off when damaged and are quickly replaced by new ones. This is the perfect defense against what Tony is calling the nanoplasm, nanites that spread like a virus converting machinery into flesh and blood; it is what the mysterious diagram was picturing….
Tony meets with casino boss Marc Vicus who was an old friend of Tony’s father before he got into the casino business. But when Tony asks why he left his old industries to come to Vegas, Vicus is evasive. Tony reviews the recording he made of the conversation and becomes curious. He and Saige do some research and learn that Vicus’ first property in Vegas once belonged to Howard Hughes and before that it was the site of a UFO crash. Iron Man heads out to investigate the property and, using magnetic imaging to locate the buried UFO, he drills into the earth and enters the ship. Its automatic defenses attack Shellhead and scrape off some of the new armor’s tiles, effectively poisoning the craft. Iron Man then finds Mo Stanton, hooked up to the ship by a maze of cables, tubes, and probes. Stanton reveals Vicus’ scheme: the casino owner has been taken over by the alien “stuff” and is planning to infect all of Las Vegas with its DNA. Stanton was writing a book about Howard Hughes and Vicus mistook him for an enemy. As the tiles kill the ship, Iron Man bursts through to the surface with Stanton. Then, in an instant of distraction, one of the alien bugs leaves Stanton’s body and pierces Shellhead’s armor, infecting Tony with the alien nanoplasm….