Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Tony Stark's recently-discovered birth mother Amanda Armstrong is watching videos of the life of her son (we see news footage him as Iron Man fighting the Controller, but she also has family videos of his personal life). Mary Jane Watson joins her for lunch.
MJ mentions that she had met Tony long before he hired her as his executive assistant. But he didn't remember even though they slept together - only joking! It was when she was a supermodel. Iron Man and Whiplash crashed onto a catwalk in front of her. Later Tony crashed the after-party with his Iron bodyguard in tow to apologise. Back then he always pretended he wasn't IM himself, but MJ says she wasn't fooled and she thinks *most* people weren't - he obviously had the armour running on remote at the party.
Tony started chatting MJ up but soon they began talking properly. They compared notes on fathers. MJ's was abusive and she ran away as soon as she could. Howard Stark was distant and Tony got out too. MJ commented on Tony's drinking, but he claimed he could handle it. She asked if the stress of being Shellhead drove him to drink. He tried denying that again but had to admit that a poll showed only 44% of people believed his story - and he stopped pretending in this conversation. MJ said if she had a suit like that she'd prefer flying to drinking. Tony admitted he really drank just because he wanted too. MJ commented "just like my dad". They parted on good terms.
Ironheart drops in, and when they tell her what they were talking about Riri Williams says *she* met Tony a while ago too, during the Skrull Secret Invasion. The guy who was going to be her stepdad took young Riri out for the day but when they came out of the mall there were alien spaceships in the Chicago sky. Then a Skrull Thor menaced them until they were whisked out of harm's way by Iron Man. He dropped them off and went back to fighting Skrull versions of Captain America, Hulk and Phoenix. Riri noticed 1 of IM's jetboots was malfunctioning, and the young genius reckoned she could fix it. But current Riri asks the Stark Industries AI Friday to confirm that the incident was just 1 of many such saves in Iron Man's busy life.
Friday responds by showing them scenes from Tony Stark's personal files (which his mother can authorise access to). She shows them some of the things he doesn't tell the world about. We see him capturing Blackout and Friday tells them that Tony secretly funded a rehabilitation program for him, as he does for all the foes he can. Also, when he learned he was adopted and went looking for his real mother (in the International Iron Man series) he visited many orphanages. Since then his Foundation has been funding *those* too. And he often visited to hug babies as an antidote to his troubled world.
Of course that was before (as Friday reminds us on the opening page) he was put in a medically induced coma (to recover from his injuries in Civil War II). Amanda asks her to check that the orphanages are still OK. And she wants to make her son's good deeds public. But the AI goes quite for a long time, and then says Tony Stark has gone - not dead but gone.
Next issue starts the search for Tony Stark. It also switches to #593 which presumably reflects where the original series would have reached if it hadn't kept restarting with new #1's.