In honor of the return of Marvel's X-Treme X-Men title, Marvel is returning to the days of '90s excess with a series of character redesigns, including giving Iron Man an overblown new suit that tests even Tony Stark's love of being prepared for every eventuality.In Marvel and DC's '90s comic, grim and gritty redesigns were all the rage. Even characters like the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man got new, armored costumes, often accented with huge guns, bandoliers and pouches full of bullets, and grim 'n' gritty new outlooks. It was the age of Superman's electric blue form, Cable's man-sized mega-guns, and unkillable bounty hunter Lobo cruising the spaceways on a rocket-propelled motorbike.Now, Marvel is returning to that age with a range of new variant covers celebrating the 'X-TREME' nineties. While Marvel previously gave fans a look at the X-TREME covers - including a Spider-Man who fires his webs from a gun and a Captain America with an armored visor - artist Declan Shalvey just revealed an addition fans haven't yet seen. On Twitter, Shalvey shared the X-TREME variant cover for The Invincible Iron Man #1, which sees Tony Stark gloriously bedecked with every feasible type of weapon, including a grilled visor which has no possible function other than to look cool to pre-Millennium comic readers.
The nineties were a decade where the comic market was in flux, thanks in part to a wave of speculative buying that made first appearances and shock twists big business, warping the way comic stories were structured. During this decade, Iron Man was de-aged into a teenager, founded the brutal Force Works team, and developed the iconically overkill War Machine armor, which would later become the superhero identity of James Rhodes. In short, it was a period of frenetic reinvention and shamless overkill, and Shalvey pays that concept the perfect tribute in this new X-TREME armor, which presents a suit bristling with weaponry, a grim 'n' gritty skull mask, and the decade's ubiquitous 'cyborg neck.'
Arriving December 7, Invincible Iron Man is the next chapter in Tony's Stark's adventures, welcoming the creative team of Gerry Duggan and Juan Frigeri, and seeing Iron Man go up against his former protege Ironheart in a deeply personal Civil War. While the X-TREME suit is so far restricted to this epic cover, Marvel's vast multiverse has drawn on variant covers before, meaning that depending on fan reaction, the X-TREME Iron Man could actually get to unleash his unreasonably extensive firepower in the near future.
Source: Declan Shalvey