Anthony "Tony" Stark

Anthony Stark is a millionaire scientist and sportsman who runs a plant, a racing team, and one very well-kept secret: Iron Man. When a wind tunnel test slips its leash and threatens to tear the lab apart, Iron Man meets the runaway machine head on and beats it at its own game, becoming a human fan and blowing the whole storm back down to scrap. He has barely cooled the turbines when the vault alarm sounds. The thief is Gregor Shapanka, his most trusted scientist, grabbing for the secret formulas he swears will buy him eternal life. Iron Man collars him, and then Stark, feeling generous, lets the man walk, a mercy that ages about as well as milk in the sun.

The armor is more than a weapon. Its chest unit is the battery keeping Stark's damaged heart beating, and when he forgets to recharge it mid-race, the Stark Special skids into an embankment and nearly finishes the job for him. A stranger named Happy Hogan hauls him out of the flames, asks for nothing, and lands himself a job for the trouble. Shapanka, meanwhile, has taken that earlier mercy as a dare. He builds a freezing suit, empties a bank, and slides across town as the media-crowned Jack Frost to put Stark on ice for good. When ice arms drag Iron Man into a slow freeze, the hero remembers the flashlight built into his own suit, and one small adjustment turns its beam into a heat ray that melts the self-styled Walking Deep Freeze into surrender. Stark ends the day with a new right hand in Happy Hogan and not the faintest idea how close he came to leaving it as a Stark-shaped icicle.

Tony Stark's own staff have started wondering who really works for whom. Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts arrive at his palatial home convinced Iron Man has some hold over the boss, possibly blackmail. Stark vouches for the world's best bodyguard and hustles them out the door. Minutes later, a killer satellite opens fire from orbit. An alarm in the armor gets him clear, but the room is obliterated, and the world decides Tony Stark went with it. When a tearful Pepper demands to know how the bodyguard survived, Iron Man fibs that Mr. Stark sent him out for papers. He works out the beam's trajectory, pins it on the Mandarin, and boards a flight to Asia as a burly, bearded passenger, hoping the armor under his coat doesn't clang. Over the Asian coast, he simply steps out of the plane.

The Mandarin's castle is a gauntlet of traps. A beam drags Iron Man toward the rocks until his repulsers catch him, hypnotic flashes sap his strength, and a granite cell closes in until he slips out through an air vent. He watches the Mandarin's rings cancel his high-frequency waves, a paralysis ray freeze him in place, and a karate master splinter an iron bar like a toothpick. His power is fading too, and he suspects the Mandarin tampered with his circuits while he stood frozen. Stark does the math: 38 degrees cuts the blow's velocity by 52 percent. He survives it and kills the current to the electrified walls. Then the giant robot Koto takes him down and ties him to a wheel built to spin him to death. The Mandarin recounts his entire life story, flips the switch, and leaves the room, a bold amount of faith to put in a wheel. A hidden blade frees a titanium cord, the cord feeds his wrist power pack, and every spin recharges him until the axle snaps. His solar scanner leads him to the Mandarin's missile, and a miniature distorter sends it home like a homing pigeon, flattening the launch site and turning the Chinese troops' guns on the Mandarin. A boulder shoved off a cliff stops the villain's jet car, but after a round of ring beams, gas, and flying rocks, the Mandarin escapes riding a flat rock into the sky. Stark sleeps off the fight on a military jet over the Pacific, changes back in his office, and greets his stunned staff with, "Dead? Now, what ever gave you that idea?"