As you can probably tell from the image, TIA's Mark II Iron Man suit isn't supposed to be any particular one from the comics. It represents Phil's effort, with my guidance, to blend together the key elements that make Iron Man Iron Man with features and details that evoke the different technology base of the Iron Age universe.

For instance, you'll note that there's no anatomical-detail-revealing flexi-metal on it anywhere; like the Mark I, it's all plate armor. That's partly because the wearer isn't built like Mr. Universe and partly because of the native tech base - that kind of material hasn't been invented yet, and would be too expensive to make an entire suit out of even if it had. (In the TIA universe, my guess would be that it would have to be nano-assembled in microgravity, which means massive commitment of resources.)

You may notice some distinctive BGC-ish features, too, like the thruster vents on his calves (similar to those found on combat boomers), and if you look closely at his right fist, that's a knuckle blaster similar to those found on the Knight Sabers' hardsuits. Parts of the structure are similar in design as well - you can see the seam on his upper left arm where the plates, which spread for donning and storage like the thigh plates on Saber suits, join. The new design is meant to be much easier and quicker to put on and take off. (Phil even did diagrams of how that works, though obviously they weren't needed for an action shot like this.)

On the Iron Man side, the basic idea was to capture the modern Iron Man's key styling cues - the color scheme, the basic lines of his mask, his signature weapons - without directly copying any of the established suits from the comics. That said, we did pull in bits and pieces from a number of suits. Early in the process, Phil asked for references, and one of the ones I provided was the cover of Iron Man Vol. 3 No. ½, which is where the glowy yellow bits come from. That remains my favorite of the various designs they've used in the last ten years. We also looked at the version from the Under Construction story arc (Volume 3, issues 42 through 48, if you're keeping score at home), though not much of that ended up in the final design - mostly just its overall impression of bulk and mass, which owe as much to the BGC elements as anything else.

As an aside, watching Phil color this piece was an amusing exercise, because each of the various in-progress stages he presented for review was like a snapshot into the history of comics coloring. The flat-colored baseline version looked exactly like Marvel comics did in the late '80s, when they switched to a flexographic printing process, and the next version was very evocative of their early glossy-paper "hey, we got a copy of Photoshop" style; the one after that looked like modern Marvel comics, and the final version rather surpasses the current state of their art (to be fair, they don't have as much time to spend coloring whole books as was spent on this one frame). I joked that he should do one with dot half-shading, à la Silver Age comics, just to complete the set, and we'd present it as a Comics Through The Ages thing - but alas, he hadn't kept the interim versions anyway, and so the joke was lost.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/