Marvel Forces More Unnecessary MCU Synergy, Renames ‘Infamous Iron Man’ Arc Ahead Of ‘Avengers: Doomsday’
At this point in the MCU’s thus far 17 year history, fans are no stranger to Marvel’s infamous insistence on forcing movie synergy upon its source material, having long learned to roll their eyes and wait it out until Disney’s marketing department moves on to the next project – and even so, the Avengers: Doomsday-motivated change to the movie’s sole, tangentially-related Iron Man comic book story is too egregious to ignore.
Coming from the veteran writer/artist duo of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, said story picks up in the aftermath of 2015’s Secret War event and finds Doctor Doom attempting to address a newfound feeling of personal emptiness, as borne from the realization that his quest for power was solely based on his hatred of Reed Richards, by turning over a new leaf and dedicating his genius to helping the world instead of conquering it.
But rather than doing so under his own name or a new identity, Doom instead sought to serve his penance by taking up the mantle of Iron Man, having viewed Tony Stark’s falling into a coma at the end of Civil War II as a cosmic nudge as to how he could best serve the world (a move which, unsurprisingly, draws him the fast ire of New York’s superhero community).
Originally collected in trade paperback in two volumes respectively titled Infamous and The Absolution of Doom, while the arc does feature the lone Earth-616 instance of either Tony Stark or Victor Von Doom stepping into the other’s metal shoes, it otherwise has nothing in common with Avengers: Doomsday, whose version of Doctor Doom is both a multiversal Iron Man variant rather and a through-and-through villain.
(Though regularly pointed to by casual MCU fans as evidence of the film’s ‘comic book authenticity’, 2010’s What If? Iron Man: Demon in an Armor is, as its name suggests, a non-canon one-shot.)
Regardless, Marvel has decided that with its upcoming single-volume reprint, the full 12 issue arc will receive a new title, Rise of Doom, alongside a new piece of MCU-heavy marketing copy:
Iron Man’s very own Robert Downey Jr. returns as Doctor Victor Von Doom (you read that right!) in Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday, in theaters December 18, 2026. The Marvel Universe’s greatest villain is no stranger to armor, but now he’s trying something new on for size: heroism. And where Tony Stark failed, Doom will succeed. But what is Victor’s master plan? That’s what a great number of folks want to know — including Ben Grimm, Pepper Potts and the other Iron Man: Riri Williams! In his heroic quest, Doom faces a cosmic-level adversary — and his most mortal enemy, whom he thought he would never see again! But what is the shocking truth behind Victor’s reincarnated mother? With enemies on all sides, how can Victor continue to carry on the legacy of Iron Man when the legacy of Doom haunts him at every turn? COLLECTING: Infamous Iron Man (2016) #1-12
It’s a curious move, to say the least, especially given that in the three years since Avengers: Doomsday‘s initial announcement, Marvel could have easily published some sort of Iron Man/Doctor Doom multiverse story, either in continuity or as a non-canon miniseries, that would have been much more accessible to MCU fans than Infamous Iron Man and its already-in-progress and irrelevant-to-the-movie plot.
Hell, One World Under Doom was a Doom-centric event that centered specifically on him playing with the rules of magic – a Tony Stark variant of himself stepping through the multiverse to help put an end to his machinations is genuinely not that left field of an idea.
The new, single-volume reprint of Infamous Iron Man Vol. 1 currently holds a tentative release date of July 14th, 2026.
