Having seen a number of grim future scenarios portrayed in Marvel's line of comics, which we eventually caught up to in real time and passed without incident, it seems fitting to take a look at what the company once had to say about the year 2020, the year in which we now find ourselves. Such a story was published in mid-1994, nearly twenty-five years before the ball would drop on 2020--and once again, there wasn't really a silver lining to be found in our future, no idealistic prognostication of mankind having finally gotten its act together and resolved to build a better world and a brighter future for itself. On the contrary, there was only the stark realism of the same-old same-old--while the only thing that had improved, for what it was worth, was our technology.
And speaking of "stark," we discover that a certain industrial conglomerate has survived to claim a place in that world--but neither the company nor its chief executive is thriving.
Meet Arno Stark, who in taking on the mantle of Iron Man has tarnished the golden Avenger's legacy. Instead of living an altruistic life, Stark instead uses the armor as a mercenary, hiring out his services as Iron Man to equally ruthless business leaders like Sunset Bain (CEO of Baintronics) while having established for himself a reputation as someone who has no compunction against committing corporate espionage in order to cripple his competitors for his own company's gain.
When we first meet Stark, a character who appears in the 1984 Machine Man limited series based in 2020, that amoral man fits all too well in the corporate cutthroat environment where Bain et al. are looking for any edge to prevail against their competitors. The plot revolves around Machine Man, whose remains have been found and reassembled by a group of technology raiders calling themselves the Wreckers--whom he then joins forces with against Bain (who subsequently hires Iron Man to take out Machine Man).
Stark of course believes what he's saying about the fate of Iron Man, though the truth would only be revealed to the reader in the later '94 story--but more on that in a moment.
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