Tony Stark: Murderer!

As we've begun to see this week, the Avengers: Disassembled story arc from 2004 sent ripples through a select number of other titles, though some mostly shared the story's distinctive DISASSEMBLED banner tacked on to each book's masthead while their stories only loosely made reference to the Avengers crisis. Captain America and the Falcon was probably the only book that could rightly admit to being a "tie-in" to what was happening in The Avengers, as it featured the Scarlet Witch herself in more than a cameo role in a series of stories that took place before everything hit the fan at Avengers Mansion.

In Invincible Iron Man, however, the story that takes place would simply take its cue from Tony Stark's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, an appearance that took a turn for the worse and tarnished both his reputation as Iron Man and almost certainly his credentials as U.S. Secretary of Defense. Only well afterward would we think to take notice of the woman who appears with him on the dais.

Knowing Stark's history as an alcoholic, our first instinct would probably be to take this display as an indication that he's fallen off the wagon and relapsed into a state of inebriation. Yet it becomes apparent that there's something deeper at work here, when he attests to just the opposite.

Yet as fast as good news travels, bad news outdistances it by a country mile--and the news for Stark keeps getting worse. Thanks to his performance at the U.N., the Stark Enterprises Board of Directors is left scrambling to contain the damage, even to floating the idea of changing the name of the company--while Iron Man becomes embroiled in the Code White alert at Avengers Mansion that has already cost lives. For S.E., the Board believes things couldn't get any worse. For the Board members themselves, however, they soon discover that their future has become hopeless.