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Not much. I wandered into Mark Gruenwald's office one day while a discussion was going on about redesigning Iron Man's armor. Mark asked me to contribute something and, perched on a corner of Howard Mackie's desk, I doodled the image at left, above. It was not, of course, a "proposed" design for the armor. Just visual spitballing. If it had gone beyond that point, I would have refined it considerably.

(You can tell from the slight rightward skew of the image that it was not drawn under ideal circumstances. I have a small blind spot dead center in my left eye -- I've had it since I was a child -- and when I am working at home, on my drawing board, I am able to consciously compensate for it, but "out in the wild" it often produces that right-leaning bias.)

The color arrangement was not mine. Did not, in fact, expect ever to see that drawing anywhere in color, or I might have left notes!

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One of the elements we were playing with during that brainstorming session was the idea that Tony didn't so much wear the armor, as ride inside it. He was "plugged into" it, inside a kind of electronic cocoon, and his arms were not actually inside the suit's arms.

That's a neat idea -- but I would have hated to see somebody else later decide that Tony Start should become paraplegic and have some kind of doodad plugged into his brain so that he could remote control "Iron Man" (or an army of "Iron Men") from afar.

As for the color design, I found Marvel Age would do their own color work which was less refined. Panels reused from a comic nearly always had different, even incorrect, color.

This amused and puzzled me as a kid but I enjoyed what peeks and insights the book brought into the "sausage making" process.

This new design is not one of my favorites but I definitely don't hate it either.  I always felt that Iron Man changing up his armor every now and again seemed a pretty natural thing to do.  Being a superhero/scientist I would think Stark would make the upgrades/changes necessary.

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I've never had a problem with Tony changing his armor every now and then.

I would have hated to see somebody else later decide that Tony Start should become paraplegic and have some kind of doodad plugged into his brain so that he could remote control "Iron Man" (or an army of "Iron Men") from afar.

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That did happen, Michael.

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Eep! Just, just, just... awful.

My first exposure to Iron Man was the '60s animated series when I was 5. I had no problems with the armor... that was the best part, for me!

But for Italian children giant robots and super technological armor were quite ordinary, then. The anime invasion made Iron Man very easy to be accepted!

Ha! I remember using the same logic...and thinking Star TREK was the rip off!