Later Tony watches the match on TV and drinks whisky, trying to forget how his dad always shows him up and makes him feel incompetent, even though he's one of the most successful men in the world.

The next day, Tony walks through Stark Tower with Howard while being briefed on current dealings by his employees. One tech is concerned about Jason Wyngarde's new processor, but Tony's already built a better unit that they can produce to destroy Wyngarde's efforts. They stop by an office where Hank Pym and Forge are working. Howard inquires about their progress, and Pym is excited about his genetic research. Tony, however, is incensed, since Pym's working on the mutant genome, which could be construed by the House of M as a potential attack on mutantdom. Pym tries to defend the scientific nature of his work to Howard, but Tony threatens to fire Pym if he continues. Tony ushers his dad away and semi-apologizes, but Howard seems disappointed that Tony's sold out to the mutants. He laments not making Tony think and work for himself. Tony defends his actions, having taken his father's near-bankrupt company to the top of the economic ladder, but ends up sounding like a petulant child complaining.

That night, Tony determines to show his father what he's made of, and descends to a secret locked chamber, which houses his new arena battlesuit. He flies out over the city, conversing with the suit's AI "Jarvis," who's neurotically concerned about being detected by the Sentinels. Tony tells Jarvis to lock onto Pym, and they find him at a gathering of humans, ostensibly in some sort of resistance movement. Tony bursts in and tries to stop their escape, but the worst happens when the Sentinels show up and start blasting away at the humans, frying some of them. Tony takes out one Sentinel, but finds that they're faster than the Death Match models and is pinned under one's hand. Strangely, it speaks in Howard Stark's voice! Howard is very disappointed in Tony's performance...

Review: First off, if you're an X-Fan only this LS will not grab you too much, as there's no one you'd recognize except for two dropped names (Wyngarde and Forge), and it doesn't seem necessary (yet) to the overarching plot of the crossover. Having said that, if you know a little about Iron Man at all, the story setup has some interesting stuff. This is a pretty straight-up issue action-wise, and focuses a lot on the emotional content in the father/son relationship between Tony and Howard, which is something we've never seen before, since Howard died long ago. It's pretty decent, and you really see how living in his father's shadow affects Tony and makes him reckless. It also explains his alcoholism, though we haven't seen anything about his heart problems yet (which might not happen, given the re-worked origin of the Iron Man armor) The story also seems to be dealing with Tony's "sellout" to the House of M and the lengths he may go to in order to protect what he's built. On the flip side, I thought that Howard might be more pro-human and that's fueling his frustration with Tony, since perhaps he wants Tony to use his skills to fight for sapiens rights, but then the last scene threw me. Have to wait to see what Howard's goals are next issue.

With Tony, as with all the other House of M characters, the idea seems to be "give them their heart's desire to keep them out of Wanda's/Magneto's way." I'm assuming that having his father alive was his dream, but if so, it's very ironic that their relationship is so strained. It's also problematic that Tony is spurred to build an Iron Man suit, since you'd think that would be a threat to the House of M. I guess that would seem to be solved by his "sellout" mindset, kind of like what they tried to do to Doom over in FF:HoM. However, as with Doom, there's a limit to how powerful a second-tier guy can be (first-tier being Mags of course), so you end up providing the thorn in the side anyway. Besides, if Tony had no suit there wouldn't be much reason for the LS, right? Look at Cap.

The art was OK overall, obviously excellent on the Iron Man armor, which I expected given Lee's classic work on Transformers. The rest wasn't as good, and seemed to be a little rough. For characterization, I really enjoyed Jarvis as the AI, but Johnny Storm's appearance seemed superfluous. I guess they just wanted someone recognizeable with a power that could be duplicated by technology. Pym's appearance here was good, thought it seems that this is occuring before HoM LS 1, since Beast in that issue references Tony's threat of firing here. Not a big deal.

This certainly doesn't seem to be one of the stronger House of M tie-ins, but that might change depending on what Tony decides to do next issue. One can assume that he will be turned against the House of M, but exactly what his plans will be seem up in the air. I think the mandate for the writer here is to get Tony to come up with some brilliant plans of attack, to justify his intelligence and technical expertise. Though you have to wonder how far "Iron" Man could get against Magneto...