Iron Man #168
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeIron Man #168 is the pivotal setup chapter for one of the most substantive addiction narratives in superhero comics history — Denny O'Neil's multi-year examination of Tony Stark's relapse into alcoholism, a story arc running through issues #167–182 that went far beyond the relatively swift recovery depicted in the earlier 'Demon in a Bottle' storyline. Where that 1979 arc resolved Stark's drinking in essentially a single issue, O'Neil — a recovering alcoholic himself — used this issue and its successors to portray addiction as a slow, grinding destruction of a man's life, company, and identity. The issue also introduces Morley Erwin, a supporting character who would become integral to the Rhodes/Stark dynamic for years, and it stages the degradation of Stark's competence in dramatic terms: a fully suited Iron Man, drunk and reckless, is outmaneuvered by Machine Man while Jim Rhodes and the rest of the Stark International staff can only watch. That image — the armored Avenger as a danger to bystanders rather than their protector — crystallizes what made O'Neil's run genuinely transgressive for its era.
In "The Iron Scream," a desperate Machine Man seeks answers from Iron Man—only to find a man drowning in alcohol, not a machine. When Tony Stark, lost in a self-destructive spiral, mistakes Machine Man for an agent of Obadiah Stane, the clash that follows forces a shocking revelation: beneath the armor, there’s a human. Denny O'Neil’s story, illustrated with grit and precision by Luke McDonnell and inked by Steve Mitchell, captures a rare, raw moment in Stark’s fall. The cover by McDonnell and Mitchell perfectly frames the tension between man and machine.
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Denny O'Neil took over as regular scripter on Iron Man beginning in 1982, and issue #168 falls squarely within the arc he and editor Mark Gruenwald developed together, navigating real internal resistance at Marvel to a story in which the title hero is functionally non-operational due to addiction. O'Neil, who had entered his own recovery roughly a decade before writing this issue, drew directly on his personal experience to give the relapse storyline a credibility and duration that earlier treatments of Stark's alcoholism had lacked; in his own words, the previous quick-fix portrayal reflected a 'macho' dismissal of what addiction actually costs a person. Gruenwald shielded the creative team from editorial pressure from above, and the two men later acknowledged that even so, the arc ended up longer than either would have chosen. Artist Luke McDonnell and inker Steve Mitchell — the regular art team O'Neil worked with throughout this run — penciled and inked the issue, with Michael Carlin and Gruenwald sharing editorial credit.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published March 1983 (on-sale date December 14, 1982); titled 'The Iron Scream'; written by Denny O'Neil, penciled by Luke McDonnell, inked by Steve Mitchell, colored by Bob Sharen, lettered by Rick Parker, edited by Mark Gruenwald and Michael Carlin.
- First appearance of Morley Erwin, a Stark International engineer who would become a recurring supporting character critical to the Rhodes-era Iron Man storyline, later killed by Obadiah Stane's bombing of Circuits Maximus.
- Central plot: Machine Man (Aaron Stack) visits Stark International seeking Iron Man, believing him to be a robot like himself; Tony Stark — in the grip of a serious relapse — dons the armor and attacks Machine Man, who is forced to protect innocent bystanders from Iron Man's drunken aggression before shutting down the armor and departing, concluding that whoever is inside 'has something profoundly wrong with him.'
- Cameo appearances by Jim Rhodes, Vic Martinelli, and Bambi Arbogast; Obadiah Stane is referenced but appears only in flashback via Indries Moomji.
- The issue is a direct narrative bridge to Iron Man #169, in which Rhodes first dons the Iron Man armor, and to the broader arc in which Stark loses Stark International to Stane and eventually becomes homeless — one of mainstream comics' earliest sustained portrayals of a superhero's complete personal and professional collapse.
- O'Neil's run on this title was informed by his own recovery from alcoholism; he viewed the prior 'Demon in a Bottle' treatment of Stark's drinking as unrealistically brief and used this arc to depict addiction as a prolonged, life-destroying process rather than a single-issue setback.
- The issue was reprinted in the Iron Man Epic Collection Vol. 10: The Enemy Within (2013) and in Marvel Masterworks: The Invincible Iron Man Vol. 16 (2022).
- A variant of this issue exists with a Lakeside Skin Tattooz temporary-tattoo insert, distributed regionally across select Marvel titles cover-dated March 1983; not every copy of #168 received the insert.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Strange #174 (1984), Σπάιντερ Μαν [Spider-Man] #396 (1988), Iron Man Epic Collection #10 (2013), Marvel Masterworks: The Invincible Iron Man #16 (2022), Iron Man : L'intégrale #1982-1983 (2025)
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