The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20 (1986)

“Man of the Year”

Rating: 4/5

Writers: Ken McDonald & Fred Schiller
Artist: Bob Sharen

In the year 2015, Arno Stark is the new Iron Man. He’s building a nuclear bomb for the military and his wife and son come to visit him at the lab. While he’s out, a terrorist named Robert Saunders threatens that if they don’t make the existence of the bomb known to the public, he’d destroy Stark Enterprises. So he infiltrates the building and arms the bomb (with the intention of just making them sweat, fully intending to disarm the bomb at the last second) and locks Stark’s wife and kid in the room with the bomb. The room is rigged so that nobody can enter without detonating the bomb. Stark accidentally kills Saunders in a fantastic explosion and needs to get a retina scan to be able to enter the room. So he uses a newly built time machine to travel to Saunders’ first newspaper headline (which happens to be in the “present” day of 1986). He has 20 minutes to find Saunders and get the scan before the bomb explodes. But of course, just as Iron Man is about to scan Saunders’ eye, Spider-Man picks a fight for no reason. He snatches the retina scanner and takes the kid and runs for the hills as Iron Man chases after, blasting everything to kingdom come. Eventually, his blast is really close to the Saunders kid and he’s hit with a bunch of glass. This pisses of Spider-Man, who then beats the living daylights out of Iron Man. Eventually, Iron Man gets sent back to the future, having run out of time. When he gets there, the bomb has exploded and Stark Enterprises is a pile of rubble. Iron Man’s family, friends, coworkers, and livelihood are destroyed. And it turns out the newspaper article about Saunders was about the fight between Iron Man and Spider-Man.