RETURN OF THE LOOPY LAPSES IN LOGIC DEPT. - (WELL, HAVE YOU GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?)

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

Okay, here's the scoop.  Wicked WEASEL WILLS, while attempting to rob one of TONY STARK's factories, finds his attache case containing his IRON MAN armour and, assuming the identity of the crimson and gold Avenger, goes on a crime spree.  Tony has to resort to donning his original bulkier armour and the two do battle.  Who wins?  Well, the next issue wasn't called The Invincible Weasel Wills - if that's any clue to you.

However, it could never have happened.  Why?  Because Tony Stark always wears his chest-plate to keep his heart beating, and only the extremities of his armour are stored in his attache case, not a spare chest-piece.  Therefore, Weasel Wills would only have discovered the boots and glove-'cuffs', from which the collapsible leg and arm parts of the armour unroll, held in place to the main body by electronic magnetism.

However, with no chest-piece there'd have been no battle, because the rest of the armour would've been useless.  Sure, he could've tried blackmailing Tony over his double-identity, but any punch-ups between the two would've been somewhat lacking in the drama department.

Here's another though that occurs to me.  If Stark can't remove his chest-plate, how did he shower or bathe?  Dead skin would've built up under his chest-device in no time, and the Invincible Iron Man would doubtless have soon become known as the Extremely Odorous Iron Man.  (And all those fit burds would've steered well-clear of 'Smelly' Stark.)

And what about his 'trunks'?  Surely they're part of the chest-piece?  In all the shots of Tony Stark donning his armour, he was always pre-trunked, so how did he go to the toilet?*  Did his trunks contain a waste-disposal unit, and his chest-piece an automatic exfoliating facility that removed and destroyed dead skin?  We deserve to be told.  Or should we just do what we did as kids and ignore (if they even occurred to us) the impracticalities and impossibilities inherent in such superhero sagas?  (*You can forget about that one - I've just noticed that his trunks were drawn as a separate component when he created his new armour in TOS #48.)

Any thoughts, fellow Crivs?  The comments section awaits.  Go on - join in the fun.

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(Some of you may well be thinking "Wait a minute - doesn't it make sense that Stark would've had a spare chest piece in the event that the one he was wearing ever became damaged?"  You'd think so, but whenever that happened in those early tales, he never once thought "Must get to the spare chest-piece in my attache case!" - he always attempted to repair it or resorted to his earlier, bulkier one.  It was never established that he carried a spare one in his case, so it's therefore legitimate to conclude that he didn't.)