Last month’s Flight of Fancy looked at an arbitrary Iron Man vs Vindicator bout, set before the publication of Alpha Flight Volume 1 #1. This month, let’s try something a little different...Iron Man vs Vindicator.

Yes, this is different. This time, the fight is dictated by existing Marvel chronology: Stark’s Armor Wars, which ran from Iron Man #225 to #232. The difference this time around is that the Armor Wars storyline would roughly coincide with Alpha Flight #50, so the key difference in this bout is that the Vindicator that Tony Stark faces as Iron Man is Heather Hudson, not her late husband.

The storyline by David Michelinie should have mandated that Iron Man go after Vindicator. In the story, Stark went after other armored characters that he thought were using his technology. The general principle is that he wanted to stop villains such as Stilt-Man and Beetle from using Stark’s own designs to commit harm to innocents. His idea to stop them permanently was to place a negator on the opposition’s armor in order to fuse the Stark circuitry. This being Tony Stark, however, it’s all about Tony Stark, and he wants all Stark armor technology only in his possession. This extreme-mindedness encompassed villains, and characters with differing political ideologies such as Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man (who Stark killed in this story) and outright heroes such as Stingray.

If Stark went after someone with form-fitting armor such as Stingray, there’s really little excuse for the lapse by Michelinie in not having Stark pursue Heather. Either as part of the original Armor Wars story or as a tie-in by Bill Mantlo in Alpha Flight, Stark should have gone after Heather.

Iron Man, clad in his clunky silver-and-white-armor of the time, heads north with negator in hand and Heather in his sights. Unfortunately for Stark, he picked a bad time. Heather’s cranky enough for having just lost Northstar, Aurora and Puck. She greets Iron Man civilly as he approaches. He asked permission to apply the negator. Heather tells him what to do with the negator. Stark attacks.

Heather more aggressively applied the battlesuit’s technology than James did. She withstands Stark’s attack and returns with interest. The fight is joined, and the story allows for the differences in their suit’s capabilities to be shown. They seemed well matched. Stark is arrogant; Heather at the time tended to grandstand in overcompensation for being a vulnerable widow. Stark has more experience, and Heather gets a wake up call as the battlesuit shorts. Stark closes in to apply the negator.

Heather’s back-ups come on line faster than Stark anticipates. Heather gets over show of womanly strength and acts a bit more like the capable leader she is by looking at the objectives of the fight. Recharged, she blasts the negator.

Iron man seems to retreat. Heather pursues because (1) Iron Man has invaded Canadian airspace (2) she feels civic duty to stop anyone who wantonly attacks other heroes just because they wear armor and (3) she is really pissed off at everything now, especially Stark.

Again, Stark’s experience pays off. He lets Heather close in, then whips out the negator he had brought to cripple Box (who would have been the more obvious target, given armor design.) Heather just reacts. Stark receives a point blank array of electromagnetic offences. His suit freezes up. Heather debates letting him fall, just long enough for Stark’s armor to begin to reboot, enough for him to start flying south. Heather, of course, pursues, up until Stark reaches the U.S. border. There, Heather relents, opting instead to contact the Avengers for an explanation.

This story didn’t happen, and was unforgivable of the writers of both Iron Man and Alpha Flight. Perhaps Michelinie figured Stark knew the Guardian battlesuit wasn’t his, or he had space constraints for the arc, but Heather’s absence probably stems more from the fact that Alpha sales were flagging. The introduction to the trade paperback claims the story developed as an event to boost sales but this doesn’t excuse the lack of a mention when lists of armored characters are provided. But let’s face the facts without too much whining by Iron Man fans: the battlesuit designed by James Hudson is technologically superior to Stark’s. Michelinie probably didn’t include an Iron Man/Vindicator bout because he knew Heather would have opened his tin suit along with her can of butt whup.

Jeff Kozzi is a Providence writer and property manager. He can be reached at kozzi24@hotmail.com