Contains spoilers for Judgment Day #4!While Iron Man has made many bad decisions in his life, the creation of his new ‘child’ has led to a devastating refutation of his own futurist philosophy. Tony has often claimed that his real “power” is his ability to intuit and plan for the future, helping society on its journey to new and better forms. In this way, Tony is unfailingly optimistic, always looking forward to what comes next. Tony Stark believes in himself and in the future, but now his creation has a terrifying answer to everything the ultimate futurist believes.
In A.X.E. Judgment Day #2 by Kieron Gillen and Valerio Schiti, a makeshift team of Avengers, X-Men and Ikaris’ Eternals faction create ‘the Progenitor,’ a hybrid of a dead Celestial and Earth-based tech, in order to stop the machinations of Druig’s Eternals. Tony Stark provides the blueprint for its nervous system, with The Progenitor stating in its narration that “If I have a father, it is Tony Stark.” In doing so, Tony demonstrates two crucial aspects of his character. One, his steadfast futurism – his drive to shape the future for the better. The second, his ego and hubris in believing that he is the man to be the model for this aspirational future. Once given life, the Progenitor doesn’t in fact fix the Druig problem, and instead begins the classic work of the Celestials, deciding to judge the Earth over the next twenty-four hours, promising its destruction if humanity cannot prove that more of them are just than are wicked.
In Gillen and Schiti’s A.X.E. Judgment Day #4, the Progenitor refutes Tony Stark’s futurist philosophy. Having co-ordinated with leaders all over the world, Starfox, aka Eros of the Eternals, helps to articulate the most aspirational version of Tony’s futurism, saying, “We can make this world a heaven. But we need more than a day to do it.” The Progenitor disagrees, making the point that always looking toward the future in its eyes means putting off becoming better until ‘tomorrow,’ which never really comes. If humanity promises to be better ‘in the future,’ then its improvement can be indefinitely delayed forever. Thus, Earth is judged to have failed the Progenitor’s test, and Tony Stark’s Celestial child begins annihilating the planet’s heroes.
Tony’s Philosophy Fails the Celestial Test
The Progenitor’s argument brushes up against a classic critique of Iron Man, Reed Richards, and all other super geniuses of the Marvel Universe. If these geniuses are so great, why haven’t they fixed real-world issues? War, poverty, and illness remain as devastating in the Marvel Universe as in the real one. The obvious answer, out of universe, is that solving these issues is antithetical to the world’s larger sense of realism. In-universe however, one justification remains the same as to why progress in the real world is so difficult, because humanity cannot work as one, because the human race is flawed and some problems are more complicated than any one super-genius. The progenitor takes this to its illogical conclusion. Since it sees the majority of humanity as failed, it believes that large-scale improvement of humanity, can never and will never come.
On many occasions, Iron Man has argued that his status as a genius futurist gives him the unique right to help dictate the course of human achievement. Even in the superhuman Civil War, it was Tony’s future endgame that he used to justify his fall into villainy, and even in his ongoing series, he’s breaking the law by buying up world-ending weapons, arguing that once he possesses them all, it will have been worth lying to his allies. The Progenitor’s response is a devastating call-out of the way Tony lives his life, challenging the very core of Iron Man’s futurist mantra. Hopefully, Tony can find a way to convince his Celestial child that ‘tomorrow’ really will come, but so far it seems that Iron Man‘s guiding philosophy has officially failed the planet.
Judgment Day #4 is available now from Marvel Comics.
