You Can’t Always Get… Part 1

It’s the holiday season and Iron Man races to the apartment of his girlfriend Rumiko Fujikawa. He realizes too late that the reason she wanted him to come over was so she could do some Christmas shopping. She even insists that they visit the mall Santa to tell him what they want for Christmas. Tony is mortified.

As they head home, Rumiko tells Tony that he she asked Santa with a poinsettia that won’t die after Christmas. As they pass a chruch, she gets Tony to admit that what he wants more than anything else in the world is someone to watch over him. They are interrupted, by a young homeless girl named Angela. Tony had dropped her wallet and was returning it to him. Learning that she had nowhere to go, Tony brings Angela to Haven, the group home that Tony set up for homeless women to help them get off the street. The women are celebrating the holiday season, and Tony has Shelly, one of their newest members show Angela around.[1]

Meanwhile, out in the Atlantis Ocean, a submarine meets with a ship. The crew of the freighter are delivering a nuclear weapon to the crew of a submarine. Once it is brought aboard, a technician begins rigging it to explode in the next 6 hours. He tells the captain that the bomb can’t be detonated by accident, but they had better reach their destination when the time runs out. They are caught in the act by the US Coast Guard. The crew of the ship insists that this is a harmless resupply in International Waters. The captain of the Coast Guard ship doesn’t buy it because the ship is Iraqi and the submarine is North Korean. He orders his crew to intercept. That’s when the submarine fires torpedoes. The members of the Coast Guard that abandon ship are gunned down. As the submarine pulls away, they open fire on the ship of the men who sold them the nuclear weapon.

The US Navy is deployed to determine what sank the Coast Guard ship. However, time is of the essence as a storm front is on the way. The story itself making the news. The follow up story is that about how the stone statue of an angel that was stolen from the front of a church in Lower Manhattan. While the general public is outraged, the priest who runs the church likes to think it was taken because the person who wanted it had a need for it and that it will be returned once they are done with it.

The Navy sends down a bathysphere to investigate the cause of the ship sinking. The crew of the submersible discovers that the it was sunk by torpedoes. When they try to recover the ship’s log, the vessel ships and topples on top of the bathysphere, pinning it to the ocean floor.

By this time, the Stark Enterprises Christmas party is in full swing. Pepper has been acting anti-social and when Happy tries to get her to join the rest of the party, she tells him she’s not feeling up to it. Happy gets annoyed and heads to the bar for a drink, something that he has been doing a lot of recently.[2] Tony then surprises Rumiko with two gifts, a poinsettia as well as a diamond necklace. This romantic moment is interrupted by Friday, Tony’s personal AI, who has a call from the President of the United States, who wants Iron Man’s help to rescue the Navy officers trapped in the bathysphere. As Tony suits up and leaves the party, Rumiko complains about how Tony is always leaving. She likens it to being married to a doctor, social worker, or Boy Scout. Overhearing this, Pepper gets annoyed and tells her that she doesn’t get Tony at all.

When Iron Man arrives on the scene, he dives down into the water to reconnect the air hose to the bathysphere. While Iron Man manages to pull the bathysphere free. However, in doing so, he knocks the sunken ship loose so it ends up tipping over the edge of a trench. Iron Man gets caught in the plunging vessel and is dragged even deeper under water.

Recurring Characters

Iron Man, Rumiko Fujikawa, Pepper Potts, Happy Hogan, Friday

Continuity Notes

1. Tony set up Haven to help young women get off the street. See Iron Man (vol. 3) #51-52.

2. The tension between Happy and Pepper stems from the fact that Pep lost the baby she was carrying in Iron Man (vol. 3) #54. She hadn’t told Happy that she was pregnant or that she lost the child. This secret has put a wedge between the pair.

Topical References

• The story takes place around Christmas. Since the plot resolves around a disappearing stone angel and a Christmas miracle, one could argue that the holiday can’t be considered a topical reference. Either way, Christmas usually breaks the Sliding Timescale, so eh….

• When Tony asks the mall Santa what happened to the BB gun he wanted for Christmas when he was a boy, the Santa responds with “you’ll shoot your eye out.” This is a reference to the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. The main character is Ralphie Parker (played by Peter Billingsly) who wants a BB gun for Christmas. Everyone tells him he’ll shoot his eye out and, (sorry to spoil a 40 year old movie that plays on an endless loop every Christmas on TBS but….) he does shoot his eye out.

• The news reporter covering the theft of the stone angel refers to the theif as a “Grinch”. The Grinch was a fictional character in stories by Doctor Seuss. The character is a grumpy cynic. He is best known for the 1957 story, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It was adapted into an animated Christmas special in 1966. The story is regarded a holiday classic and the term “Grinch” has become eponymous to describe someone who is not in the holiday spirit.

• When relaying the message from the President of the United States, Friday offers to deliver it with a “Texas drawl and a cowboy hat”, this is a reference to George W. Bush, who was President of the United States at the time this story was published. Dubya was a Texas native who spoke with the typical drawl. This should be considered a topical reference as Bush has since served two terms from 2001 to 2009.

• Tony likens the bathysphere being stuck underwater to the Biblical story about Jonah being swallowed by a whale and the story of Pinnochio which has a similar situation. Since one story is a Biblica parable and the other classic literature, their reference here wouldn’t be considered topical.

• When Iron Man arrives with the oxygen hose, he shouts “Cable Guy!”, which is a reference to the 1996 film of the same name. One of the bathysphere pilots quips “Skip the Playboy Channel”, now known as Playboy TV, this is a specialty cable channel that deals in mostly adult film fare. These should be considered topical references because quoting Cable Guy is dated AF and Playboy TV is a real world TV network.