What If Leonardo Da Vinci Designed Iron Man’s Armor?

By David Wharton | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

One of the fun things about the Iron Man movies, aside from the fact that Robert Downey Jr. was created by God specifcally to play Tony Stark, is that each new installment pretty much guarantees we’ll get to see new iterations of the armor. Hell, Iron Man 3 went all-in by giving Tony a freaking army of the things…which he then blew up at the end of the movie. Thankfully we’ve already seen Tony back in the armor in the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer, not to mention the badass “Hulkbuster” variant, but a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist needs as many suits as his closet will allow, so if Tony needs a hand designing some replacements, why not draft Leonardo Da Vinci? I mean, he’d have to invent a time machine first, but if he brings in Banner to brainstorm, it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

DaIron1

These rather lovely “Iron Man by way of Da Vinci” illustrations were done by artist Axel Medellin. He created them as part of Comic Book Resources’ regular “The Line It Is Drawn” contest, which invites readers to submit ideas, which artists then bring to life. As with the Iron Man art, most of the challenges involve rendering one subject in the artistic style of another, so you get things like “Seth MacFarlane’s Spawn” or “Jules Verne writes Adam Strange.” Still, the Da Vinci Iron Man is one of our favorite submissions we’ve seen in a while.

DaIron2

It’s all the little details that sell it, from the “aged paper” look to all the indecipherable scribbles. I also like that Medellin includes several different poses for the armor. Da Vinci was an amazing visual thinker, so you can totally believe that he would have created such varying angles and poses to truly sculpt out the idea. Also, those dragon rocket boots are amazing.

DaIron3

Seriously, though, if the MCU wants to bring time travel into the equation and drop Stark into the Renaissance, I would totally watch that movie. Maybe he’ll befriend Ezio Auditore, since he’s always hanging around having Da Vinci design gadgets for him.

Okay, I have to include this one as well, since I mentioned it above and because I am completely in love with it. The Verne/Adam Strange mashup was created by Robert Rath.

VerneStrange