WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Darkhold: Iron Man #1, available now from Marvel.
Tony Stark built the first version of his iconic Iron Man suit to save his own life after he was mortally wounded by shrapnel. He was a weapons developer who had been kidnapped by terrorists, but he somehow managed to build a mobile life support system. In the years since, he has built many new suits, most of which are designed for combat rather than biomedical use.
While Tony is first and foremost a man of science, his superhero work regularly puts him into contact with magical phenomena. He recently read from the Darkhold, a grimoire whose pages contain black magic. In Darkhold: Iron Man #1 by Ryan North, Guillermo Sanna, Ian Herring, and VC's Clayton Cowles, Tony Stark got a look at a possible version of events where he developed a very different kind of Iron Man suit that ended up eating him alive.
Within the lore of the Marvel Universe, the Darkhold is among the most powerful magic artifacts in existence. The book was created by the elder god Cthon (an allusion to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu) and so it is associated with some of the most vile aspects of sorcery and cosmic horror featured in the Marvel Universe. Anyone who reads from it can be granted visions or great power, but risks their very soul being twisted into a perverse corruption of its former self.
The Darkhold showed Tony Stark a vision of himself building his second Iron Man suit after he returned from his original captivity. This alternate version of the Mark II armor did more than just keep him alive. It also repaired tissue damage. What is more, the computer processor could sync up with his brain's neural patterns. However, it came at a great cost.
When he first tried to remove the glove from the suit, his skin came off with it. The suit was designed both to heal and protect his body. It had concluded that his skin was a human weakness and fused to his hand, leaving him trapped inside. Thankfully, Tony had put on the rest of the suit a while after the glove and was able to remove the rest of it. He and Pepper Potts worked tirelessly on software and hardware updates to fix the problems. As they worked, the two confessed their love for one another, bonding as equals for the first time.
However, the suit's programming continued to work even after Tony removed it. Without even realizing it, he put the armor back on and it fused to him. Pepper watched in horror as his skin and tissue slid out of the helmet's eye holes. Scans showed the suit replacing his bones, organs, and other biologic matter, all of which were perceived as human weaknesses - weaknesses that needed to be fixed through new upgrades.
Always a visionary, Tony tried to share his gift with the world. After the suit had fused to him and overtaken his human anatomy, he built another one, throwing both his chauffeur Happy Hogan and his butler Jarvis into the single iron suit. They screamed as their bodies melted through the holes in the suit, fusing together to become something new. Pepper watched in horror through the surveillance feed.
The next morning, Tony revealed his new armada of suits to the world, advertising these as medical life-savers that would eradicate all disease and health issues. People clambered in as fast as they could. And they all began to scream. By the time that Tony finally came for Pepper to put her in a suit, the world was already falling as Tony Stark's newest invention tried to upgrade humanity.
Tony Stark is a very flawed hero, but his greatest flaws have always been his hubris and his involvement in the military-industrial complex. Even when he made a medical device to save his life, he turned it into a weapon of death. But in the alternate reality that the Darkhold revealed, the line between life-saving medical technology and body-destroying horror ceases to exist. The newest Iron Man suit tries to save humanity, but only ended up destroying it.
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