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So, Joe Quesada. Joe Quesada is a big name at Marvel - currently their Chief Creative Officer, which means he is their top executive as regards the actual creative process, after being their Editor in Chief for over a decade. He'd worked at Marvel for a while before that, and he had originally started out as an independent artist working for Valiant comics. Valiant was one of the first indie cape comic publishers, created after a bunch of Marvel employees and executives tried to buy the company itself, but were outbid - so they struck out on their own. Quesada had earned his wings, and in 2000 became Editor in Chief of Marvel comics; and one of the first things he did was take over the writing of Iron Man for a while. He wrote five issues, then co-wrote five more with Frank Tieri (but more about him later). The first story, a five-issue story arc named "The Mask in the Iron Man", was a fairly subtle call-back to an Archie Goodwin-penned story from thirty years before. It was actually quite simple: The armor is struck by lightning and comes to life. It becomes obsessed with being 'one' with Tony, demanding he wear it at all times, then grows disenchanted and decides to replace his creator, instead; finally, it sacrifices itself to save Tony's life. Quesada spins a more complex tale, however, involving (to my delight) Rumiko, Tony's most serious love interest ever. Tony finds himself lying to her to protect her from the increasingly deranged armor. At this point it had already killed one of his enemies - Whiplash, whose whip had acted as a lightning rod to send millions of volts through the armor. The final confrontation comes at a deserted island the 'sentient armor' had abducted Tony to; as the two are struggling, Tony suffers his second heart attack in as many weeks. This seems to cause the armor to suddenly have an epiphany and, instead of ending his creator's life, rips out its own mechanical heart and shoves it into Tony's chest to keep him alive. Jocasta, Tony's live-in artificial intelligence, soon diagnoses him to be in perfect health; the cybernetic heart has integrated itself perfectly with his body, completely replacing his old, damaged heart. The heart seems to be pretty enterprising, repairing ribs and involving itself with other organs as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't have its own power source, so Tony finds he has to recharge himself every twenty-four to forty-eight hours, just like wayyyy at the start when he had just become Iron Man - a creative decision which was not entirely uncontroversial among the fans, to put it mildly. The decision to have Iron Man experience the same problem he had at the very start of his superheroic career seems to indicate a pattern with Joe Quesada, who, a few years later, would be the orchestrator of Spider-Man's "One More Day" story. Anyway, after 'Mask in the Iron Man' there followed three issues (two regular, one annual) together with Frank Tieri, about the Sons of Yinsen. Turns out a cult exists which follows the pacifist / technological philosophy of Ho Yinsen, the old professor who sacrificed his life to save Tony Stark all those years ago. It also turned out that Wong Chu, the tyrant who had enslaved them both, was still alive. The Sons of Yinsen have sought out Tony Stark to ask him to join them to confront the now-aged and fat warlord, and they defeat him in the end, and manage to recover their prize: the intact brain of Professor Yinsen. I have to say I don't particularly care for this story, and the artwork - by Alitha Martinez, who has improved massively since then - didn't help very much. The final story with Quesada's participation was a three-parter which nominally followed from that year's company-wide crossover, 'Maximum Security'. Maximus Power - actually an alien, banished from his own world for practicing the forbidden art of science - was trying to earn the funds and resources to return home by pirating super-powers, surreptitiously harvested from super-people, and renting them out to paying customers at rave parties. It was actually quite inspired, and again involved Rumiko hugely, which made me very happy. But hard times were ahead...