Writer putting Iron Man through the wringer

Tony “Iron Man” Stark is losing his mind — literally.

When Marvel’s monthly “Invincible Iron Man” kicked off a year and a half ago, Stark had prevailed in a superhero civil war and was in charge of the famed security agency S.H.I.E.L.D. — “the big man on campus,” writer Matt Fraction says. But that didn’t last long. In the wake of Marvel’s “Secret Invasion” big event, Stark was blamed for failing to prevent the alien invasion. The villainous Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, became the government’s point man on superheroes and labeled Stark a traitor.

Throughout “World’s Most Wanted,” a 12-issue storyline that wraps up in October in “Invincible Iron Man” No. 19, Stark has been on the run from Osborn and his forces. To keep key secrets safe from Osborn, Stark downloaded top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D files — most notably those containing the identities of superheroes registered with the government — into his brain. And then began deleting parts of his mind so that he could never spill those secrets.

“Over the course of almost a year now, Tony’s intelligence has been degrading, which has always kind of been his superpower,” Fraction says.

In a recent issue, Stark complained, “Chunks of stuff just … go. I can’t remember any of third grade. I can’t remember the names of any particular cars. They’re just ‘cars.’”

In “World’s Most Wanted,” Fraction’s aim was to strip Stark to his core and have him pay “kind of the ultimate penance” for a lifetime of sins.

“I sort of wanted to take everything from him, one step at a time.”

“World’s Most Wanted” is followed by a story arc titled “Stark: Disassembled.” Fraction can’t say much about it without revealing the ending of the current storyline, but hints, “If ‘World’s Most Wanted’ is about Humpty Dumpty having a great fall, this is about all the king’s horses and all the king’s men trying to put Humpty together again, and having to deal with the fact that maybe Humpty doesn’t want to be put back together again.”

“Invincible Iron Man” won the Eisner — the comic book industry’s version of the Oscar — for Best New Series — at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con. But Fraction’s involvement with Iron Man doesn’t end with the comic. He also has been a consultant of sorts for the “Iron Man 2” movie coming in May 2010. He met in Los Angeles with director Jon Favreau, screenwriter Justin Theroux  and others to discuss the movie and the character.

“They just sort of wanted to workshop the ideas with the comics guy,” Fraction says.

Fraction also is co-writer of the “Iron Man 2” video game coming from Sega, also in 2010. While familiar elements from the movie will be in the game, “it is its own story,” he says.