Marvel Just Officially Shipped Iron Man and Emma Frost

For a year now, Marvel has been teasing fans with the most unlikely relationship that we've seen in comics: Tony Stark/Iron Man getting together with the X-Men's Emma Frost. 

At first, Marvel made headlines with the promotional reveal that Iron Man and the White Queen were getting married. That hype took a quick left turn when fans learned that in truth, Tony was simply "marrying" Emma Frost when she was disguised as "Hazel Kendal," Tony Stark's new assistant. The "Fall of X" event in X-Men comics saw the mutant nation Krakoa shattered by the anti-mutant organization Orchis. Earth's mutant population was largely banished from Earth, while the remaining X-Men have been forced underground into hiding. To help her people get revenge and avoid extinction, Emma took a helping hand from Tony Stark, including an undercover identity as Hazel, and a ring that masks Emma's mutant gene from Sentinels. 

The fake relationship between Emma Frost and Tony Stark went to the next level when Orchis industrialist (and Tony's new rival) Feilong stumbled upon the couple in a moment where Emma removed her ring and Tony tried to make her put it back on. Tony faked a proposal, which led to a quick Vegas marriage between the two heroes to make the ruse look real. 

Iron Man and Emma Frost Make Their Romance Official

During the scene of Tony and Emma's faux-wedding ceremony, a voiceover from Tony revealed that he was feeling some genuine attraction to White Queen – even though he knew it would end in her breaking his heart. Well, in The Invincible Iron Man #14 Emma doesn't do anything to dispel the prediction... 

Tony finds himself stuck in a nightmare where Magneto brutally slaughters him with a spear made out of his own armor. The terror is enough for Emma to sense, but when she comes over from her own bedroom to check on him, Tony is surprised to find out that Emma has... other ideas on how to pass the restless night. When Tony rejects the idea of a psychic dose of amnesia, Emma goes with option B: lovemaking. 

The White Queen has often lived up to her name as a cold and calculating woman – even in her infamous romantic passions with the likes of Cyclops. This love scene with Tony is admittedly a bit hotter in passion than expected from Emma Frost – but still no less calculating, as she informs Tony that it's likely she'll walk away from the final battle with Orchis – while he likely will get burned by the outcome. 

An Iron Man and Emma Frost ship is about the last one a lot of Marvel fans would've ever put on their bingo card – but here we are. If nothing else, this issue of Iron Man validates all the promotional hype around Tony Stark and "Emma Frost" (not Hazel Kendal) getting together – by having them actually do it. And now that it's happened, it's kinda hard to imagine it ending.

The Invincible Iron Man is on sale at Marvel Comics.