Justin Hammer (Earth-199999)
Justin Hammer is a former American weapons manufacturer and CEO of Hammer Industries, once primary contractor to the United States government. He was arrested in 2010 after harboring the criminal Ivan Vanko, and is currently serving out his sentence.
Biography
By May of 2010,[note 1] Justin Hammer and his company were bitter rivals with Tony Stark and Stark Industries. During a U.S. Senate hearing on Stark's privatization of his Iron Man suit, Hammer attempted to demonstrate an impending threat of foreign states duplicating the Iron Man technology, but Stark was able to show that none of them were even close to doing so. A few days later, Stark was attacked at a stock-car race in Monaco by Ivan Vanko, a man using Stark's own arc-reactor technology to power a pair of powerful, electrified whips. Stark fought Vanko off and he was taken into custody, but he had successfully proven to the world that the threat was real. In fact, Vanko specifically sought to destroy Stark's legacy as revenge for his father Anton not receiving sufficient credit for coinventing the arc reactor.
Seeing a potential asset, Hammer orchestrated a prison break for Vanko, enlisting him to create a weapon superior to Iron Man and faking his death in the process. Hammer had in mind pilotable suits like Iron Man, but Vanko was more interested in constructing drones. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. James Rhodes had succeeded in confiscating one of Stark's own Iron Man suits for the military, and Hammer was contacted to arm it. This was fortunate, as he had a timeslot for the Stark Expo coming in a few days, and Vanko's continued stubbornness was otherwise making things difficult for him. At the Stark Expo, Hammer begrudgingly displayed Vanko's drones, but used the Iron Man suit piloted by James Rhodes as his centerpiece. Iron Man himself soon showed up, which prompted the drones and Rhodes, under Vanko's remote control, to attack. Hammer quickly fled, but was soon accosted by S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow. He told her that Vanko was the cause, leaving her to track him down at Hammer Industries. Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts used this information as grounds to inform the police, who took Hammer into custody.[1]
Notes
- ↑ See the MCU Fandom page's exhaustive timeline analysis for this and other points.
References
- ↑ Iron Man 2. Dir. Favreau, Jon. Perf. Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, and Samuel L. Jackson. Paramount Pictures, 2010.