Iron Man’s greatest foe (Mandarin) is still doing stuff and Iron Man’s nowhere-near greatest foe (Vibro) is back, but the heart of this story is John Byrne kicking off his run by re-telling the origin story. The story beats are the same, only little details changed like moving his initial period of captivity from Vietnam to an unnamed country, and, probably most importantly for the current Iron Man arc, Mandarin was involved.
I guess another big difference is that James Rhodes was NOT involved. This mean’s Iron Man’s origin has been retconned to include him and now re-retconned to exclude him. That’s a little annoying. Moving it past the Vietnam War I get—so the character can have more “modern” relevance, but inserting Mandarin and pulling Tony’s best friend out seem unnecessary.
Oh! And the most important part is that Iron Man escaped in a trenchcoat.
Because I have a tag about trenchcoat disguises.
Nice!