The reason Tony has a healing factor is explained in the very first issue. I realise that I'm more than likely wasting my breath (figurativly (sp?) speaking of course), but Tony's mom was working on a way for humans to regrow cells at a very accelerated rate. In fact, that's why his dad brought her out in the first place. The blue armor ate people's skin if left on too long. Howard wanted a way for people to regrow skin quickly so that the armor eating the skin wouldn't cause any damage. They had injected the monkey that went crazy, cut off its arm on her helmet, and spilled its blood into her pregnant body. Because brain cells grow without loss (IE, our brains are growing already) the work they were doing sped this up, and so now the monky's brain and the mom's brain are growing too fast for their bodies to handle. Because of the way a baby grows in the womb, the stuff affected baby Tony differently, making him something like a human stem cell battery. The reason that he has such a great healing factor is that any of his cells can grow any type of cell he needs, not just copies of themselves. Maybe OSC didn't read the 20 some issues that have been writen about Ultimate Tony, but the fact of the matter is, no origin had been set in place. This is the ULTIMATE UNIVERSE, not 616. The idea is that things can be different here. The FF were created because Reed built a mater transporter to send things to the N-Zone. Peter was bit by a spider being used in experiments to recreate Captain America. The Hulk is a homicidal maniac. These are the characters we know and love, but not the stories. Anyway, now that I've wasted my breath, here come the insults to my inteligence, or OSC's, or the editors, or whoever gets the blame next. Oh, and MWoF, just because I like Card, I'm sticking around, on this thread, on this site, and hell, maybe I'll even read some DD so that I can post about how crappy some of the writers for it are.
lease:
