Maria Stark Maria Stark Maria Stark is a fictional character appearing in books published by Marvel Comics. She is Howard Stark's wife and Tony Stark's mother. Maria Stark was born Maria Collins Carbonell. In her adulthood, Maria married Howard, and together they had a son that was not her biological son Anthony "Tony" Stark. Maria was unsuccessful in preventing Tony from seeing Howard's alcoholism, something Tony would later face on his own. Howard secretly programmed the Mistress AI that controlled the Arsenal robots with Maria's brain patterns. On the Ides of March, Maria and Howard were killed in a 'planned' car accident
Superhero fiction Gail Simone has coined the term "Women in Refrigerators" (named after an incident in "Green Lantern" #54 where Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alex DeWitt is murdered by the supervillain Major Force and stuffed into Rayner's refrigerator) to refer to this practice. Many works of superhero fiction occur in a shared fictional universe, sometimes (as in the cases of the DC and Marvel Universes) establishing a fictional continuity of thousands of works spread over many decades. Changes to continuity are also common, ranging from small changes to established continuity, commonly called retcons, to full reboots, erasing all previous continuity. It is also