Maria Stark (Maria's brother) who died at a young age. Years later, Loni (Howard's first wife) tells Tony twice that she wishes she could have been Tony's mother under different circumstances, but Tony still prefers his own mother. While what has been depicted is retconned as an in-universe fictional TV show about Iron Man's life, the actual Ultimate version of her character is briefly mentioned by her other son Gregory Stark when joking says how Gregory "came out of [Maria] before [Tony]" but this has since been discounted. Maria Stark Maria Stark is a fictional character appearing in books published by Marvel
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