Fantastic four (1961) issue #339 4

Full feat & context with all pages in proper order can be seen in the link: https://zippyimage.com/album/iron-man-escapes-galactus-universal-black-hole.i8VoK

Fantastic Four (1961) issue #339
Problem #1: The Environmental Prison (The Time-Dilation Field)

The Threat: The "Time Bubble" itself. It creates a passive field where the universe outside appears frozen. Any unprotected object would be locked in time, unable to act.

The Solution: The Time-Sled's "local probability field." As Reed states, this isolates them from the effect. This field is the life support system. It's the hull of the submarine that protects the crew from the crushing pressure of the deep, allowing them to operate the controls. It solves the problem of existing in this hostile environment.

Problem #2: The Active Aggressor (The Universe-Eating Black Hole)

The Threat: The "giant 'black hole' which would suck up all matter in the universe, from all points of time." This is the monster inside the prison. It is actively pulling them, the sled, and reality itself into its singularity.

The Solution: The synergistic propulsion system created by Iron Man (Mjolnir + Armor + Sled Engines). This is the engine. Its job is to generate enough force to escape the active, inescapable pull of the singularity.

The fact that the sled's field protected them from the passive time-stop does not mean it protected them from the active, universe-ending gravitational pull of the black hole. They solved one problem with Reed's tech just to be able to face the second, even greater problem with Tony's idea.

To escape a universe-ending threat, Iron Man's armor served as the crucial interface for a system that synergized its own advanced technology with Mjolnir's magic. With Mjolnir's planet-shattering power explicitly stated to be insufficient on its own, Iron Man's armor had to withstand, process, and refine that energy while integrating it with its own systems to create a superior, reality-warping propulsive force powerful enough to overcome the impossible.

The Threat: A Black Hole in a Celestial's Prison

The heroes were trapped in a multi-layered, conceptual deathtrap:

The Time Bubble: A conceptual prison built from the laws of reality itself. It created a devastating time-dilation effect, isolating its interior from the normal flow of the universe. This bubble was the home and direct machination of Tiamut the Dreaming Celestial. The spacetime within this bubble (especially near the black hole) was so chaotic and distorted that even its creator, the Celestial Tiamut, was forced to expend immense energy to travel within it—a crucial benchmark that establishes the environment's hostility as being on a cosmic god-tier level. While their Time-Sled's advanced systems created a "local probability field" that isolated them from the bubble's passive, time-freezing effect, they still had to confront the active threat at its heart:

The Singularity: At the heart of this temporal maelstrom was an artificial, galaxy-sized black hole created by a machine of Galactus. This was not a passive object; it was a chronovorous weapon actively consuming all of reality "from all points of time." The team was trapped deep inside its effective event horizon, a point from which not even light could escape.

The Failure of Gods and Geniuses

Faced with this absolute, multi-layered threat:

Reed Richards, one of the universe's greatest minds, was defeated. His technology was exhausted, and he had no solution.

Thor, the God of Thunder, was equally helpless. He stated that even Mjolnir, a weapon with the explicit power to shatter a planet, was not enough to win through the chaotic maelstrom on its own.

Iron Man's Solution: The Crucible of the Cosmos

When raw power and conventional genius failed, it was Tony Stark who conceived of and executed an impossible solution. His role was not passive; he was the indispensable architect and crucible through which victory was forged.

He Withstood Opposing Infinities: For over thirty seconds, the Iron Man armor became the epicenter of a cosmic war. It was simultaneously being torn apart by the universe-ending gravitational pull of the chronovorous (past, present, and future eating) black hole while being burned out from the inside by the full, continuous planet-shattering power of Mjolnir. His systems were being crushed, warped, and detonated at once, yet they held.

He Transcended the Limits of Magic: Iron Man's armor did what Mjolnir alone could not. It took the raw, chaotic, planet-shattering magical energy of the hammer and transformed it into a stable, focused stream of reality-warping propulsive force, powerful enough to function within the hostile Celestial environment.

He Produced a Superior Force: The final energy output of the system was, by definition, greater than Mjolnir's alone. It generated a force sufficient to violate the laws of gravity, create a stable path through a temporal storm engineered by a Celestial, and escape a point of no return.

Conclusion: Iron Man's Tier (Verifiable Universal+)

This feat showcases Iron Man's power not as a brawler, but as a cosmic engineer whose capabilities are nearly limitless. He demonstrated the ability to create a system that could generate a reality-warping, Universal-tier propulsive force.

He did not just escape a black hole. He engineered a solution to a problem that had defeated gods and super-geniuses, piloting his way out of a prison that taxed the power of a Celestial itself. In this moment, Iron Man's technology, and therefore his power, operates on a verifiable Universal+ scale.

https://zippyimage.com/album/blackdreaming-celestial-time-bubble.xdRk5

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Glossary:Black_Hole#cite_note-Fantastic_Four_Vol_1_338-341-4

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Bubble_at_the_Heart_of_Time