As promised by Jon Favreau, the first offi­cial Iron Man 2 pic­ture has sur­faced at USA Today. It shows Tony Stark sat at a desk with glow­ing chest and four suits behind him.

The arti­cle reveals that the sequel takes place six months after Stark reveals he is Iron Man:

“How many super­heroes are open about their true iden­ti­ties?” he asks. “We wanted to play with that idea. But it obvi­ously has con­se­quences — in his rela­tion­ships, on the team. There are a lot of areas we can explore.”

The arti­cle continues,

He hopes to have all other Iron Man 2 details locked down — even though he’s send­ing dis­patches via Twit­ter from the set. “It’s never easy with sum­mer movies, but we’re try­ing to keep as much a sur­prise as pos­si­ble,” he says.

[…]

Favreau says that tack­ling the fran­chise a sec­ond time is eas­ier because he knows the land­scape. Some­thing else would help, too: “I really enjoyed when we were a dark horse and no one knew much about us. … I hope we can find that place again.”