Iron Man: Rivetting Stuff

IRON MAN'S THIRD ARMOUR REDESIGN in fifteen months was, in my view, a bit of a backwards step. I thought Steve Ditko's makeover for the first Red-And-Yellow suit, in Tales of Suspense 48 (Dec 1963), was brilliant - no improvements needed. But just six months later,  Don Heck redesigned the armour - or more accurately - the headpiece - yet again, this time giving Iron Man a line of rivets down his face.

The four faces of Iron Man, from Tales of Suspense 39, 43, 48 and 54. That's quite an evolution in a little over a year. And I'm actually not mad about the Don Heck "Rivet-Face" version. Was Heck just trying to come up with something that was easier to draw? Or did Stan think this was an improvement?

I think the design change Iron Man's faceplate was supposed to be a surprise to readers, the cover blurb certainly gives that impression. But for whatever reason, the Marvel production department included the upgraded mask on the corner box figure of Iron Man on the cover of Tales of Suspense 54 (Jun 1964).

"Wait till you see Iron Man's new protective head mask!" shouts Stan's coverline for Tales of Suspense 54. But of course, we didn't need to wait ... we just had to glance at the top left of the cover and see the new faceplate in the Marvel trademark box.

"The Mandarin's Revenge" is a bit misleading as a title for the story inside. Stark does indeed meet The Mandarin in this adventure, but not until page 7 of the 13-page story. And no revenge is actually meted out. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Pentagon officials are concerned that Stark's observer missiles, deployed over Vietnam to track enemy troop movements, are falling out of the sky like flies. They blame Stark for supplying faulty technology. Yet Stark knows there's nothing wrong with the missiles. They're being brought down by some Sinister Force. And there's only one person in that part of the world that could be responsible. The Mandarin.

Someone's knocking Tony Stark's "observer missiles" out of the sky ... and it doesn't appear to be Dr Doom. Only one way to discover the culprit. Go to Vietnam and knock on a few castle gates.

It is a little surprising that the US military will allow their most valuable weapons manufacturer to jaunt over the border - illegally - into China to face a dangerous saboteur without an escort, but let's not dwell on that. Stark's plan to allow himself to be captured in his civilian identity might just work.

Inevitably, Stark is grabbed by The Mandarin's guards, who foolishly try to open his attache case and get a face-full of sleep gas for their troubles. Stark changes to Iron Man and crashes through a wall and advances menacingly towards The Mandarin - the Mandarin's rings can't stop Iron Man, the despot's electrical devices can't stop The Golden Avenger, not even The Mandarin's "karate" kicks can stop Iron Man. Swords, rockets ... no dice. In the end it's unbreakable steel bands that trap Iron Man and leave him helpless until the next instalment.

I strongly suspect this splash page was Heck's pitch to Stan to change the faceplate of the Iron Man armour. For surely only Heck would want to get rid of the Ditko-designed mask that Stark was wearing up till this point and replace it with this easier-to-draw version.

There are a couple of other interesting things about Iron Man's first two-part adventure, other than the fact of The Mandarin being old Shellhead's first recurring villain. The first is that after Steve Ditko's three pages introducing Iron Man's new-look armour back in Tales of Suspense 48, Heck doesn't spend even one panel on Stark re-designing his Iron Man helmet. He leaves Stan to explain it away in a bit of dialogue.

It's almost as though either Don Heck decided to change Iron Man's helmet himself - though that does seem unlikely, as Stan was a pretty tough editor - or Stan simply forgot to direct Heck to include a scene of Stark re-designed the armour's headpiece, and had to fudge the transition in the dialogue.

Then there's Stark's sudden interest in Pepper Potts. Up till this point, Pepper has been portrayed as having a bit of a schoolgirl crush on Stark and he's at best mildly amused by it, and reacting by engineering dates for her with Happy Hogan. Yet in this story, out of the blue, he acquires a romantic interest in his secretary. Stan would build on this as time went by, but this is where we saw it first.

After fifteen months of dating supermodels and actresses like a stoat, Tony Stark suddenly and inexplicably develops a romantic interest in his freckly secretary Pepper Potts. It's a little at odds with his established character, but romantic sub-plots seemed de rigeur for Stan's superhero books around this time.

Another first in this story is Iron Man referring to the blasts he projects from his hands as a "Magnetic Repellant" ray. He's used the repellant power of magnetism before, starting with issue 48 of Tales of Suspense, but the concept had always been less focussed - Iron Man used a hand-held device in ToS48 and radiated magnetic waves from his armour to break his fall in ToS49. After ToS54, Stan would refine this quite quickly in the more familiar Repulsor ray, and have Stark share the technology with other Marvel good guys like SHIELD, where the Repulsor rays were used in Nick Fury's flying Ferrari and later in keeping the Heli-Carrier aloft. 

Iron Man called the blasts from his gauntlets a "Magnetic Repellent". This would morph quite quickly into the now-familiar Repulsor ray, and Stark would later modify his armour's jet boots to use Repulsor technology rather than the less efficient jet fans.

The story closes with Iron Man helpless at the hands of the Mandarin, all trussed up with steel bands and refusing to beg for mercy. "I'll show you how an American faces death! I'll show that nothing can shatter the faith of a man who fights for freedom!" thinks Iron Man to himself, with steely resolve. And the readers would have to come back next month to find out how Iron Man escapes for [spoiler!] escape he will.

Tales of Suspense 55 featured one of those symbolic covers - a bit like X-Men 4, which came out a couple of months earlier - where the villain was show as a giant, looming menacingly over the hero. We all know that The Mandarin isn't actually thirty feet tall, don't we? Except this time, we'd be wrong ...

Tales of Suspense 55 (July 1964) gave us the 13-page second part of The Mandarin's Missile Crisis, titled "No One Escapes the Mandarin". The story picks up exactly where we left off last time, with Iron Man trussed up in The Mandarin's "unbreakable steel bands". The resolution to this inescapable death trap is a bit of a cop-out, brokered via the Mandarin's ability to see Stark's face beneath the Iron Man helmet. "Why are you smiling?" asks the Fu Manchu wannabe. "Because I know something you don't know," smirks Iron Man back at him.

Not only can The Mandarin see Iron Man smiling beneath his metal mask, but he can also apparently grow to thirty feet in height (as depicted on this issue's cover). Yet despite all these tricks, The Mandarin is not a match for Iron Man, giving lie to the story title, "No One Escapes The Mandarin!"

Iron Man then continues, "Why shouldn't I smile? While you waste time with me, Anthony Stark has probably found out where you keep your anti-missile missiles - and he could be destroying them this very minute." It doesn't occur to The Mandarin that Iron Man could be lying, and he hurries off to find out what Stark is up to, giving Iron Man the respite he needs to free himself. Iron Man follows and, discovering where The Mandarin controls his missile-snatching technology from, destroys the controls and recovers his missiles.

At the end of the story, Pepper seems a bit too happy to see Tony Stark and Happy is none-too-happy about it. Stan is still developing this new love triangle on the book and it'd be a few issues before he found the right note.

When Stark gets back from his adventures, he finds that Happy has struggled, in his absence, to keep Stark Industries on an even keel. And Stark's interest in Pepper hasn't diminished ... even Happy notices and remarks on it.

Since the beginning of the Iron Man series in Tales of Suspense, the page count has risen and fallen almost randomly. Click on the graph above to enlarge.

Interestingly, the final caption box announces that the page count on the Iron Man stories will be increased to 18 pages from next issue. However, this isn't really a new idea. The story-length on the Iron Man tales had risen and fallen all the way through the series. Once Captain America became a regular in Suspense, there wouldn't be room for 18-page Iron Man tales, but this wasn't something Stan saw coming at this point.

And right on the heels of the main story, there's a handy three page guide to Iron Man, presumably for late-comers. As I've mentioned before, Marvel Comics were gaining sales during this period, and many readers were late to the party. Stan has mentioned more than once that in the early days of the Marvel superhero comics, there was a large upswing in fan letters, many of which were asking for back issues. And in the later letter columns, Stan would regularly remind readers that the Marvel offices didn't have space to store supplies of their earlier issues.

"All About Iron Man" does what it says on the tin ... provides a condensed guide to Iron Man's powers, the Tony Stark identity and supporting cast in just four pages. Stan would include a similar guide to Giant-Man two months later in Tales to Astonish 59.

There are a couple of examples of Stan providing catch-up features for readers who were less familiar with Iron Man and Giant-Man than they would have been with Superman and Batman during 1964. I can't recall such features in Journey into Mystery or Strange Tales, but this sort of "How it works" piece would also be a feature of some of the Marvel annuals. And the Marvel Tales and Marvel Collectors' Item Classic titles were a more organised attempt to provide back-story for readers who'd missed the initial Marvel issues.

Oh, and Tales of Suspense 55 was also the issue in which Don Heck (or maybe Stan) got rid of the little row of rivets down the centre of Iron Man's faceplate.

"Iron Man has never been more exciting, or more dramatic, than in his never-to-be-forgotten battle with The Uncanny Unicorn!" Yes he has, Stan. On many occasions.

It was interesting that Stan decided to up the story-length in Tales of Suspense 56 (Aug 1964) ... for if ever there was a villain that deserved five pages less, it was The Unicorn.

There are elements to the story that are great. The opening scene in which Stark blows a gasket because he's tired of being cooped up in a metal chest plate has a ring of truth to it. Then, when he decides to be a selfish twat (for a change of pace), Happy Hogan is hospitalised and Pepper is kidnapped by the villain, The Unicorn. Stan also includes a flashback in which we see that The Unicorn's "Power Horn" was created by Ivan Vanko, The Crimson Dynamo, which is a neat bit of fledgling continuity.

For me, Tales of Suspense 56 is the least memorable of the 1964 issues - mostly because The Unicorn is such an uninteresting villain ... mediocre powers, sketchy backstory and no sign of any real motivation for battling Iron Man. I'm thinking deadline crisis filler issue; how about you?

As for the Unicorn himself ... well, he's just a bit dull. The costume is clunky and his power is a bit limited. The idea that he can only direct the force beam in his headpiece by turning is head would be handicap enough, but the rigid neckbrace approach to the costume means that he would have to turn his whole body to direct the power beam. Not the best design to come from the otherwise great Don Heck, and definitely not deserving of the allotted 18 pages. Luckily, the following month's Suspense was a big improvement, and introduced an important new supervillain.

It does seem likely that Stan had some considerable confidence in his new character judging by the multiple images on the cover and the tone of the cover-copy. This is also the first Don Heck art on a Suspense cover for quite some time, after a long run of Jack Kirby-pencilled covers.

Tales of Suspense 57 (Sept 1964) featured the return of the deadly Soviet agent The Black Widow, and this time she had a new ally. We first see Clint Barton - unnamed in this story - as a sideshow marksman, failing to impress the Coney Island crowd. Witnessing Iron Man preventing a fairground ride accident, Hawkeye decides that he too can have adulation if he becomes a superhero. But his first case, a botched jewel robbery, ends with him mistaken by police for the robber and forced to flee. 

With his deadly aim and trick arrows, Hawkeye made for an unusual villain, in that he really wanted to be a superhero. But circumstances conspired against him, and he ended up in the thrall of the beautiful but deadly Black Widow, who set him against Iron Man for her own purposes. Any similarity to DC's Green Arrow is purely coincidental.

By no small coincidence, the glamorous Black Widow is driving past at just the right moment and helps Hawkeye escape the cops. And that's pretty much the end for our Hawkeye, as he falls under the alluring spell of the Red spy and becomes entangled in The Widow's plot to exact her revenge on Iron Man.

Whether it was the increased page count, or a flair for the dramatic on Don Heck's part, this story included some rather large frames, at a time when most Marvel pages consisted of six or more panels per page ... even Jack Kirby's. How about the neat way Heck's layout in page 17 above shows cause and effect in the first two panels. Pretty cool, eh?

There follows an eight-page battle in which Hawkeye's trick arrows almost get the better of Iron Man and it's Hawkeye's coup de grace on his armoured foe that catches The Black Widow in an explosion, and renders the beautiful Russian spy unconscious. Just when he has Iron Man beaten, Hawkeye scoops up the woman he loves and gets the heck out of Dodge. 

Hawkeye must have been a hit with readers because just about as soon as he could, Stan would bring the maverick archer back, along with The Black Widow, in Tales of Suspense 60, just three months later. But first, Iron Man had the obligatory Battle Issue to deal with.

Tales of Suspense 58 (Oct 1964) would be the last to feature Iron Man as the star attraction. Starting with Suspense 59, he'd share the spotlight with fellow Avenger Captain America, a run I've covered in an earlier blog entry. But first, in the time-honoured tradition of Marvel superhero mash-ups, the two would have to slug it out in an epic-length story ... well, it seemed epic-length to me back in 1964.

It's hard to describe just how excited I was to see this comic advertised in the other Marvels of the period. I wouldn't track a copy down until 1966 or so, but it wasn't for lack of trying. My copy (above) you can see is a pence edition, so some did make it through the T&P blockade.

Tales of Suspense 58 (Oct 1964) was a pretty important one for my ten-year-old self. It was a tricky one for me to get hold of back in 1965, as it was one of the issues caught up in the Great Thorpe & Porter Distribution Snafu of 1964. I would later track down a copy after I'd already read the later Jack Kirby Cap stories in Suspense, so at the time, I wasn't mad about Don Heck's version of Captain America.

Again, Don Heck is using big panels on the page to maximise the impact of the battle scenes. I also really liked the way Sam Rosen rendered the Captain America logo in a Stars-and-Stripes motif, something that wouldn't be adopted on the Suspense covers until some time after the Captain America series started.

The plot's a little contrived ... After their defeat in Amazing Spider-Man 15, Kraven the Hunter and his partner-in-crime The Chameleon sneak back into the U.S. only to be apprehended by Iron Man. The Golden Avenger drags Kraven off to jail, but fails to notice The Chameleon skulking in the shadows. Out of the blue, The Chameleon gets the idea to impersonate Captain America and foment a battle between Iron Man and the real Cap. If I had to choose another hero to trick Iron Man into fighting (for no good reason), I'd probably choose Thor, who'd have a better chance of beating the armoured guy ... but then Thor wasn't going to be co-starring in the next issue of Suspense, was he?

It all comes out in the wash, though, when fellow Avenger Giant-Man shows up to explain to Iron Man that he's been fighting the real Captain America and not an impersonator as he'd first thought. It quite key that it was Giant-Man who does the big Reveal as he was busy the same month over in Tales to Astonish, having his own Battle Issue with another Avenger, The Incredible Hulk.

And for the first time since the beginning of Don Heck's work on Iron Man he's inked here by Dick Ayers, an embellisher I've never thought terribly well-suited to Heck's fine pencils. I'm guessing this was to free up some of Heck's time for taking over as penciller on The Avengers with issue 9 (also Oct 1964), where he was inked by Ayers as well, but for what it's worth, I've always preferred Heck inked by Heck.

From Tales of Suspense 59 onwards, the page count of the Iron Man stories would drop back down to 13 pages, with the Captain America solo stories - drawn by Jack Kirby - taking up the remaining 10 pages of story space. I couldn't have been happier, as I've always rated Cap as my all-time fave Marvel character, especially when illustrated by his co-originator, Jack Kirby.

Tales of Suspense 59 was one of those Marvel issues denied to UK readers because of the dispute between Martin Goodman and Thorpe & Porter distributors. It would be a few years after 1964 before I'd find one of these, but it's a milestone issue and one of my all-time favourites.

I'll take a look at the Iron Man stories in the "split" Tales of Suspense another time, as I wouldn't want Iron Man to outstay his welcome here.

Next time I want to return to the earliest days of Marvel Comics. I was reading my old chum Kid Robson's blog in which he revisits the old Stan versus Jack and Steve issue. I was astonished at how many readers still cite the Jack Kirby interview in Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990) as hard evidence of Stan Lee's "perfidy". So I want to take a closer look at the interview to assess how much of it is reliable testimony.

Next: Follow the Money!

Iron Man: A Red and Yellow Future

IRON MAN'S GOLDEN ARMOURED RUN ENDED with the November 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense. Stan Lee had realised that his grand superhero adventure of the early Silver Age was in danger of foundering. He'd started drafting in some old Atlas alumni to (re)build to same sort of operation he'd presided over during the Atlas years. But the stories, by former Atlas and Charlton staff writer Ernie Hart and Atlas and DC scripter Robert Bernstein, seemed flat and lifeless compared to Stan's own writing efforts and they had to go.

Tales of Suspense 47 was the final outing for Iron Man's golden armour, a design pretty clunky even by 1963's standards. Even while Don Heck was trying to make the armour lighter and more manoeuvrable in the interior art, Kirby continued to draw the same clumsy tank-like armour on all the covers. Small wonder Lee brought in Ditko for the makeover (and mentioned it on the cover).

In taking over the writing of the Marvel b-titles, Stan also brought a little something extra to each book. In Strange Tales, he added Dr Strange as a regular feature; in Tales to Astonish, Stan changed Ant-Man to Giant Man; in Journey into Mystery he added Tales of Asgard as a secondary feature; and in Tales of Suspense, he had Ditko design Iron Man a new, red-and-yellow armour. He also added Tales of the Watcher as a back-up strip, but I barely even noticed that.

In anticipation of the changes he was planning on Iron Man, Stan needed Steve Ditko. I think he saw Don Heck as a capable storyteller, but not a designer. The Kirby look for Iron Man wasn't working - at least, not for Stan - so he went to his next best designer. He moved Don Heck temporarily off Iron Man onto Thor and suspended Strange Tales' Dr Strange for a couple of months to free up Ditko's time for Iron Man.

The Melter is an interesting foe for Iron Man, but I don't think Stan made it clear enough that the melting beam liquifies iron (and only iron) without raising the temperature. Also, I'm not seeing a great deal of Steve Ditko art here, as Heck's style is overtaking any Ditko pencils.

For "Iron Man Battles the Melter", it doesn't appear to me that Steve Ditko contributed more than the barest of layouts. I don't think Ditko was responsible for The Melter's costume either. It has the distinct look of a Heck design. And, of course, it was business as usual with the clunky yellow armour. Kirby's cover depicted Iron Man without a chin again, though in the interior art, Heck (presumably) has given the Golden Avenger's helmet a distinct curve into the neck. It does look better, but even as a kid, I wondered how Stark got the helmet over his head.

Though Kirby's "chinless" Iron Man looked more like a robot, it did make sense from a practical point of view. Don Heck's version, though sleeker and more modern-looking, does make you wonder how Stark got his head through the helmet's narrow neck hole.

There's some other nice touches in the story's art. Heck renders a couple of panels in silhouette. I'm pretty sure it was Heck, as I don't recall that was trick Ditko used in any of his Spider-Man or Dr Strange art.

Is Don Heck the inker just saving himself some time by blocking in the figures in Ditko's pencils in black ink? Or was this a deliberate design decision by Ditko. I'm leaning towards the former.

Also apparent in this issue is how Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts have a bit more to do. Stan gives them quite a few lines of dialogue and even begins to refine the relationship between them.

Compare and contrast: the introduction of Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts as scripted by Robert Bernstein in Tales of Suspense 45, and, on the right, Happy and Pepper as dialogued by Stan Lee in ToS47.

But best of all is Stan Lee's peppy script. The dialogue is just so much better here than it was in the Robert Bernstein issues. Stan's humour and grasp of characterisation shine through and though there isn't much to choose between the content of say, the Happy-Pepper verbal jousting, Stan just does the whole bickering schtick so much better, but also in a good-natured way.

Even at the end of this tale, Stan wasn't giving anything away about what lay ahead. But big changes were coming to Iron Man in the very next issue.

The cover gives away the big surprise inside this issue ... Iron Man gets new-look armour. It's one of the few times the two versions of the armour have appeared in the same comic and on the same cover.

Tales of Suspense 48 (Dec 1963) was quite a landmark issue. Not for the first time, Stan overturned a Kirby design that wasn't, for whatever reason, working for Stan. In my view, Lee was right to get rid of the heavy, lumbering Kirby-designed golden armour. It was a 1959 Cadillac for a 1963 world - big and heavy and energy-inefficient. Having Steve Ditko do the work made sense. He'd redesigned Kirby's original drawings for Spider-Man to make the character sleeker and less bulky, it made sense to see if he could do the same thing for Iron Man.

The New Iron Man Battles the Mysterious Mr Pain - Stark's newest foe is a classic piece of eccentric Ditko design, looking more like a Dr Strange villain than someone Iron Man should be fighting. What is the point of the pointy head-dress?

The villain, Mr Doll, has taken some flack from fan circles for being anything but "a truly different super-villain". Some have compared him to The Fantastic Four's Puppet Master, but in fact the two have quite different powers. The Puppet Master uses his puppets to mind-control his victims while Mr Doll - originally called "Mr Pain" - uses his doll to cause harm to his victims in much the same way as a Voodoo houngan. He's not the best supervillain Stan's ever come up with, but he's not the worst either. Mr Doll would probably have been more interesting as Mr Pain. It's a much darker idea, and there has been some speculation that the name change was enforced by the Comics Code, though there's no confirmation of that which I could find.

Only Steve Ditko would spread a scene of Iron Man putting on his armour over three pages ... and only Ditko could make it work. Despite the slightly unsuitable inking of Dick Ayers, this is still a milestone moment in the development of Marvel Comics. And this version of the armour is still my favourite.

But the key reason to use a villain who's powers depend on using the hero's likeness against him is to catalyse the change in Stark's Iron Man armour. Stark reasons that if he alters his Iron Man appearance, Mr Doll's powers won't work against him. It's pretty flawed as far as the logic goes. Stark has already seen Mr Doll alter his magic doll to switch the pain from millionaire victim Charleston Carter to Iron Man. Nevertheless, the side benefit is that the new armour is lighter, stronger and, most importantly, far more modern-looking than the golden version. This armour, with its distinctive hinged faceplate with pointy "bat-ears", is easily my favourite of the red-and-yellow armours. Just why Stan allowed it to be changed just a few issues later is anyone's guess.

Jack Kirby doesn't quite get Ditko's design for Iron Man's new armour. Here, the hinged faceplate is drawn as though it's actually part of the  headpiece, again begging the question, how would Tony Stark put the Iron Man helmet on?

Stan used Tales of Suspense 49 (Jan 1964, on sale 8 Oct 1963) to showcase Iron Man's new abilities and give a high-profile plug to his new team book The Uncanny X-Men. In fact, he gives The X-Men the lion's share of the action, devoting a third of the story's 18 pages to Professor X and his band of merry mutants. The trigger for the tale is The X-Men's Angel flying into a danger zone above one of Stark's factories where a nuclear explosion is about to detonate. Quite why he wants to detonate an atomic device in one of his own weapons facilities isn't explained. 

Flying along, minding his own business, The X-Man Angel blunders into Tony Stark's atomic explosion. But the biggest mystery for me isn't, "Why is Tony Stark carrying out nuclear tests in a built-up area?" but rather, "How does Iron Man know The Angel's a youngster?"

Because radiation is the cause of everything in these early Marvel stories, this time the nuclear energy turns The Angel bad, at least temporarily. So Iron Man spends the rest of the issue chasing Warren Worthington around the skies over upstate New York. And when The Angel quits the X-Men to go join the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (who wouldn't appear in The X-Men for another two months), Professor X doesn't seem able to discover what The Angel's problem is, despite his not-inconsiderable telepathic powers.

Who's bad? It's funny what a bit of exposure to radiation can do: give you super-powers, take your super-powers away, make you evil ... the list is endless.

Iron Man finally has to engineer a death plunge from several miles up in order to snap The Angel out of his evilness. The story ends with The Angel recovering from his bout of bad behaviour and saving Iron Man at the last second. Everyone parts friends with The Angel assuring Iron Man that "if you even need help ... no matter how deadly the trouble ... call on me ... call on The X-Men". Yet, when The Avengers desperately needed to find the Hulk  later the same month in Avengers 3 (Jan 1964), Professor X - unchallenged by the Angel - is curtly dismissive of Iron Man's request for help.

Avengers 3: When the superteam have to find The Hulk, Iron Man approaches each of the other Marvel superheroes looking for aid. Despite The Angel's promise in Tales of Suspense 49, The X-Men are no help at all. (Thanks to George Chambers for the heads-up.)

That promise was a distant memory by the next time Iron Man encountered the mutant team, in X-Men 9 (Jan 1965), but at this point in Marvel history, Stan and Jack weren't letting pesky continuity get in the way of a good superteam battle.

X-Men 9 (Jan 1965): Not only does The Angel forget his promise to Iron Man provide help whenever asked, he doesn't seem to remember Iron Man either - though in all fairness, Iron Man doesn't seem to remember The Angel. They all just want to have a Kirby scrap, for no apparent reason.

All's well that ends well, and everything was safely back to normal in time for X-Men 3 (Jan 1964, on sale 5 Nov 1963) and for Tales of Suspense 50 (Jan 1964, on sale 12 Nov 1963), which featured a brand-new villain.

In the back-end of Tales of Suspense 49 was another Marvel cross-over, unheralded on the cover. Stan began framing some of his old-school fantasy tales with a narration by The Watcher ("by special arrangement with the Fantastic Four magazine.") What seems especially strange is that Stan had prefaced the Iron Man story in this issue with the editorial message, "The Angel and The X-Men appear in this story through the courtesy of the editors of The X-Men magazine! The Avengers are depicted briefly on these pages by the spacial arrangement with the copyright owners of The Avengers magazine!" So what was Stan's point here? He's making it seem as though The X-Men and The Avengers are published by different companies, despite the fact that by this point all Marvel Comics were labelled as "Marvel Comics" in the cover corner box. So he wasn't fooling the readers. It's an odd conceit, and I cannot fathom a reason for it.

Omnipotent intergalactic demi-god The Watcher waves cheerily to the reader before relating an inconsequential tale of the passive conquering of the human race by aliens called the Sneepers. He then breaks his own code of non-interference by urging the humans not to allow this avoidable disaster to come to pass. I think I'd have preferred "Tales of Happy Hogan".

The first Watcher tale, "The Saga of the Sneepers" is barely distinguishable from the pre-hero five-pagers Stan was filling Tales of Suspense with before Iron Man and, back in the 1960s, I'd gloss over these with barely a second glance. This one has a plot by Stan and script and pencils by Larry Leiber, with George Roussos (as "G. Bell") finishing up on inks.

The first of Iron Man's truly memorable opponents was The Mandarin, a bargain basement imitator of Fu Manchu, The Mandarin followed in the footsteps of such knock offs as Wu Fang and Marvel's own Yellow Claw.

Tales of Suspense 50's "Caught in the Clutches of The Hands of the Mandarin" - despite being one of the more tautological story titles of the period - did introduce an enduring villain to the Iron Man cast. Okay, he was a low-rent Fu Manchu, but the gimmick of the rings was pretty cool. Where DC's Green Lantern had one all-powerful ring, The Mandarin had ten! I mean, what chance would Iron Man have against that?

Despite being seriously out-gunned by The Mandarin, Iron Man somehow manages to temporarily disable the warlord and escape China with his life. There would be other, more challenging battles ahead.

Iron Man gets involved when the CIA asks him to investigate a Chinese warlord The Manadarin, who is feared even by the Red Chinese government. Without really knowing what he's up against, Stark blunders straight in and is almost immediately at the mercy of the self-styled descendant of Genghis Khan. Overall the battle is inconclusive and though Iron Man temporarily defeats The Mandarin, he barely manages to escape in time to rendezvous with his CIA pickup plane and the irritated Mandarin lives to fight another day.

The tale runs a shortened 13 pages and I have to wonder if there was a reason for that, since the Iron Man stories had been 18 pages since issue 47. Certainly by ending the story in such an inconclusive way, it seems Stan had designs on bringing the Mandarin back, even at this early stage. And, of course, that would turn out to be the case. And it's great to see the great Don Heck back on pencils and inks, as the story looks once more like classic Iron Man. Certainly Ditko's input on the previous issues was invaluable, but I don't think I'd have liked to see him continue on the title.

Stan and Don also contrive to change Pepper Potts' appearance to make her more of a glamour girl than she was when first introduced. It's not beyond possibility that this was Heck's idea, as the artist was especially known for drawing attractive women characters.

Also in this story, Stan gets Don Heck to give Pepper Potts a makeover, making her far prettier. I suppose this was to make for a more convincing love triangle between Stark, Pepper and Happy ... not that it was ever convincing in the first place. Because of the shorter Iron Man story, the issue is rounded out with two fantasy tales; "Them!", a fourth wall tale in which a man believes he's being hounded by fictional characters, but turns out to be a fictional character himself, and a Tales of the Watcher "Journey's End" in which a nerd finds paradise on a hidden alien planet.

It's strange that Stan chose his two best sellers to advertise in Tales of Suspense 50. Wouldn't it have made more sense to try to bolster the lower-selling anthology titles like Journey into Mystery?

Also included for the first time, two full-page Marvel house ads for Amazing Spider-Man 9 and Fantastic Four 23 (both Feb 1964, on sale 12 Nov 1963), titles that were selling significantly better than Tales of Suspense's 188,000 copies a month average.

"The Scarecrow! What strange power does he possess?" shouts Stan's cover line for Tales of Suspense 51.  The answer is, "None!" Unlike Batman's eponymous foe over at DC Comics, this Scarecrow doesn't actually scare anyone, being an escape artist turned cat-burglar with no actual power at all.

Tales of Suspense 51 (Mar 1964) featured a decidedly unmemorable villain, especially when compared to The Mandarin. The Scarecrow is a bottom-of-the-bill vaudeville escape artist (did they still even have vaudeville by 1964?), Ebenezer Laughton (using the stage name "Uncanny Umberto"), who gets a great idea to turn to crime. So he steals a costume and three trained crows and sets himself up as a costumed second-story man. What isn't explained is how Laughton manages to contact the Communist Cuban authorities in order to sell them the secret plans he's stolen from Tony Stark.

A genuinely forgettable story, and mercifully brief at 13 pages ... with one bright spot, where Pepper Potts gets rid of one of Stark's snooty girlfriends, with a view to landing a date with Stark herself.

Stan's characterisation of Pepper Potts is straight out of a 1963 coffee commercial, but at least he was making an effort to portray a feisty, strong female character, even if he wasn't quite there yet.

It's probably not terribly politically correct by today's standards, and Stan's handling of the character is a little condescending, and owes more to Millie the Model than it does to the mainstream Marvel superhero style of storytelling, but these tales are a product of their era and should be taken within that context.

The issue is rounded out with another Tales of the Watcher and a five-page fantasy tale, also written and drawn by Larry Lieber and embellished by the decidedly eccentric Matt Fox.

Tales of Suspense 51 was Matt Fox's last inking job for Marvel, working over Larry Lieber pencils. He dropped away as the fantasy tales were phased out of the fantasy titles. His style would have been especially unsuitable for the kind of superhero stories Stan was publishing.

WHO THE HECK IS MATT FOX?

Matthew Fox was born in 1906, making him one of the older artists working for Marvel's predecessor Atlas Comics during the 1950s. Fox had earlier enjoyed a stint as a cover artist on the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales, from 1943 to 1951. 

It wasn't just Fox's comic art that was eccentric, his cover paintings for the legendary Weird Tales also featured some extremely odd-looking aliens.

By the end of the 1940s Weird Tales was struggling and Fox was getting fewer cover painting commissions, so he found other work, starting with a five-page strip for the Atlas title, Adventures into Weird Worlds 10 (Sep 1952). He also contributed some Weird Tales style covers to Chilling Tales (Youthful Comics) before concentrating most of his efforts on Atlas.

Matt Fox's comics career was patchy. Considering how little work he actually did for Atlas/Marvel and other publishers, he wouldn't have been able to live on so few jobs. It's been said that he also worked in advertising, but I haven't been able to uncover any further details on that.

At Atlas, he provided finishing art for just 21 stories between 1951 and 1958, his final Atlas tale appearing in Journey into Mystery 49 (Nov 1958). He dropped out of sight for a few years, returning to Marvel with art for the story, "The Man Who Wouldn't Die" in Journey into Mystery 93 (Jun 1963). He would ink another 16 short fantasy tales for early 1960s Marvel anthology titles, his last work appearing in Tales of Suspense 51 (Mar 1964).

While Matt Fox may have had his fans, by virtue of the sheer quirkiness of his work, Larry Lieber - whose pencils Fox often inked - wasn't one of them. "I hated his stuff because I struggled with drawing," Lieber told Roy Thomas in an interview for Alter Ego, "and I was trying to make the drawings look as real as humanly possible, and I had a tough time. I remember I once had Don Heck inking me on a five-page western, and I remember saying, 'My God, he's good at making my stuff look better than it is,' and he was. Matt Fox - if my stuff was a little stiff, he made it even stiffer; he made it look like wood cuttings!"

Matt Fox died in 1988.

BACK TO IRON MAN

Tales of Suspense 52 (Apr 1964) was a considerable improvement over issue 51, featuring the return of one of my favourites, The Crimson Dynamo, and the introduction of an important Marvel character who would go on to enjoy a long career and a fascinating backstory - The Black Widow.

How can this be? Didn't The Crimson Dynamo reform at the end of his last appearance and count Tony Stark as a friend and ally? All is not what it seems in this issue of Tales of Suspense.

It was established at the end of Tales of Suspense 46 that Ivan Vanko, The Crimson Dynamo and former Soviet saboteur, switches sides and goes to work for Tony Stark. And that would have worked out just fine if the Russians hadn't decided to assign notorious spy The Black Widow to assassinate Venko for daring to defect. And while they're at it, they can just take out Tony Stark and his "bodyguard" Iron Man, as well.

There's a lot of sound an fury in this story, but essentially, we meet the Black Widow who fails to destroy the defector Ivan (The Crimson Dynamo) Venko, and is forced to flee for her life, hunted by both the American and Russian authorities.

With her ox-like "assistant" Boris, Madame Natasha fetches up at Stark's factory and manages to bluff her way into a meeting with Stark. Oddly, Stark doesn't seem in the slightest bit suspicious of this unknown Russian woman who looks like a movie star. In fact, Stark acts a little bit creepy around her, uttering howlers like, "If there's a moon out, lady, you'll find out how I feel about you, too!" Meanwhile, as Tony acts like an amorous schoolboy, Boris snoops around the factory and finds Venko. He quickly subdues the defector and delivers him to a nearby Soviet submarine, then returns to the factory and puts on Venko's armour. His disguise fools Iron Man and Boris is able to defeat the Golden Avenger and also bring him to the Russian submarine. But Iron Man revives and rescues Venko. There's a final showdown at the factory, and Venko sacrifices himself to defeat The Boris Dynamo. The Black Widow, having failed her communist masters, escapes to an uncertain future in the confusion.

Stan Lee must have liked the idea of The Black Widow quite a lot, because she returned the month following her initial appearance to menace Iron Man and Tony Stark anew, this time with a stolen anti-gravity device. Also, Stan had the masthead altered to reduce the size of "Tales of Suspense" and enlarge the Iron Man lettering. Perhaps with a view to changing the title of the book at some point?

The next issue of Tales of Suspense, 53 (May 1964), is pretty much Part Two of the story, "The Black Widow Strikes Again!", this time scripted by veteran Atlas editor Don Rico, probably helping Stan out of a deadline crunch.

We know Madame Natasha - The Black Widow - is a bad girl, because she smokes ... with a long cigarette holder! And Tony Stark becomes as dumb as a rock around her.

The story is every bit as chaotic as the last one, but that's not a negative. There's loads going on in just 13 pages, but the central plot revolves around Madame Natasha trying to redeem herself with the Soviet government by stealing Tony Stark's anti-gravity device. Little does she know that the treacherous Russians have no intention of forgiving her. Much floating hardware later, the device is deactivated by Iron Man's "Proton Gun" and poor Natasha is back to square one.

My only real quibble with this issue is the way Tony Stark acts out-of-character towards Madame Natasha. It's already been well-established that Stark allows only the shallowest relationships with the women he dates because of his critical heart condition (and probably also because he has to wear a metal chest plate that would raise questions the moment he took his shirt off). Yet here he is, his tongue hanging out like a randy labrador just because The Black Widow is beautiful? I don't buy it.

Stan might have made it work if he'd explained, perhaps in some thought balloons, that Stark was especially drawn to her by some factor other than her looks. But that probably wasn't his intention, as he'd later give Madame Natasha a different love interest that would be instrumental in her changing the course of her life.

But that's a story for next time, when I cover the remainder of the Iron Man red-and-yellow solo stories.

Next: Move Over Iron Man!