Welcome back, friendos. We're gonna continue on with our Iron Man readthrough. Well, mine. You're just gonna sit there and take it.

Now that Tony's origin story has completed, we're going to start seeing a bunch of monster-of-the-day-style episodes, and our first one is... Iron Man fighting a big naked dude.

This time, we're reporting from Tales of Suspense Issue #40, from April of 1963. Our artist this month is Jack Kirby, with Don Heck doing the inking this time. And our writer is R. Berns. The lettering is just credited to "Duff" which is funny, especially since the lettering for the credits seems kind of cramped at that point, so maybe Duff misjudged how much space was left to work with.

We start out by re-establishing Tony's "three faces," scientific genius who works for the military, millionaire playboy who you know you wanna go down on, and that clunky tin man thing.

The first of those is illustrated through Tony showing off TRANSISTOR roller skates that allow soldiers wearing them to travel at 60MPH. Hope no one loses their balance! I like how they go WOOSH when they try it out, though.

The next part is just Tony dating some girl and refusing to go swimming, because he has to keep his iron chestplate thing fastened all the time. These girls are like clinging all over him and they don't wonder why his torso is a giant bulging piece of metal? Like, I mean, I'm sure they can notice that through the clothes?

But the funniest of these three things is the reveal of Iron Man's core weakness... he has to plug himself in to charge his batteries, lest he becomes super weak and risks the shrapnel penetrating his heart and killing him. You know, TRANSISTORS can do all of these crazy things, but they can't just... remove the shrapnel safely? Or you know, maybe he could... have a surgeon do it...? I'm sure he could give them some transistor-boosted tools to make it easy. Or just do the surgery on himself, idk.

But instead, we get a giant walking iron torso lump in a suit who has to plug himself in. I can't really complain, because the idea of Tony running off to the bathroom to jack himself into the wall outlet is hilarious every single time it happens.

But the shenanigans don't stop there -- we learn that "thanks to [his] knowledge of microscopic transistors," he can fold up his suit and store it in a briefcase. Yes, he is carrying around that entire thing in a briefcase, like wadded up into small little sheets of metal that somehow unfold into this enormous humanoid suit that he can crawl inside and manipulate with his brain. Because TRANSISTORS.

Then the narrative starts to kick in, and Tony is dating some gal named Marion at a zoo, and suddenly all the animals break loose and start attacking people. Sounds like a job for Iron Man! So, Tony tells Marion he's going to go call the police (which is a pretty convenient excuse in a world without cell phones, though I'm surprised Tony hadn't invented a TRANSISTOR phone that was basically the same thing yet...) while everyone else runs around in panic.

But as he's trying to save everyone, all the women talk about how scary he is, while all the men are just like "OK yeah, it's Iron Man." So Tony realizes that he needs to give Iron Man a makeover. He comes back to the scene after Iron man leaves, and Marion tells him they don't need the police anymore (and she never questions why he was gone all that time and either didn't call them or called them but they never showed up) and they start talking about how Iron Man is creepy.

Tony asks Marion what she thinks Iron Man should look like, to which she responds that since he's like a knight in shining armor, he should be gold-colored!

Tony tells Marion he wouldn't be surprised if Iron Man himself had the same idea, which is stupidly suspicious, but I guess we're supposed to assume Marion will never catch on because she's just A Woman. Even though she was the one with the brilliant makeover idea in the first place.

So Tony goes back to his lab and spraypaints his suit. But of course, it's not just regular spraypaint, it's untarnishable TRANSISTOR spraypaint, so it'll stay gold forever!!!!

And so, the new look for Iron Man is born. Iron Man has a lot of different armors over the years, and I feel like I often see people consider this and his first armor as two separate models. But it's just the same one with paint on it.

So, later Tony is supposed to meet up with Marion again; I guess this must occur several days later. He asks a pilot at the airport if he picked up a Female when he was in Granville. Now I of course was not alive in the 60's to know how airports worked then, but this sounds more like something you'd ask a bus driver, not a pilot. Do the planes just jump around to many stops and the pilot actually knows who gets on and off? And is he supposed to recognize Marion from the sole description that she is "A Female" ???

Well, apparently Granville has been inaccessible for three days, but no one knows why, so Iron Man goes there to check it out. This is actually the beginning of the "main" plot of this episode, though honestly the gold spraypaint was the most important part of this whole thing.

Iron Man flies over to Granville to discover that the people have walled off the town and are attacking any outsiders because something called Gargantus will kill them if they don't.

Gargantus ends up being a Neanderthal Man (yeah idk) who despite looking like he should have ponderous footsteps, instead is ridiculously nimble and jumps around everywhere, TWANGing off of flagpoles like Super Mario and climbing up buildings with the expertise of Spider Man.

Iron Man realizes that because it's cloudy, this must really be a robot controlled by aliens! And indeed, he busts up Gargantus by using those TRANSISTORS and magnets he used to blow up the safe in the last mag. Gargy rips apart into robot scrap, and then shines a light at the clouds which makes the alien spaceship appear, with little green men inside and all! Somehow, breaking Gargantus also makes the mind-control on the people stop working (?) and the aliens get scared and run off, vowing not to come back to this planet because it's protected by iron men.

Iron Man busts down the wall, and then the next day we find Tony reuniting with Marion, ending the episode on a real knee-slapper!

To be honest I have little to comment on the actual Gargantus plot because it's pretty dumb. In the end, it's revealed that the aliens had actually visited the planet 80,000 years ago and only just now came up with the Gargantus plot to mind-control the people, but didn't realize that in 80,000 years the people would have evolved a bit. I guess in a way, that's somewhat clever writing, but at the same time... no, it's not. I mean, we had Star Trek in the 60's, too, so clearly people were able to imagine way more realistic stuff than that.

Actually, thinking back on the original Trek... never mind. People in the 60's were just really silly with their sci-fi.

I do love spray-painted Iron Man, though. Definitely a hilariously quirky reason for Iron Man's main appearance for a while.

For our side-stories, we had another prose about some Little Jimmy or whatever, a short called "Work of Art!" which had some fuzzy-faceed dudes in it and ended up being about a sorcerer who turned living things into paintings, and another short called "Prophet of Doom!" which mostly was about this dumb time-traveler who wanted to mess up history, but there was a little moment with these two mustached world leaders, one of whom was a Not Hitler with his little toothbrush stache. The side stories in these mags seem to revolve around a few pages leading up to a "clever reveal" like "there were other time-travelers, too!" or whatever; the stories aren't particularly exciting, but I'm sure in the 60's kids thought these were very surprising plots.

And here's our collection of Handsome Tonys for this month:

There weren't any other hot characters this time, but the second image above at least has some nice mustache action going on in the background. And that's it for TOS#40! Until next time, keep stachin'~