Welcome to May 1963! Today we're going to see Iron Man pitted off against one of my favorite mustaches, Dr Strange! Except, perhaps not that Dr Strange. This one doesn't have a mustache. And "the" Dr Strange apparently debuted a couple months after this, so maybe this is like... Prototype Strange. I know pretty much nothing about Dr Strange, but from stuff like Marvel vs Capcom and other appearances... hot damnnnnnn.
So, we're not going to get the sexy Strange this time, but... something. I guess. Let's just get started.
The same electricity I am SHUTTING OFF -- now!
Also, you gotta love the question that ends with an exclamation point.
This month, we have the same writer/artist combo with R. Berns doing the script and Jack Kirby illustrating. Personally, I liked Don Heck's Tony a little more going by the first two issues -- Heck seems to draw more detail on the face which makes Tony look a little older (and handsomer). There's also just a tiny bit more detail to the mustache, which is very important. Not that Kirby's Tony is bad by any means, of course. We'll see how he holds up this time.
Our story begins with who's gonna win Tony visiting a children's hospital that seems to be named Children's Hospital during a charity event, where he of course donates a bazillion dollars and even offers to contact Iron Man to come entertain the kiddos--
Whoa. Okay, maybe Kirby's Tony is not holding up. He looks a little wonky/boring in the rest of the panels on this first page, but this one is just... wow. I mean, the mustache looks good, but... maybe Kirby's style of drawing faces detailed and from the front is not my thing, because these two look creepy as heck. Not Don Heck. Just heck. That hot place.
But, uh, yeah, apparently the kids "idolize" Iron Man when just last episode they were terrified of him. I guess the gold paint completely changed their view! Nice job, Marion the Woman!
We're also given a little insight into Tony's views on love (and a recap of all the stuff he does) when his date (why do you take a date to Children's Hospital??) asks him if he considers falling in love and getting married. He claims that no woman wants to marry an "absentee husband" and then goes on to talk about all his research and development he does around the world and how he's always so busy.
Of course, he doesn't mention the whole I-have-to-run-around-the-world-in-my-spraypainted-suit-I-keep-in-my-briefcase thing. At least, not to this gal. He thinks about it to himself, so we get to see it as the readers.
There's also the whole ordeal where he has to plug himself in to keep himself alive. With this girl cuddling all over him I'm still unsure how they don't notice that his torso is is a giant iron plate with an electrical socket on it... but oh, well. Just go with it. But yeah, gotta keep that shrapnel floating around in there and not piercing his heart!
So we cut to Iron Man visiting Children's Hospital and giving a show for the kids. He juggles cars magnetically in the air, of course because TRANSISTORS, and then has the military fire a cannonball at him, which he catches and crunches up in his arms. The TV announcer says that the only person who could possibly match this display is the evil villain Dr Strange (... why is he just randomly bringing this up?) who is thankfully behind bars. Also I just accidentally typo'd that as "behind bras" which is funny. Teehee, bra.
We then cut to Dr Strange in jail, who also has a terribly creepy face from the front when drawn with detail. Stop it, Kirby. The tl;dr version of Strange's backstory here is that he's a big bad who went to jail and then got struck by lightning somehow, and is faking being "sick" because of the lightning strike, when really it "increased the electrical energy of his mind" instead. (?????????????????????)
Also, somehow he just... knew? that Iron Man was going to be at Children's Hospial... I mean, I guess Tony did publicly announce it before it happened, but... I don't know. Just... pretend this makes sense, okay? We already have lightning bolt powering him up and everyone thinking you get sick from lightning, so just... yeah.
Anyway, he wants to break out of jail, so he pretends to be dizzy. The guards carry him back to his cell (... where was he before...?) which is conveniently low-security because he's still sick with The Lightning. I don't understand if it's supposed to be like... he was in a high-security cell but they take him to the low-security one when he gets Thundersick or what?? But now he's there, and just... carrying around this radio device that no one seemed to notice or question...
He uses the radio to send signals out to Iron Man at the nearby Children's Hospital, which somehow mind controls Iron Man into breaking into the prison and freeing Strange.
... 8)
We also get to hear a bit of Strange's motive now -- while Iron Man is carrying him away (flying with Strange on his back, both of them with creepy faces from the front), Strange thinks about how proud his daughter is going to be once he conquers the world or whatever. But yeah, apparently more than anything, he craves his daughter's love and affection which he neglected during his years spent on a "fantastic life of crime."
Then Iron Man drops him off at home in his secret lab or whatever, where Strange tells his daughter that he's going to give the world the choice between total surrender or extinction. She is aghast at the idea and asks him why he must do something so drastic. He calls her a "foolish child" and then goes on his way, telling his lackeys that "she'll straighten out" when she is acting distant from them.
Like... did he really not realize that he's not "winning" his daughter's love and affection this way...?
I guess his thinking is supposed to be, like, she doesn't understand the master plan now, but once he's ruler of the world, she'll love it?
So Strange goes on to detonate a "200-Megaton Bomb" in outerspace, then transmit a message to... everyone in the world, I guess? that he's capable of detonating the same bombs on Earth unless everyone surrenders. Also, I might note that while on the cover, he was wearing a green outfit, his outfit is purple now. He never wears the green outfit in the actual comic.
And of course, he also... gives away the location of his hidden base in the Atlantic Ocean and explains how it's protected by a forcefield from above, so Iron Man knows where to find him and knows to go underneath the base to avoid the forcefield. Also, a mad scientist's lab hidden out in the ocean reminds me of Dr Wily, which is great.
Except Wily doesn't look this creepy when we see his face up-close.
We see Strange arguing with his daughter Carla, who is telling him she is shocked that he's willing to kill everyone in the world. Iron Man breaks in and starts busting up Strange's stuff, but then he falls down. Apparently there's "no electricity" left in the building because he busted up the machines, so now he can't function (?!?!) and even one tiny spark could save him. So Carla throws him a flashlight and Iron Man cracks open the the battery or something??? And now he can fight?
Strange is shocked that Carla would help the enemy, and she tells him that she once loved him, but now there's nothing more for her to love. Strange says he forgives her and that she'll understand some day (SERIOUSLY dude, do you STILL not get it?!) and escapes. All of Strange's lackeys are captured and arrested, but Strange himself is nowhere to be found. We end the episode with Carla crying into Iron Man's arms (okay, hopefully at least she realizes he has a big metal torso?!) and Iron Man wittingly saying that giving the world a love, courageous girl was Strange's "strangest" achievement.
Like, I wish I could explain this story with more detail but it's really just that Iron Man punches some machines and eats a battery. Somehow it took many pages and panels to convey; a lot of them were just the characters describing their actions before they actually acted on them. In fact, that's a thing about these older comics -- instead of showing actions, they have a character think out their action. I remember in the last episode, there was something with Iron Man jumping down a building and doing all this stuff to ensure his safety and trick Gargantus and stuff... but we didn't actually see any of that. We just kinda saw Iron Man standing atop the building and thinking to himself about how he was going to do it, and then... we saw him after it was done. This is a really common thing it seems, just narrating the story with thought bubbles instead of actually illustrating it. I guess part of it is to save space, since telling all of the action with pictures takes up a ton of panels and pages.
But in this issue, everyone thought out all their actions, and then we saw them, too! So it was a lot of redundancy.
I don't know if this was a great story for the 1960's, but "I did the evil thing for my daughter!" and the daughter not actually wanting it is such a tired gimmick anymore that I can't really get excited about it. I liked when Iron Man was powered up by a flashlight battery, though. Why does he have to go plug himself in if he can just crack open a cold battery when he's feeling down?
As for our side stories... I think the DVD rip I'm using is missing some pages from the non-important parts, or maybe the original DVD-ROM was like that. I'm not using the actual DVD-ROM as it's packed away, but rather a rip I found online that converted it to e-comic format for easier reading. But I think in the conversion, perhaps some parts were lost? But it only seems to be now and then a random page of an unimportant part is missing -- the main stories never have anything missing as far as I know. So maybe the original scans were like that, too. It's been so long since I had the DVD-ROM out, and back when I read on that, I didn't even look at the side-stories and stuff.
Anyway, the first one is weird and has some beards but is not particularly interesting. The second is weird, too, about this like... suicidal guy in space or something? It at least has some nice mustaches for a moment, including a toothbrush, drawn by Steve Ditko who we haven't seen illustrate a proper Iron Man story yet:
And then we also had some prose about little Joey playing the piano or something. The written stories always seem to be these really awkward slice-of-life stories, which don't really fit in all that well with the rest of the mag. Or maybe they have some kind of fantasy elements in them that I'm not noticing because I never read more than a few paragraphs before being bored out of my mind and deciding to give up. But even skimming the rest of the story it doesn't seem like there's much there. Maybe I should actually read an entire one.
This month, we don't have very many Handsome Tonys. In fact, there's only two, and one I already displayed earlier:
Overall, what seemed like a very promising issue ended up being quite a disappointment. A lot of redundant talking, a tired and predictable storyline, and very little sex appeal (though tons of creeper faces!) ... At least with Strange's escape, it seems like we might be setting up for him to return as a villain in the future, which breaks away from the episodic nature of the first two issues. Maybe. Since he's going to go on to have his own comic in a couple months, he might not cross over into Iron Man's world again any time soon, especially if this was only Prototype Strange. Actually, if this isn't the "real" Dr Strange that appears later, that means this is probably the last we'll ever see of this Strange (and Carla), so all of this setup was for nothing. We'll have to see.
