Hold your breath! Here comes IRON MAN!!
It's time for another exciting (?) issue of Tales of Suspense, this time coming at you from June of 1963. This flavor of the month this month is anti-communism social rhetoric!
It's pretty common in any era when you're trying to justify violence on other people to depict your target as subhuman so that the people you're manipulating into committing or condoning the violence won't resist as much. And so we get depictions of "communists" as barbaric, which in the context of 1960's American just means "anyone we want to kill and especially Asian people." They don't even really try to mask it this time, with the villain literally just being "a barbarian." The villains seem to enjoy being ruthless and stupid like this.
Now, it's not that Stan Lee and friends were themselves hoping to mislead the population into supporting the violence in Vietnam. Rather, when writing episodic fiction like this that needs to sell based on the cover alone, you need to create "obvious" villains and conflict that the reader will quickly become invested in. And since the government-influenced media was making everyone terrified of The Commies at the time, it was super easy to just use that as your catch (the scene on the cover doesn't even make sense in the context of the story we're about to read, anyway). Comics have a broad history of questioning these kinds of things and standing up for social justice, but... in this era we just get a lot of this stuff instead.
And don't think this isn't without your usual heaping portion of racism like always, either! Even though The Commies of this issue look like white guys (though the Barbarian is a bit ambiguous himself), they make multiple references to Asia anyway.
OK, I kinda rambled a bit. I didn't want to just ignore the whole RED BARBARIAN thing, but brevity is not my strong suit. Though using idiomatic expressions in proper contexts is a forte!
But let's get to the story. We have R. Berns on the script again, and now Don Heck is back on the illustration. Like the first issue, there's no separate inker, so I'm assuming Heck is doing all the art on his own when he works on the mag. Also, looking back on the two Jack Kirby issues, the creepy faces only appeared in the second of the two, so mabye he was just rushed to finish those ones or something and couldn't spend time making the faces look less scary...? Trying to give the benefit of the doubt here.
But I'm looking forward to seeing if Heck can keep up his Handsome Tony streak in this one.
This time, we start out right with Iron Man instead of Tony. The FBI (lol) planted a fake atomic bomb for The Commies to steal. So they came by and pirated it on a boat, but SURPRISE, it was just a box with Iron Man inside! He pops out and explains the government's plot in full detail to the gangers trying to nab the bomb that didn't even exist.
He then goes on to explain his own plan to fight them while they just kind of... stand there and listen, I guess. Even though one of them commanded the others to shoot him, none of them even try.
We have one of the most ridiculous illustrations of what TRANSISTORS can do here. Iron Man powers up a magnet above the baddies, which makes their guns shoot up and stick to it. But even funnier than that, the people holding the guns get sucked up into the magnet, too! Because they don't let go of the guns. You know if a force like that suddenly pulled your gun straight up, I'm pretty sure it would come out of your hand, rather than you reacting quickly enough to take your gun for a ride, flying through the air carried only by a little pistol...
And of course, Iron Man also has to explain that his suit may be metal as well, but it's ~special metal~ that doesn't get magnet'd. Or something.
We finally get to see Tony, though mostly in shots too far away for Heck to even bother drawing his little stache (a huge disappointment), who is showing off his newest tech to the government again. This time, it's a ... disintegrator ray. Yup. It fits in a flashlight case (I wonder if he's using the flashlight case that he ate the battery from?) and you just point it at stuff and it goes away. If it's magnified, you could even destroy an entire metropolis!
Is this not, you know, maybe a bit OP? I mean, he says it has a "few bugs" left, but he is able to completely poof away an entire tank and a wall with no problem. We're just not at the destroy-the-entire-world level yet, I guess? And he didn't mention if it works on organic stuff, so I don't know if we can poof a human or not. But I'm assuming if we're poofing a "whole metropolis," the living things contained within would go with it, too...? And, yeah, what about a tank? Do we just destroy the operator in the process? I'm not really sure how it works on a wall without affecting the things around the wall, either, but... I guess we're not supposed to think that much about it.
We then cut to a "red satellite country" where The Red Barbarian is... chomping on a big hunk of meat. I don't know what kind of meat this is supposed to be, but it's that... thing you always see where it's like a big bone they hold like a cotton candy or something and there's just this massive round meat hunk on it.
But yeah, he's munching away and some goons show up and tell him that Anthony Stark has a new plan to make America invincible. But Big Red gets mad that they didn't already steal the plan and throws the big Meat Thing at one of the lackeys, knocking him unconscious. So with the take-the-fun-for-a-ride and now this, I'm guessing this is supposed to be a comedy special...?
After a bit more squabbling with his lackeys and shooing them out of his office by firing weapons at them (he's... shoo-t-ing them...!!! MAHAHA) another dude appears and introduces himself by removing his disguise. This guy is called The Actor, and apparently "with a little bit of makeup" can exactly replicate the look of any other man that he's seen before! At first I thought this was a bit OP, too, but not nearly on the level of the disintegrator ray. But further thinking, this is a pretty shitty power. I mean first of all, you have to carry makeup around. Makeup seems kind of fragile as a weapon; you'd have to make sure you don't lose any and none of it gets messed up somehow. Plus, all he does is paint his face (and apparently changes his hair, too). But like, his stature doesn't change? What about the shape of his body? So he can only impersonate men around his height, I guess? Like, if he's trying to mask as someone 6 inches taller, I think people are going to notice... Plus, you'd have to have like a million changes of clothes or like always be stealing clothes...? It seems super situational and difficult to really use most of the time. Other than for small little things, you'd be found out right away.
Anyway, so The Actor is apparently some new guy to Red's group and wants to help steal the plans by using Tony Prism Power Make-Up. Red, being the Barbarian that he is, threatens to kill Actor if he doesn't return with the plans, and so he sets off.
We get a few little examples of Actor's abilities by seeing how he sneaks into the U.S., posing as famous actors and senators, including wearing a very fine chevron mustache. Or would you call it, like, a petit walrus? I'm never sure what to do with these in-between styles. Anyway, he can copy mustaches, and clearly ones that extend enough away from the face that you couldn't just paint them on. I guess since he's also changing his hair, he must carrying around some kind of synthetic hair he can like... insert into his face and head temporarily or something...? I don't really get it. It's definitely not that this power is OP, it's that it makes no sense. It would be better if they just said he was using magical powers instead of saying he uses make-up, I think...
The Actor has some cronies disguise as pentagon officials (he doesn't do their make-up, sadly; they're just wearing costumes) and they head over to Stark's lab. Stark's private guards are confused because Tony before said that no one is to enter his private office except himself, but now he's letting people in. Actor!Tony just says he's allowing them in now because they're pentagonners and the guards are just like, "K, boss!"
You'd think that Tony would have said something like "Don't let anyone in but me, even if I say so!" or something, or at least had some additional security besides just some guys sitting around. You know, like a retinal scanner or something. I know this is 1963, but he has a disintegrator ray, so he could probably at least make like a thumbprint thingy?
They start ransacking the office looking for the plans. While one of the lackeys finds the plans, though, The Actor stumbles upon Iron Man's folded-up parts. I don't know how he knew what they were or why Tony wasn't carrying them around in his briefcase like always, but he found them. And of course, conveniently for the plot, he decides not to tell anyone ever unless it's dire.
Though none of that is particularly important at this point because LOOK AT THAT FACE. Definitely not issue-41-Kirby-style creeper from close up. And I have to say that evil-scheming look on "Tony's" face... holy (Don) heck, that's hot...
A few drooling minutes later, we can continue reading the rest of the panels.
The Actor leaves on a plane, but for some reason, the goons dressed as officials are still in Stark's office. Well, I'm guessing their orders were to kill Tony upon his return or something. We see Tony talking to himself about how someone sent him a phony request to attend a emergency meeting or something. The baddies ambush him in his own office, shooting guns only at his torso and nowhere else.
Fortunately, Tony has the power of the Iron Man chestplate he always has to wear... and the power of indoor lighting! He turns the lightswitch off which makes everything pitch black (I'm assuming there are no windows in here?) and quickly changes into his Iron Man suit. He turns the lights back on and no one quests how Tony escaped and Iron Man suddenly appeared. Actually, it's probably not that sudden, because he has to unfold all the parts and put them on his body like he's getting dressed, so the dummies were probably fumbling around in the dark for several minutes while Tony got changed in the corner and they just-so-happened not to fumble into him.
Tony couldn't have left the room because he would have had to open the door, leaking light in...? And they would have heard it? Well, actually, did they not hear him changing his clunky metal clothing? Maybe it doesn't make sound because transistors or something, I don't know...
But yeah, Iron Man karate-chops their guns away and then hugs them until they give away that The Actor stole his disintegrator ray plans. They gave up the information from just one hug! But if Tony hugged me, I'd tell him anything he wanted to know, too, probably... But I mean, these idiots can't even see his mustache through his weird gold suit. Oh, maybe it has some kind of seduction transistors in it...? Or maybe they just thought he was gonna squish them...
Somehow knowing exactly where The Actor is at the moment, Iron Man flies off to go interrupt him. He catches his moving car with his bare hands. Well, his iron hands. And then... it's like tied up to a tree by vines? I'm guessing Iron Man did that, but it's not really explained.
We also get our first instance of "Does Khrushchev tell Kennedy?" which we'll hear a few more times going forward. Also, why does "Khrushchev" have so many H's in it? I have to type it very slowly to make sure I don't mess it up... But yeah, we also get a "By Lenin's beard!" later in this one, too.
So, Iron Man goes to the Red Barbarian's office and pretends to be The Actor (hoo boy). He has the attache case with the plans that he took from The Actor with him tied up in his weird tree-car cage. He tells Red that he was impersonating Iron Man in order to trick Tony, and he now has the plans, but they have a time-lock on them that will explode if it's opened in the next four hours. He takes the case with him (with everything Red Barbie did leading up to this, you'd think he'd demand they wait out the time bomb together, but no) and heads out to "take off the suit" for four hours and then come back so they can open the case together.
He then returns to the treecar to free The Actor. The Actor is ecstatic to be freed even without the plans, because he knows Tony's secret. He rushes off to tell Red, and Iron Man takes the plans safely back to his office.
When The Actor arrives at Red's place, though (which hilariously has posters of the hammer-and-sickle emblem on the wall just to remind you THEY'RE COMMIES!!), Red thinks that The Actor is trying to betray him by pretending to not know what happened and hiding the attache case. Now, if he was really planning on betraying him, wouldn't he have just run off with the case instead of coming back and pretending to be confused about it?
Red commands his lackeys to kill Actor, but Actor pleads with them saying he knows Iron Man's true identity. Considering that Red believes that The Actor had been disguised as Iron Man while infiltrating Tony's lab, you'd think that it would be reasonable to assume it's possible he did somehow learn Iron Man's identity, but Red doesn't believe him and The Actor is killed, with Iron Man's secret identity remaining a secret.
While there were a lot of questionable moments, I'd say this was definitely the most clever plot so far. The ending seems kinda hastily put-together, but I feel like in the 60's, you weren't challenged to really question stories that much, and just if the general idea was clever, it made for pretty good writing. You can see it in other 60's media, too, that this kind of writing is the norm, so I can't really complain that much. It definitely wasn't as ridiculous as the first three. Well, the gun magnet flight part was, but...
Our side-stories are a bit boring as always, too. I already forgot what the first comic was about by the time I got to typing this sentence, and the second one was about a prisoner who escaped to space, but the police knew he was there, so that's okay, I guess. And I guess I shouldn't complain about Kirby's creepfaces anymore, but this one was illustrated (and written!) by Larry Lieber, and he drew... this...
And since i promised I was going to read the prose eventually, I guess I'll go ahead and do it now.
K, I'm not going to do that anymore. Basically there was this weakling skinny dude who everyone made fun of and he wanted to be strong. And he had a car with a name that he talked to that seemed to "talk" back with car noises like an animal, though this is not relevant to the story in any way, but for some reason it was there. He met a farmer who was even skinnier than him, and the farmer could lift a car. He told the dude that he got strong by eating a magic candy bar and gave one to him but told him to keep it a secret. So main dude went to the circus and challenged a strongman to a fight for a thousand dollars. But then the manager called him a fake and reached into his pocket to find he had a magic candy bar that gives strength. But then main guy realized he didn't actually eat the candy bar and was just naturally super strong this whole time. So he ran away and carried his car home. The end!!!!!!!!
So, yeah. I'm not even going to comment on that. Let's get right into the handsome Tonys.
Actually, there are none. Well, there are some handsome Actors-as-Tony. I guess that kinda counts, but we're just gonna lump all of The Actor's good looks together:
The one as the senator is very nice~~ Though, of course, the Tony ones are great, too. And lounging back in his purple suit, even no-make-up Actor looks pretty fine.
It's hard to see in most of the illustrations (or impossible as it's not even drawn half the time), but Red had a mustache, too:
I'm not entirely sure how to refer to this style. It doesn't have the definitive grown-out sides of the manchu, but you hardly ever see a stache with the middle part shaved other than the manchu. It's like some sort of chevron-manchu hybrid. Maybe a half-chevron? Petit-manchu? Chuvron?
Either way, it's pretty hot, though I think it's intentionally supposed to make Barbie look more "Asian," and I'm not going to go into that rant again.
And with that, we've finished another issue of Tales of Suspense and another episode in the story of Iron Man.
