Never has Iron Man faced so deadly a foe as... wait. That's not very threatening-sounding. I mean, he's faced less than a dozen foes at this point, and half of them were weird stuff like some animals at a zoo or a make-up artist who can do mustaches, too. I mean, when you have a zappy beam that can destroy an entire metropolis, are your foes really that deadly? And if worse comes to worst, just eat a battery.

That's right friends, we're back again, hot off the presses from July of 1963! This month, it looks like Iron Man is going to be facing off against a woman for the villain this time. We already learned that in the Marvel Universe, women are masters of fashion and can choose colors that make giant robot suits go from terrifying to adorable with just a coat of spray paint. But how do they stack up as evil masterminds? We'll have to find out! (Please don't be a seductress, please don't be a seductress, please don't be a--)

This month's episode is illustrated by Jack Kirby again, so we'll get to see if the CREEPY FACES come back. Spoiler: they don't! I guess that really was some kind of time-management issue, or just... a really rough month for poor Kirby or something. Faces are looking normal again, and the albeit less-detailed Tony faces are looking handsome as ever and giving Don Heck's art a run for its money. Berns is yet again on the writing, and Heck is doing the inking again. I'm not sure if inking includes coloring or if the work goes back to Kirby for colors. These days inking would mean the black lines only, or at least that's what it means to me, but they don't list colorists in these things, so... no clue.

This time we start off at Stark's laboratories again. There's some kind of wind tunnel with a giant missile inside of it, where they're... performing... some kind of test. But the control panel explodes for no reason!! And tornado-class winds are bursting out of the tunnel! In fact, they send the missile crashing into a mountain in the distance, blowing up the whole thing. And even though these winds can pick up an enormous, heavy missile and fling it across the countryside, it apparently can't blow people very far, because they're hanging onto poles and stuff and managing to stay together pretty well.

One of the workers calls up Stark, who of course "calls up" Iron Man. And by that I mean he gets naked and puts on the Iron Man suit. Ah, yes, the reveal I've been waiting for! We now learn that not only does Tony carry around his Iron Man suit folded up in his attache case, but he actually takes his regular clothes off in order to put it on! That means, for us mustache enthusiasts (which should be everyone, honestly), we are gifted with the realization that Tony strips for us every single episode of these comics. Kehehe.

So after our little striptease, Iron Man rushes out to the wind tunnel, which doesn't seem to affect him at all. I doubt he's heavier than the missile that blew away earlier, so I'm guessing this is another miracle thanks to TRANSISTORS. And this isn't the only miracle we're going to witness. Everyone knows that the only way to stop a tornado is to throw an opposite tornado at it, so Iron Man hops into the air and just starts... spinning around. Yup, he becomes a "human fan!" The power of the two winds blowing at each other causes a huge explosion which somehow stops the problem.

8)

Afterward, Iron Man rushes off to change back out of his costume (and yes, we get another stripping scene, from a little closer up so we can also see Tony has pretty hairy arms lol) so he can run back to everyone as Anthony Stark so that no one gets suspicious. Because Iron Man and Tony always immediately running away and then the other appearing isn't suspicious at all.

And since one disaster was just solved, Tony makes the 'logical' decision to leave his attache with Iron Man's suit stored inside behind in his office, because it's a law of the universe that two disasters can't occur within 17 minutes of one another or something like that. I don't know. But guess what's going to happen! Wah-wah!

Pretty much as soon as Tony arrives on the scene, people start disappearing. Everyone's screaming and no one seems to know what exactly is going on. First Jim, then Evans...

And then a weird thing appears around Tony! No one has any idea what it is, not even the readers.

Whatever this polygonal thing is, it can't be broken, and Tony seems to be trapped inside. It even starts sinking into the ground! The workers nearby pick up their conveniently-placed sledgehammers and start whacking at it, but it won't bust open. It's a good thing it wasn't fragile, or they would have just smashed Tony in the process. They even try shooting at it with a gun (who even knows where the bullet ricochets to...) but no dice. The thing keeps sinking until Tony is completely underground.

Tony compares the phenomenon to being aboard a super-natural elevator. And indeed, as he continues to descend into the Earth, he finds not lava or anything like that, but... a weird laboratory!

Tony is greeted by Kala, Queen of the Netherworld. Tony seems surprisingly calm with the whole thing, just thinking it's pretty neat that there's a civilization in the core of the Earth. He may be a technological genius, but I guess he's dumb as rocks when it comes to geology.

We find out that Kala was attempting to summon Tony here because she needs the power of TRANSISTORS to get back to the surface of the Earth. Apparently her people were once the people of Atlantis, which sunk so far it actually sunk into the Earth's core (????) and they've been living down here ever since. They seem to be more technologically advanced than the surface-dwellers of Earth, except for Tony, who's more advanced than anyone ever. They have all the tech they need to destroy and conquer the surface once they reach it, as well as the ability to destroy the surface from within the core if they wanted, but the one thing they can't do is actually move from the core to the surface. And that's what they want to do the most.

We also find Jim and Evans -- I guess their tech is kinda buggy because they were brought down by mistake when they were trying to bring Tony to the core. I don't know why they didn't just use the instant-teleport thing on Tony, too, but for some reason he got his own special impregnable crystalline elevator thingy. Well, I don't know about impregnable but it's bulletproof and unsledgehammerable. But yeah, that's never really explained.

Kala tells Tony that if he doesn't help them build a transistor device to reach the surface, she'll kill him, Jim, and Evans! And even worse, if they don't get any help, she has a device that can make the Earth's orbit messed up so only the people in the core can survive on the planet anymore or something. Evans says to Tony that he thinks Kala is lying about the second part... but how would he even know? Like, there's no evidence to really base any assumptions on right now except for the whole... she teleported you from the surface to the core of the Earth in seconds thing... which, uh, hints toward phenomenal power in my opinion, but... I guess that's none of my business...

Anyway, so Evans says she's lying and that the three of their lives are worth far less than the lives of the entire human race, so Tony shouldn't help her build an elevator to the surface. Tony says he disagrees and wants to help out. Kala just knew he would be quick to turn his back on his own people to save his own life! Tony says all he needs is a lab with lots of tools and materials and absolutely no interruptions.

So it seems like Kala didn't end up being the generic seductress type after all! Maybe Marvel was even listening to the struggles of women back in the 60's, like Gene Roddenberry and friends were.

Just kidding, they're as ignorant as ever. Kala's top commander Baxu escorts Stark to his new lab. Tony sees it as the perfect opportunity to get inside Baxu's head, because obviously a man would not normally take orders from a woman! And simply because she exists and is hot or something, he must also "love" her, but it seems that they're equating "love" here with "finding her beautiful" with absolutely no distinction.

Now, you'd think if Baxu belonged to this entire society of people led under a matriarchy... maybe, just maybe... he would have different values and thoughts regarding women compared to the surface-dwelling misogynists...? But no. And Tony doesn't even bat a (beautiful) eyelash when responding, "Why should you?!" when Baxu complains about having to take Kala's orders.

Uh, but Baxu has a beard with a prominent mustache, and in some panels only the mustache is detailed. So that's good, right...?

Anyway, let's continue our story. Tony's life is threatened and he has no way out but to build some instrument of death for his foe, who for some reason gives him all the tools and stuff he wants with no supervision whatsoever. This sounds... like something I've heard before. I wonder what Tony will really end up doing in that lab? He's certainly not ready to sacrifice the entire surface population of Earth to save himself, right?

Well, as you probably expected, just like the story a few issues ago, he uses the free secret lab to build Iron Man. Again! This time it's a replica. You think maybe he would have worked in some upgrades or something, but he didn't... at least he remembered to do the spray paint!

Well, I guess he should make it as similar to the original as possible, since he's trying to trick everyone into believing that he actually went to the surface and told Iron Man to come down to the core while he was in the lab. Yeah. Everyone buys it, too! Like, running away and coming back as Iron Man wasn't suspicious enough, but now he's saying he literally dug through the entire Earth to call Iron Man and people are just like, "okie, makes sense!"

Anyway, Iron Man has a little confrontation with Baxu, but instead of defeating him, he says that Tony spoke highly of Baxu. They had only one exchange, and it was just "wemmen are stooped and I don't want to take a orders!" and that's what got him on Tony's good side...? I mean, I guess he's still trying to manipulate the dude but really whyyyyy in our first episode with a female villain did the key to victory have to be sexism...?

So they tussle for a bit, and then Iron Man comes out into the open to face Kala. She tries all kinds of tricks on him like using a GIANT disintegrator ray (But does yours fit in a flashlight, Kala? Didn't think so!), shooting some homing missiles, and more. Iron Man just TRANSISTORS them all away, though. He then throws a bunch of tiny mirrors on the floor which somehow activate his kage-bunshin no jutsu and he confuses the crap out of Kala. With her mind blown, he grabs ahold of her and takes her to the surface by using a pair of clippers that look like sheep-shears or something to just... cut his way up to the surface! While flying! There's some other fail science like the entire underworld being contained in a glass dome, and no problems coming from busting open said dome to drill out of the core, but... at this point we really need to stop questioning things.

And just when you thought this story couldn't get even worse, Iron Man reaches the surface with Kala and... she turns OLD! Dun-dun-dunn! Oh, she's like the crypt keeper! Yup, apparently the "different atmosphere" makes her turn old (?!) which Tony somehow hypothesized would happen. So seeing that Kala and her people have the opportunity to explore and understand an entirely new world and culture, befriending the surface-dwellers and exchanging ideas... she decides it's completely not worth it because she won't ~look pretty~ here.

Kala "learns her lesson" and goes back to the underworld, where she begs Iron Man to stay and be her King so he can rule instead, but he says instead she should marry Baxu. And then he tells Baxu to rule wisely and stuff as if he's already the ruler and Kala is suddenly a pointless side-character in this episode.

So the moral of this story is that the only value women have is in their beauty, and that only exists when they are young. And if they somehow succeed in any other way, it's because they did something wrong and forgot that their beauty and submission to men is the most important aspect of their entire existence.

To top it all off, we get a man and woman talking about Tony once he's back, saying at least since he was trapped in the Earth's core (yes, everyone learns of this and just accepts it as reasonable fact) it kept him away from the ladies for a while. Tony's fixing his tie in the foreground and thinking, "that's what you think, bub!" so we solidify the idea that even Kala was just to be interpreted as another object of Tony's sexual conquests or something...???

But yeah, what seemed promising for a second at the beginning completely fell apart into this crap.

But there's one redeeming thing here -- not only did Kirby show us he doesn't always have to draw creepfaces, but he drew us a whole slew of Handsome Tonys to look at!

Look at all those! A total of 9 hot Stark Staches in a row. And if you count the two-fers, there's a grand total of a whopping eleven! A new record! Kirby's gone beyond redeeming himself, and I'd say he's got me lusting over Tony even more than Heck and his facial detail. Granted, Heck didn't get much of a chance with last month's script hardly having any Tony in it, but still. At least in the hot stache dude department, things are looking up for this series. As for the writing and character development and stuff... uh... maybe we'll see Carla again in the future? Kinda doubt it. Oh well, mustache fanservice. Let's just keep chugging forward! Until next time, keep stachin'~