A mere four years after the dawn of the Marvel Age of Comics, Stan Lee was already mining its history for fresh story material.
For example, in When Titans Clash! (Tales of Suspense 65, May 1965), a small-time burglar, Weasel Wills, turns big time when he manages to acquire Tony Stark’s attaché case complete with Iron Man armor. Wills launches an armored crime spree, and Stark must don his original, bulky armor to take him on.
Iron Man first showed up on newsstands in December 1962, with the first major change in his armor appearing in September 1963.
Wills’ theft has the incidental effect of revealing Iron Man’s secret identity to him, and after the real Iron Man corrals him, it seems that the thief will expose Stark to the world.
But he doesn’t. Drunk with unaccustomed power, Wills has gone insane. “Take your hands off me!” he rants. “I’m Iron Man! … Can’t you see? I’m Iron Man!”
“It’s a good thing Iron Man didn’t really go bad!” muses Happy Hogan. “Nobody would ever be able to stop ‘im!”
“Perhaps!” replies Stark. “But sometimes a person can seem to possess all that anyone could ever want, and still have … nothing!”
Narrator Stan intones, “So, once again, America’s youngest, most handsome, wealthiest tycoon enters the solitude of his private office … with his private secrets … and his never-ending private sorrow.”
Tragedy and pathos “…was Stan Lee’s thing, he was always thinking of Hamlet and stuff like that, artist Don Heck told Lou Mougin. “You knew at any time he could die, his heart could go out on him, stuff like that. That to me is a hell of a lot better than, say, the Terminator in the movies; that no matter what you did to him, you couldn’t kill him.”
Lee reached into Marvel prehistory for the issue’s other feature — a retelling of Captain America’s first encounter with the Red Skull in March 1941.
Nathan J. Bennett:
ReplyDeleteWell, when you name your kid “Weasel”, what sort of career do you expect him to have?
Charles W. Fouquette:
ReplyDeleteI bought this issue off the stands, back in the day, because I was intrigued to see the new Iron Man battle the old Iron Man. As it turns out, that after all these years, it's one of those tales that I never forgot. The Capt. America tale was just icing on the cake! Great post, Dan!
Mark Engblom:
ReplyDeleteI've always been a sucker for any issue of Iron-Man that featured the earliest armor models, especially the original grey version. It's usually as a "last resort" on Tony's part to overcome whatever challenges robbed him of his much more advanced model. Like a high-tech "Golem" figure, it more often than not plods out from some darkened corner to save the day in blunt, primitive fashion.
Johnny Williams:
ReplyDeleteAhhh Dan, those were the Days when ‘Marvel Magic’ was still in it’s ascendancy stage and Everything coming out of ‘The House Of Ideas’ as they called themselves, was new, exciting, and different.
Salvatore Marlow;
ReplyDeleteThis story showed it wasn’t the suit that makes a superhero, it’s the man inside.