Iron Man is born!

[iamrman]

Tales of Suspense #39.

Plot by Stan Lee

Script by Larry Lieber

Art by Don Heck

You all know the story by now, millionaire philanthropist Tony Stark is captured and he makes a suit of armour to escape.

Comments

[zachbeacon]

"Look out commies, I have transistors"

-Silver Age Iron Man

[beyondthefringe]

In the '60s, transistors were fuckin' magic. :)

[deh_tommy]

What even *is* a transistor? At least the way Iron Man uses one? I remember one issue of Avengers he took apart Captain America’s shield and stuffed a transistor, every issue he was in he’d say transistors at least once.

[beyondthefringe]

Beats me. All I know is they make modern electronics go and do stuff. The better the transistors the better the technology?
Which means for comic books they’re miracle machines.

Like radioactivity in the 60s.

[donnblake]

Imagine if modern day Tony kept insisting that proprietary Stark transistor technology was the key to all his tech. Like the dinosaur in Atomic Robo's crystals.

[scorntx]

"It's plugged into the wall."
"Plugged in to TRANSISTORS!"

[blues32]

And this transistor allowed Cap to control the shield in the air. Like he needed it. In the previous issue with the lava men, he was able to make it bounce around a cave and sever a bunch of stalagmites before he was "cinderized".

[scorntx]

Yeah, that, uh...
That's a bunch of racist stuff in that origin story right there.


There was a bit in the Fraction run where Tony's wiped his mind, and he remembers the TOS version and immediately after coming out of it just goes "what the what? Where'd I even get a trenchcoat and fedora in the middle of a freaking jungle? And what's with all the wrestling nonsense? My brain is fried..."
Don't particularly like the Fraction run, but that was pretty funny.

(And later on, in the dramatic origin story of how Tony met Rhodey, we learn the fate of that trenchcoat.
Rhodes shot it.
RIP, trenchcoat.)

How can you, the reader, not love a character with such a lack of self-awareness as Tony Stark?
"Who knows what fate awaits me? I'll have to go back to being your ordinary, boring, run-of-the-mill playboy billionaire industrialist! The agony!"

Meanwhile, somewhere in Latveria, Doctor Doom just scoffs and goes "please. Doom managed to make a nuclear powered jetpack in a mountain cave in Tibet, alone!"

[agent8]

"Yeah, that, uh... That's a bunch of racist stuff in that origin story right there."

How so?

[scorntx]

Well, the main villain is an Asian man drawn with yellow skin called "Wong Chu" and who speaks in (intermittent) broken English.

[agent8]

Wong Chu (or Wong-Chu) is a legitimate Chinese family name.
Referring to himself by using his name (instead of I or me) is pretentious, but no worse than when Doom does it.

the coloring we can attribute to the restricted palette available to comic colorists of the time.

The intermittent broken English - it's not his first language and he's under a pretty large amount of stress.

Would it fly today - no of course not. But you can't judge it by today's standards because it wasn't published today.

[starwolf_oakley]

IRON MAN REQUIEM (2009) #1. It has a reprint of TOS #39 and IRON MAN (Vol 1) #144. It takes place during Matt Fraction's run when Tony is on the run, and Fraction wrote the "framing sequence." Kano did the art.

Mark Waid's BLACK WIDOW series revealed Natasha was the one who kidnapped Professor Yinsen and brought him to Wong Chu.

[scorntx]

Any particular reason given for why Nat kidnapped him, or was she just in a kidnap-y sort of mood that day?

[starwolf_oakley]

It was a KGB/Red Room assignment for Natasha. The sliding timescale being what it is, maybe it should have been updated to "the Russian Government."

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I just kinda figured he got the clothes from the enemy camp.

[agent8]

I have to give props to Wong Chu. Having a filing cabinet filled with rocks sitting at the top of the stairs just in case he needed to shove it down on someone chasing him shows some serious contingency planning skills.

Now if only he'd put his ammo storage site a little further away he'd have been home free.

[trooper924]

Very much a product of its time--and not just with the 60s racism, but also in the fact that it's the sort of pro-American/anti-communism material that Marvel often did in its early years before public opinion really turned against Vietnam.

[bravest_spinja]

That Vietnam went horribly wrong is something that could easily dated Iron Man beyond repair, but over time sort added a level of complexity to him, and sadly it wasn't too hard for the movie to update the setting to the War On Terror, of made him fit in with (and reach the popularity of) "original sin" characters like Spider-Man and Wolverine.

Critics of superheroes say they're fascist or super right wing, (When a Dem is President, it's because they operate outside the law, when a Republican is President it's because they uphold the status quo, which probably says a lot to how much of that sentiment is expressed in good faith) but I think it's always interesting that most Communist adversaries never took hold. Largely a lot of Lost Causers or maybe revanchists like Omega Red. They were at their nadir of popularity in the comics in the 50's, and it's funny that moviegoers are losing interest in them around the time the West's relationship with and China and Russia is at its tersist. (Granted, Russia is hardly Communist now, but some have accused Putin of sort of being Soviet brained)

[super_fly]

"First I shall remove my clothes-"
"Oh *my*!"
"Shut up, George Takei!"