By the summer of 1963, the Marvel creative team had had the time to not only gather feedback on the Iron Man stories published so far, but also learn from the successes of other series. Without being too familiar with the Fantastic Four comics, I can only presume that as the longest-running reliable seller, a lot of the learnings would have come from that direction. But my personal experience with the Amazing Spider-Man, whose bread and butter was human drama and relatability, leads me to believe that the first few adventures of the wisecracking web-slinger were starting to shape into something of a template for what makes a character work.
That's why, I'd argue, we started to see the emergence of recurring supporting characters, engaging villains, and moments of struggle for the main hero in the Iron Man stories featured in Tales of Suspense around this time. The character was hardly interesting in its conception, but starting with #45, you can watch the creative team figure out the formula in three issues, much like chipping away at stone to uncover the sculpture hidden within.
Tales of Suspense #45:
"The Icy Fingers of Jack Frost!"
- Writers: Stan Lee & Robert Bernstein
- Artists: Don Heck
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: June 11, 1963
- Cover Date: September 1963
I can tell I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with Iron Man lacking drama, supporting cast and interesting villains: this issue must have been Stan Lee and the team responding to just that set of criticisms. We spend a lot of time introducing Happy Hogan, and a good moment with Pepper Potts as well, and aside from him arriving to his car on the first page, we don’t even see Iron Man until halfway through the story. We deal with Stark’s condition in the most dramatic fashion so far, when he nearly runs out of time to recharge his chestpiece, and in a relatively intense moment of him crashing his race car.
Jack Frost (not to be confused with another character of the same name from the 1940s) isn’t the most interesting villain in comics history, but he’s leagues above any of the previous Iron Man bad guys – for one, he at least has a backstory, and a personal link to Stark that motivates him as an antagonist. It’s basic, but it checks the minimum requirement boxes of a villain that's more than just a disposable target dummy.
I appreciate the attempt at irony of the idea for his ice tech coming from a passing quip by Stark, even if it’s a little hoaky. There was an opportunity here to make him a tragic case of misfired technology – Jack Frost intentionally turns himself into a supervillain, but he could have just tried to make himself live forever with his ice tech (while maybe trying to get back at Stark some other way), and a freak accident would have turned him into a super-villain. That’s a common trope of course, but it would have given the character a bit of extra punch.
With the addition of named characters alongside the protagonist and a villain that we might remember after closing the book, Tales of Suspense #45 marks the moment where the minds behind Iron Man figured it out; for the next two issues, it would only be a matter of closing in on the specifics of what makes a good Marvel story. You can already see it take shape here, just barely out of focus.
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| Art by Don Heck. © Marvel Comics. |
Tales of Suspense #46:
"Iron Man Faces the Crimson Dynamo!"
- Writers: Stan Lee & Robert Bernstein
- Artists: Don Heck
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: July 9, 1963
- Cover Date: October 1963
The debut issue of one of the more recognizable Iron Man villains takes a step beyond good – it stays on the track set by the previous issue, introducing an interesting antagonist with a plot that makes some sense, executed with a smidge more success. It's a story growing out of Cold War anxiety with a fury, and that context actually makes the story even more charming.
We see Stark stumped by the villain for a moment for the first time, unable to fix the situation of the sabotaged plants. In fact, he never figures out how to track his enemy down, but instead Crimson Dynamo approaches him at his home and offers the opportunity for a confrontation. As Iron Man, he’s still as infallible as ever, but it’s refreshing to have him play defense for a bit before resolving the issue.
While the resolution itself is sort of abrupt and a little too clean for my taste, there’s some good narrative mechanics at play here: the solution comes from Stark turning Crimson Dynamo against his country by drawing on the endemic Soviet mistrust. Said mistrust is set up extensively in the introductory scene where the Soviet Premier constantly fears Vanko is trying to kill him. Even if Vanko’s turn is a little fantastical and easy, I count it as a win just because of how it was promised in the beginning and consistently paid off at the end.
Crimson Dynamo also works well as a villain, even though his exact power is a little bit unclear at this point. He’s honestly frightening, and his ability to explode entire facilities without anyone even knowing he’s doing it is genuinely pretty intense. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have replaced the intro panel of Iron Man trying to rescue the men in the rocket in the Vince Gilligan -esque flash-forward with a shot of the Crimson Dynamo demolishing the facility – that would have generated more curiosity for me than unknown astronauts in a rocket that’s clearly going to be rescued by Iron Man.
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| Art by Don Heck. © Marvel Comics. |
The threat is resolved by Tony Stark cleverly fooling Vanko into believing his government is going to turn on him as soon as he finishes the job of eliminating Stark -- which is implied to actually be the case, too. The villain, who was powerful enough to actually compete with Iron Man, just giving up his evil plan is a little shocking in a good way, even though this wasn’t even the first time this happened in an Iron Man story. It works better here than with the Kala story from Tales of Suspense #43 because the trigger for the turn is seeded in the story early, not introduced out of nowhere at the critical moment.
It's a bit of a missed opportunity to not have Dynamo beat Iron Man first – the page count surely must have been a part of the reason, but I certainly expected a guy with electric powers to have some kind of dramatic moment with the hero who’s dependent on electricity to live. Not having that come into play at all is a little disappointing, but I can only imagine that in a full-length mag we would have gotten an extra act, and then there would have been space for not just one but two encounters between the characters.
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| Art by Don Heck. © Marvel Comics. |
Tales of Suspense #46 builds directly on top of what worked in the previous issue. This was Stan Lee, Robert Bernstein and Don Heck no longer just filling pages with a shotgun blast of vaguely sci-fi pulp adventures -- they were going somewhere, and they had hit on something definitive that they could refine and reproduce. They were close enough now that you could pinpoint the exact remaining problems with the story, and fix them with a focused effort.
Tales of Suspense #47:
"Iron Man Battles the Melter!"
- Writers: Stan Lee
- Artists: Steve Ditko
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: August 8, 1963
- Cover Date: November 1963
If the previous two issues fixed the lack of supporting characters and interesting villains, then #47 addresses the last lingering cardinal sin hamstringing Iron Man's takeoff: Iron Man itself was uninteresting and hard to identify with, because he has no meaningful weaknesses and never fails.
The issue continues the same trajectory as the previous two, as if Stan and the team knew they were circling around a formula that works, and they were just sculpting the template to get closer and closer. Steve Ditko temporarily replaces Don Heck as the artist, which doesn't change the dynamics that much here, though the touch of the Spider-Man co-creator can certainly be seen in the layouting of the action scenes in particular.
In the Melter, we have another completely passable villain with a meaningful motive and a power that not only makes sense, but directly counters Iron Man’s advantages; this time we do address the villain being a significant threat to Stark specifically, due to his dependency on a device that the villain can destroy, rectifying the omission from the last issue. The Melter isn’t as cool as the Crimson Dynamo, but he’s mechanically very similar, almost to the point of coming across as a second draft of the same concept.
Rectified also is the long overdue reasoning for the secret identity - it’s just a passing line, but at least now Iron Man does establish that the criminals he’s crossed would come after him if they knew his identity. That doesn’t explain why he needed the secret identity in the first place before crossing any criminals at all, but it’s better than nothing.
We also get a tweak in the pacing that I was missing in the previous issue - the Melter defeats Iron Man in their fist encounter, setting up another fight later. The solution is a logical, concrete one too, if a bit cheesy: Stark builds an aluminum suit to nullify the Melter’s power. The Melter can still melt other things, however, preserving some stakes for the final fight.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
Like with the Crimson Dynamo, the setback in this story places Stark in a position of disadvantage, and we even get a moment of self-doubt. We now clearly draw from the learnings Stan and crew have gathered from titles like FF and Spider-Man. The solution shows resourcefulness and cleverness, which is always more satisfying than punching harder, or firing the Instant Victory Science Weapon.
Tales of Suspense #47 is what I'd call the first genuinely good Iron Man story, and the first one that feels appropriate to consider a part of the same universe as Fantastic Four or the Amazing Spider-Man -- if not in terms of quality, then at least in its narrative makeup.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
While the series still doesn't compete with the greats with its storytelling, and the thematic depth isn’t necessarily there, we’re now consistently maintaining a quality that's reliable because of the mechanics are all in place: the problems from the early issues have been fixed basically across the board, and we’re in a nice groove of familiar core cast mixed with cool villains and some clever storytelling. There's still a lot of untapped potential in the Iron Man brand, chief among them the characterization of Tony Stark -- our hero is still relatively bland and monotone, and his weakness hasn't come into play in any meaningful way. But we've finally reached the point where the premise works, and we have a reason to care.
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