Tales of Suspense # 39 – Iron Man is Born

Noted as the first appearance and origin of the Iron Man, one is struck by the early Marvel economy of storytelling in getting this much done in so few panels as by the ‘realism’ and Vietnam in a comic. Iron Man, or rather the Iron Man portion of the Tales of Suspenseissue, serves up another example Marvel compressed classics which almost rivals the masters like Ditko and Kirby in this shorthand of image and texts. The artist, Don Heck, sets a remarkable feeling of realism that, with perhaps with the exception of Daredevil at the same publisher, set this origin apart from the style that many might think of as the breakthrough of Marvel. In fact picking up the book in 1963 one might only feel the Marvel style from one of the three comic stories that comprise the issue done by Ditko and followed the amazing tales form rather than superheroes that Stan Lee was giving a try.  Iron Man could just as well have been seen as another Ant-man which had been floated in Tales to Astonish a year before in two 13-page stories.

As context their strange tales were petering out from 1959 to 1962. Marvel was also expanding its line of girl-humor titles during this time right before Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man broke onto the scene in 1962

 http://en.marveldatabase.com/Tales_of_Suspense_39

In 13 pages we have the introduction of Tony Stark, his near fatal encounter in the jungles of Vietnam with a mine, capture by communists, the transformation and turning of the tables with the aid of Prof Yinsin and the downfall of his captor Wong-chu.  The link above does solid summary which belies the brevity of the actual.

What is striking in the ambition of Lee and Heck’s 1963 look, setting and politics is in suggesting the next incarnation of the long-running American adventure comic strip by writer-artist Milton Caniff of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon fame.   Were they trying to tap into that success or simply mining the cultural landscape as the company would do in the decades hence? It also raises the question of what if the superhero trappings hadn’t taken over the book so heavily but that of course might just as well have left Iron Man as a one failed experiment rather than have pursed its own course in expanding the bounds of the genre. Some might ask if this just points out the Superhero is just a sub-genre of heroic storytelling but I hope to get back to that point at a later time.

It is perhaps with an anachronistic hindsight that one may wonder about a more grounded and developed narrative that could have been but as we are talking about publications that might have aspired to more but also faced many real and perceptual constraints about the medium.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they work through some of those in the future issues.