Tales of Suspense #48 – The Mysterious Mr. Doll!

I read this with some disappointment as the story presented is just a genre re-tread of the kind that Tales of Suspense had done many times over before superheroes had become its mainstay but as an inferior version of converting it into a villain of ongoing interest. The Fantastic Four had already had such a derivative appear twice before this one appears in the year before; and with the better name of the Puppeteer. Mr. Doll in this case, uses enhanced voodoo dolls that take control of important people to wrest their wealth from them. Iron Man, through Stark, stumbles upon these schemes and nearly perishes at the controlling power of Mr. Doll. This provides the excuse for Steve Ditko to bring about the redesign of the Iron Man armor that we see bringing down the villain at the end.

What strikes me about this issue apart from the obvious first appearance a red and gold armor, that will remain as the main
identifier of the character right up to present day, is how his new red and gold armor Iron Man armor places him in a form that is more compatible with the genre that his creators were now with full intent committing him to. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s redesign were fitting him for a life amongst other costumed crime fighters. We should make no mistake here as to what that meant to them – the heroic fiction that some of them had been working in since the 1940’s but tapping into older literary themes and techniques. So as Stark dons the armor for the first time, in an elaborate three-page sequence explaining how the form-fitting components to connect and work, the new Iron Man, repeats the mythological/Homeric trope of cladding/arming of the hero that invests the moral hero with its power. This instinctive borrowing by Ditko is revealed in final panels in setting the armor’s redesigned face mask in place, to which its additional purpose is added by the odd explanation in text that “it enables my expression to show…which will psychologically aid in instilling fear in the hearts of my enemies!”

One might as well have said ’so that I can humanize this robot and tell more emotional stories visually’.  That however was not Ditko tipping the hand of what was going on but it is wonderful bit of overtelling by the scripter.