Tales of Suspense #81 – The Return of the Titanium Man!

Take that you anti-pro-registration, HUAC bridling, McCarthy invoking, hyperventilating civil libertarian Civil War partisans. Whatever one thought of a recent Marvel continuity event’s political and ideological positions one of the critiques that didn’t hold water for this reader of Iron Man was that he was “acting out of character” in the series.  Civil War, for those not quite up on Marvel events, was a 2006/07 seven-issue comic book miniseries, crossover event. The work built upon themes and events established in previous Marvel comic book series, most recently Avengers Disassembled and House of M. It featured a tag line for the series is Whose Side Are You On? It developed that that out of a catastrophic event involving superheroes that public opinion had become skeptical to hostile to about the masked superheroes who over the years since they had emerged had also come to regard themselves as a community. That community is split on the passage of a federal law that requires superheroes to be “registered” and licensed thus divulging their secret identities to the government to operate as lawful heroes. A war breaks out between superheroes as a result.

The opening panel Tales of Suspense #81 of picks up on a storyline that has building in the Iron Man portion of Tales of Suspense since perhaps introduction of Senator Byrd but at least since Tales of Suspense #72 when having defeated communism’s champion the Titanium Man. In that issue the Senator became convinced that control and the identity of Iron Man can not be left in the private hands of one man and evoked much of the Pro-SuperHuman Registration Act (SHRA) side’s argument that would resurface forty years later. Wrapped as it was in the question of Communism and conversely Americanism/Democracy/Capitalism it may have just read as a point of authoritarianism and a faith in systems when this was published than it does today about the very nature of republics born out of the ’state of nature’. This story returns to the ever present question of its day and the threat to national security by the Soviet Union. That’s not say that the reader wasn’t meant to tremble at the idea that Tony Stark being exposed as Iron Man way back when this was published; as the superhero genre has always predicated itself on the supreme sovereignty of the individual to be free to do as he or she does thanks to their mask.

As Tony Stark prepares to deliver himself to the committee in Washington D.C. he packs his attaché case with his armor and heads out of his apartment and into the custody of the police escort to the airport. At the airport however he ditches the idea of taking a plane to D.C. and dons his armor for the trip and exalts in the sensation and freedom of being able to fly in his own suit. Tony’s upcoming testimony is apparently big news as radio and television cameras are reporting on his arrival before congress. These same broadcasts however are also being monitored by Soviet equipment and since the defeat of their warrior, Titanium Man, have been redesigning and improving the armor for a second crack at the West and its stalwart. As the news breaks half a world away the Soviets load the Titanium Man into a rocket like a payload and send it into Washington D.C. itself.  A rocket launch on the U.S. however doesn’t go unnoted by American air defenses and interceptors are scrambled to hopefully bring the bogey down. Iron Man himself is in the D.C. airspace and moves in as well to avert the attack on the U.S. The issue ends simply with Titanium Man bursting from the rocket and diverting into a collision with the also airborne Avenger.

As one considers this very realistic portrayal of an international attack in a time of nuclear armaments on the nation’s capitol, one comes very close the fear that 9/11 invoked and was a throbbing background to everything sociopolitical in 1966.  Fact is, almost no comic was approaching the sociopolitical considerations of the real world to the extent that the Iron Man was at the time.  His co-featured character in Tales of Suspense, Captain America, who would seem to be the natural character to speak to America’s place in the world, spent this issue fighting a Nazi sporting a Cosmic Cube that could alter-reality begs the question of relevancy. More so it goes to the heart of the literary conventions of “realism” to address the social experience of a conscience in the world.  While many comics would address the questions of power and responsibility, particularly the superhero genre’s dedication to the ethical formulations of that relationship, very few venture in to the areas that Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau encompass.  At times Tony Stark is a veritable avatar of Rousseau’s “general will” and I think that is what makes people uncomfortable with the character in that it pushes its readers to think about individuals and systems in a way that faith in ideals can not.