Tales of Suspense #89 – The Monstrous Menace of the Mysterious Melter!

The Melter is such an obvious cooked up counter to our hero Iron Man that back in Tales of Suspense #47  it showed all the thinking of a game of rock, paper, scissors in creating a villain in a genre for juveniles. Marvel may have aspired and pressed the genre toward a more literary and complex art form but that didn’t eliminate being aware of its audience. In 1963 superheroes hadn’t advanced much beyond cops and robbers, good vs. evil fights that the Golden Age had established. While superhero comics would be the poorer if it ever did away with using broad strokes and potent iconography, character development and borrowings from other genres had given books like Iron Man an older or least more sophisticated readership that could place their comics on the same level as other media they were consuming by 1967 when this issue hit the newsstands.

Reflecting this in this issue are number of pages that fill out the character’s psychologies of both hero and villain.  Tony Stark only appears as Iron Man at the close of page 7 of the 12 pages which otherwise concerns itself with Stark rebuilding his factory and trying to get Pepper Potts off of his mind. Two of those seven are devoted to the Melter conversing with his cell mate and executing his escape from prison. While Gene Colan had well come to favor doing a single page panel in just about every issue to deliver a dramatic high mark these often involved a key point in the action or tension but here we see him use the page as a montage of images relating to the state of mind of Tony rather than just putting the reader in a state.  What we had seen up to the page was the Stark the industrialist and a heroic act at construction site to save Pepper while rebuilding the factory plant that had been destroyed by the Mole Man. with this page he throws himself into his playboy persona in the hopes that is will consume him.

When the requisite fight does actually happen in the issue between the Melter and Iron Man it is fight of personalities, desires and emotion as much as it is about the technology at odds.   Colan’s art delivers all of that as the Melter puts out a punishing attack that sends Iron Man into retreat after saving plant workers that were endangered by the Melter.   The Melter, it turns out, also has enhanced his beam technology such that more than metal can be effected and Tony discarding his damaged armor wonders what he can do to counter the villain’s destructive path through Stark Industries.   He does have much time however as the issue concludes with his being taken captive in his labs in his civilian garb.  Once again it is Tony Stark that is the center of the drama and the key to all the subtext of the series.