Tales of Suspense #90 – The Golden Ghost!

The Melter story continues with Tony Stark under the gun to create a miniaturized version of the melting ray gun for the Melter. He complies playing to the Melter’s ego and feelings of dominance such that he alters the new ray to have a flaw but the arrival of the police at the plant press the villain into a desperate situation and he blasts Stark to seeming death before heading out to confront the cordoning law officers. It is this police action which offers one of the issue’s as they also hold at bay the gals that Tony has been accruing in his playboy spree of late.

Thinking that the cops are all he has to contend with The Melter begins to toy with them while Tony revives and dons … his old golden armor?

At the start of this issue in Tony’s lab we had seen the Melter exercise his ray guy on a standing suit of the old gold armor which splashed the title for the story as “The Golden Ghost!” other than that we have little reason as to why this suit is hauled into action against the Melter; other than Lee reaching back to a story he had done once before that gave him a chance to show new readers the old original suit in action back in Tales of Suspense #65. This idea of showing off old versions of the armor would become a stand-by in the title for many years  as little give back to readers about the history of the character and a way of asserting that the advances of the armor weren’t the source of Tony’s success only the means.   That the man not the machine makes for a hero, regardless of technology or powers, was a kind of Humanism thrust of all of Stan Lee’s novelistic comic writing and that many would emulate in following on in his creations.  Archie Goodwin would be the next guy to dig out the old armor in #18 but that is for another post way ahead while the next takes us to Cuba and the The Crusher.