The Invincible Iron Man #6 – Vengence…Cries the Crusher!

Last seen in Tales of Suspense #91 – The Uncanny Challenge of the Crusher! being driven under the earth’s surface by his altered gravitational state due to Tony Stark’s centrifugal device, the Cuban-esqe Crusher frees himself from the center of the Earth and attacks a spy outpost of his former masters. The Crusher’s also overdeveloped ego has him set on one thing – immediate revenge on Iron Man. The writer this issue pulls together a number of prior story elements that seemed to have been languishing for a while as we see the return of the orphaned Janice Cord, the sexpot and secret Maggia boss Whitney Frost and the earnest boy scout SHIELD agent Jasper Sitwell who loves her.

The Crusher catches up to Iron Man testing out a new Stark battering ram for SHIELD under the supervision of Jasper Sitwell at the Long Island plant. While Whitney Frost has infiltrated Stark facilities using Sitwell as a pass into the site she takes further advantage of the chaos caused by Crusher and starts into the advanced weapons test areas. Whitney, however, is captured by the Crusher after being caught in a hail of debris and Jasper tries to save her forcing Iron Man to knock Sitwell out so that he can deal with the Crusher without anyone getting hurt. With a hostage now Crusher demand that the centrifugal force device that buried him once be brought to him to turn upon Iron Man as just revenge. The device is brought and true to his exact word, Iron Man turns it over to Crusher but the device can not be worked with the Crusher’s massive hands and fingers resulting in an explosion of the device. Seizing the opportunity which he had created, knowing that the device would be useless to his foe, Iron Man jets in and carries the threatening  over the ocean where he drops in the struggle, where his massive bulk causes him to sink to the ocean’s floor. Back at Stark Enterprises, Iron Man finds a humiliated Jasper dejected that Iron Man saved Whitney from the Crusher leaves to “prove” himself to Whitney to close the issue.

Goodwin plots this issue rather mechanically to get certain pieces in place and yet deliver what each individual issue promised to its buyer’s expectations of action, fights and villainy defeated.  Crusher serves as a rather generic bad guy paying only token note to his communist nation of origin and literally cruises in on a slow boat to allow a conflict  to build with Whitney Frost and Jasper Sitwell complicating the relationships with Stark and his alter-ego with them hereafter by the issue’s conclusion.