The Invincible Iron Man #15 – Said the Unicorn to the Ghost…!

George Tuska had been working on the Iron Man title for over a year and at 53 years old seemed to really get into the swing of things rather remarkably by not only updating his ’golden age’ style and talents but by also capturing the shift in the times of the youth reading the publication. Goodwin and Tuska both shift gears rather quickly away from the Cold War origins of the two villains that appear in this issue and indulge in the rather “trippy” aspects of this story.  The Jimi Hendrix inspired story title itself sets the reader on notice that the times they are a-changing with the allusion to Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”.  The Red Ghost isn’t even really an Iron Man foe originally but a Fantastic Four hold over that, as a renegade Soviet scientist, shares similar fate to Milos Masaryk.
Both the Red Ghost and the Unicorn are victims of Soviet and by extension any government grab at power for its own uses. The villains here are motivated not by some grand ideological struggle but are simply trying to make their own way in the world as individuals with the hand that they have been dealt but the system. The system in this case just happened to be the Soviet Military. Back in Tales of Suspense #56, Masaryk was just a Soviet intelligence agent assigned to security duty at the advanced technological weaponry laboratory of inventor Anton Vanko who created the code-named Crimson Dynamo armor and also gave forth the technology of the Unicorn. It would be the effects of the Hyper-Activator treatments that Soviets would subject him to in Iron Man #4 that would haunt Masaryk with a deteriorating disease sapping his life force and in this story leaves him enthralled to Ivan Kragoff for injections. The Red Ghost’s motives are not clear at the start of this story but do provide the impetus of this two part-er as well as the underlying theme of power and its distorting effects on the mind and morality.

It’s not such a stretch to say that the drug culture and politics of the late sixties had taken hold of the themes and styling of the issue and potentially the series at this point and was leaving behind the Cold War foundation of the title character. The issue itself begins with an induced hallucinatory experience of the Unicorn guided by the Red Ghost in his lab reworking the last encounter with Iron Man in battle to “correct” Masaryk’s sanity. By itself this hearkens to the LSD experiments of Timothy Francis Leary that resurfaced on May 19, 1969 as The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States over Marijuana who had risen in the public eye from oddball to Futurist. The dependence on drug injections for power highs by the Unicorn though confirm the counter-culture perspective that steers the storyline. As I said it isn’t clear at first but the Red Ghost has lost his powers and is using the Unicorn to steal a device from Tony Stark that will enable him to “fix” his condition not cure the Unicorn of his own. The action of the issue bears on the theft of a cosmic radiation inducement device being delivered to a desert testing ground by Tony Stark with his SHIELD escort Jasper Sitwell via futuristic aircraft.

It is however the visual dynamics of the issue that sells the theme and period shift going on in the story as Tuska clearly goes for the ‘far out’ head trip in the details of the story. Elements like the aircraft and lab design are just some of the surreal aspects employed by the artist to contemporize the superhero story being told. Tuska also has just absolutely arresting perspectives in use during the fights to grab the reader and that’s even before the trained apes show up.  Needless to say at this point but upon getting his hands the cosmic ray intensifier the Red Ghost goes on his own power trip and juices up his own abilities and then his trained apes before turning on the Unicorn and blowing up his own secret base to finish off both him and Iron Man.  The issue itself leaves off with that image of the ghost town erupting in an explosive FTOOM! as the Red Ghost jets away from the scene.  The next issue would have to resolve just how did our hero get away in time from such devastation.

The only thing worth further mention is the letters page, Sock It To Shell-Head, which features in its lead-off letter a exhurberant note from a University of Georgia student Robert M. Leen praising Marvel for put out “a philosophic treatise depicting the nature and aspirations of contemporary society.” and I couldn’t agree more.  Iron Man as a comic however would be as much a dialectic hereafter as the thesis out of which it had been born.