Our look at the comic origins of Marvel characters actually comes to a close with Iron Man, leaving only the Avengers origin left on my list before we start heading into actual story arcs. Iron Man was a character who didn’t really click with a lot of people until Mr. Downey Jr. came along, I enjoyed the early 90s cartoon and I liked playing as him in the CAPCOM vs. fighting games, but even I didn’t really find him all that interesting for a lot of his early stories. Does this revisit to his very early days change that? Erm, well… sort of! It’s a mix of dull and often racist stories and fun and hilariously weird ones.. Let’s take a look!
The first issue does play out in a very familiar fashion to the now-classic film adaptation, though thanks to being released in the 60s Tony Stark is creating weapons for the US army to help fight in Vietnam rather than the Middle East. Either way though Tony is a cocky womanising dick until while out on the field he trips a booby trap and is left critically injured, soon found by soldiers speaking in proper “Me talk simple! Me Asian!” accents who take him to warlord Wong-Chu, who finds out that he’s a big deal weapons creator but also that due to the explosion he has shrapnel near his heart and that he’ll be dead in a week. Wong gives him a lab and tells him to make weapons for him, and soon Stark gets a new guest in physicist Professor Yinsen, and together they create a metal suit of armour with a chestplate that will keep the shrapnel away from his heart. As the suit is powering up Yinsen causes a distraction at the cost of his life, giving Stark time to fully charge the suit and break out, setting Wong-Chu on fire and into an exploding ammo dump on the way out. It’s a good and still very unique origin, it’s no wonder the film kept so close to it (without the blatant racist stereotyping, anyway) but the caricature artwork of the Asian characters are a little hard to take seriously in 2025, for good reason!
Those not your words? Ahh soo, choppy choppy, um… chopsticks. Classic.
The next issue doesn’t waste time going straight for the weirder side of 60s comics as after painting his armour a shiny gold colour Stark’s next opponent is a large neanderthal-looking man called Gargantus who is holding a whole town hostage by fear, but after Iron Man outwits him and fires a beam he finds out Gargantus is actually a robot… a robot created by aliens who are hovering above the city in a flying saucer. Iron Man tosses some large magnets at the saucer to destabilise it, and the aliens fly off saying that Earth wasn’t this dangerous 80,000 years ago when they last visited. Bloody weird second adventure for Iron Man, that’s for sure! The second issue has Doctor Strange, a villain that predates the hero of the same name obviously, try to hold the world to ransom with his “S-Bomb” but his daughter helps Iron Man eventually defeat him thanks to tossing him some plain flashlight batteries after his suit was drained of power. Having to literally plug his armour into a wall socket all the time is an issue for early Iron Man that comes up in most issues as a wall to stop Iron Man from winning too early. It’s… an odd crutch, and I’m glad they didn’t go that way in the film!
The fourth issue has Iron Man, of course, come up against the evil “red commies” as a large Soviet agent called The Barbarian hires a master of disguise simply called “The Actor” to trick Stark into giving him the plans to his latest weapon: a disintegrator ray (Tony is still supplying weapons for the military here, by the way… no “I will no longer create weapons” for THIS Tony Stark!) Iron Man outwits him, then Stark heads to The Barbarian and pretends to be The Actor playing Stark and then leaves before releasing the actual Actor. The Actor returns to the Barbarian and apologises for letting Stark go but says he has found out something more important, but before he can reveal Iron Man’s secret identity he’s shot dead by the Barbarian’s men, who due to thinking he’d already came in a few hours ago, suspected this one was fake… idiots. The next issue is bizarre as Iron Man is dragged to deep beneath the Earth’s crust where a woman called Kala rules over a technologically advanced nation and once again tries to enlist his services against his will so she can conquer “the surface world”. He eventually escapes the situation by outwitting their technology with nonsense like “reverse energy beams” and such, then he pulls her to the surface where she mysteriously ages to an old woman, so she decides against invading the surface world and instead is content with just ruling her “netherworld” kingdom. I wonder if this highly advanced civilization deep beneath the Earth is ever mentioned again?
These three panels are deliberately out of context because that makes them somehow funnier than what they actually are… which is still pretty funny!
It only gets weirder from here as the next issue sees a 2,000 year old mummy come to life as Hatap reveals he took a magic potion that put him in suspended animation and then uses the “Chariot of Time” to pull Tony Stark/Iron Man back in time so he can help him defeat his nemesis Cleopatra. Iron Man outwits and defeats Hatap and turns down Cleopatra’s offer to stay and rule ancient Egypt and returns to his own time. The next issue is important as it features the debut of both Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan but otherwise it just has Iron Man face a generic villain with ice powers called “Jack Frost”. Issue #46 has Iron Man face the first of his classic foes as he takes on the Crimson Dynamo, basically the evil Soviet version of himself. The Dynamo sabotages several of Stark’s factories in an attempt to take down Stark Industries by ruining their reputation but Iron Man manages to overpower him. The next issue has Iron Man faces what he must surely fear the most: “The Melter”, a villain with the power to melt iron using his weird red chest piece. Admittedly he gets round this new villainous threat by creating a new suit made of aluminium and then swiftly defeats him, but hey-ho. It was worrying for a while there, I’m sure!
Wow! A tiny ultra-sensitive… tape recorder. Massive suit of armour that fires lasers and still using tapes, eh? …. Great stuff.
We get the debut of the red and gold armour in the next issue as Iron Man has to change to a lighter suit when “Mister Doll” uses his power to control people’s bodies if he creates clay dolls in their image and nearly crushes him to death. It takes a few attempts but once again Iron Man creates a bit of nonsense tech to trick Mister Doll into holding a clay model of himself and when the shock causes him to drop, um, himself he gets knocked out. We then get our first crossover as Angel from the X-Men gets accidentally caught in a Stark Industries weapon explosion that “turns his personality to evil” leading Iron Man to take him down and cure him. Professor X actually calls the Avengers for help, but Stark was the only one around who could help, showing that we’ve once properly crossed the crossover craze threshold. Lastly, and luckily, Tales of Suspense #50 features the debut of The Mandarin, the “evil yellow-faced fiend from Red China” who uses martial arts and a set of ten magic rings to get the better of Iron Man for some time before he uses more technobabble to upgrade his suit so that it causes the Mandarin great pain when he tries to chop him, giving Iron Man a chance to escape from his evil lair. Super cheesy, super 60s racial stereotype, but I was glad I could include the iconic villain’s first appearance in this Iron Man origin review!
Overall Thoughts:
How come Iron Man never used the phrase “Who’s laughing now, Sunny Jim?” in the films?
Iron Man’s first 11 issues are a real weird mix of political “evil Asians and Russians must be stopped” racist stereotype stuff and stories dealing with aliens, time travel and deep under-Earth societies. I really enjoyed the latter, not so much the former, though at least being “of the time” meant it didn’t upset me or anything, but that doesn’t mean they were good stories! I’ll settle for somewhere in the middle then, as a lot of these 60s comics have landed in. Will the Avengers origin change that trend?! Find out next time!
Hogan Reviews 