The citizens of Granville erect a wall around their city at the command of a massive Neanderthal man with mysterious hypnotic powers. Investigating the disappareance of one of his girlfriends in the city, Iron Man uncovers an alien scheme to conquer Earth!
Notes:
- We see Stark carrying his armor in an attache case for the first time. The collapsible sections are stored in a hidden x-ray proof compartment. Stark unrolls them like tin foil and "microscopic transistors" harden them for action. One wonders if Stan Lee even knows what a transistor is.
- Iron Man dispatches a crazy guy with a shrinking ray in a mere two panels. Crazy Shrink Ray Guy doesn't even rate a proper name, nor do we see him actually shrink anything. Perhaps the biggest loser in super villain history.
- The Iron Man armor starts to crimp Tony's style. In Monte Carlo, a beautiful woman begs him to strip off for a moonlight swim but our hero is forced to make lame excuses about "sudden tiredness" to avoid taking off his shirt and exposing his secret.
- The unnamed alien invaders are terrible procrastinators, only getting around to their attack 80,000 years after their first reconnaissance of Earth. Expecting to find a bunch of primitive dummies, they're quickly frightened off by Iron Man, who rips apart their slope-browed robot, Gargantus, without clutching his heart even once.
- Tony is back in the States after his first adventure in Southeast Asia. A sampling of the somewhat, um, mixed public reaction to Iron Man: "Ugh!" "Momma! Momma! *sob* Save me from the ugly man!" "Oh! How dreadful looking he is!" Stark coats his armor with gold paint when his girlfriend, Marion, suggests it might make him more appealing to the public. This thinking will one day lead to the infamous "nose armor" . . . The fact that she suggests a new color scheme to Stark that suddenly appears on Iron Man does not seem to register on Marion.
This issue is illustrated by an uninspired Jack Kirby with fairly crisp inks by Don Heck.
1 comment:
Great work.
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