Iron Man in the 1960s
Unlike my other primers, there’s not really much I can say about the first 20 issues of Iron Man. Like the other Avengers-adjacent books, the publication of Iron Man came following the end of Marvel’s horror/sci-fi books. The first 20 issues were written by Archie Goodwin with art by Johnny Craig on the first few issues with duties taken over by George Tuska for the remainder of the decade.
Goodwin is a decent writer, but these early Iron Man stories are always a slog because they are so dated. For example, in issue #3, Iron Man upgrades his armor boasting how he is replacing the transistors with printed circuits. While these were marvels in technology at the time, it’s less impressive-sounding reading these stories almost 60 years later when transistors and circuit boards are commonly found in every piece of electronics. It’s quaint what the writers considered cutting edge technology back then compared to today. However, it’s unfair to judge them based on this alone.
Goodwin can be given props for at least moving characters away from wearing bulky ridiculous costumes that were common in the Stan Lee/Don Heck era of Iron Man, giving a much needed revamp for the Unicorn and setting the stage for a new Crimson Dynamo (who won’t appear until the 70s) He also did away with the tired trope of Tony Stark fretting over the shrapnel in his heart. While some kind of health problem will always dog Tony Stark until the 2000s, the old “shrapnel-in-the-heart” plotline was a hindrance to stories. You can’t fault early writers for giving super-heroes a single Achilles heel since that was a common trope at the time. It’s good to see Marvel take a step off from something normalized by the competition at DC, realizing that giving a super-hero a constant crutch — a Kryptonite if you will — limits storytelling.
Speaking of shades of Superman, it’s also interesting to note issues #9-12 and 17-18, which featured Tony having a Life Model Decoy of himself to protect his identity. Since LMD’s came onto the scene in the Marvel Universe it seemed like they would be used to protect a hero’s secret identity, a trope that was commonly used by Superman over at DC Comics, who at this point frequently relied on a squad of Superman robots to help maintain his secret identity. I cannot stress how frequently Superman used these robots, leaving one to wonder why he bothered fighting crime at all when he could just have robots to do it. Archie Goodwin at least took the time to come up with an explanation why this was not going to be a constant loop-hole for Marvel’s heroes: That the idea of using a robot duplicate was far too much trouble than it was worth.
Anyway, that’s all I really have to say. 60’s Iron Man under Archie Goodwin won’t win awards for being the best Iron Man, but it at least did away with all the crap that Stan Lee stuck with when he was phoning in plots.
