BHOC: IRON MAN #115

This next issue of IRON MAN was the preamble to what would, in time, be considered one of the very best runs that the title had to offer. His arrival had been touted on the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page all month, and so here was John Romita Jr., the son of Marvel legend and art director John Romita, taking on his first regular ongoing assignment. JRJR would become perhaps the most natural and effective Marvel-style comic book storyteller of his generation, but at this point, he was just starting out. So while the work here is certainly of a professional level, John hasn’t quite gotten the experience necessary to catapult his approach to another level. Still, his appearance immediately made IRON MAN, a title that had been mostly anchored by longtime artists, primarily George Tuska, look a lot more modern.

This would also wind up being the last issue of the series written by Bill Mantlo, who had done a great job of pulling the character out of the doldrums and getting him back on the path to stardom. I know that IRON MAn was a n assignment that Mantlo relished, so I don’t know whether this change was his choice or was foist upon him by other parties. But as this issue ends smack-dab in the middle of several plotlines that Mantlo had been building up for some months, I tend to think his departure was unexpected. Still, I can’t say that with any certainty. JRJR was inked in this first outing by Dan Green, a good inker, but one whose style wasn’t all that simpatico with what JRJR was doing. As such, a certain stiffness in the figure work is accentuated rather than played down, and some of the line work, particularly on Iron Man himself, feels artificial and robotic.

As the issue opens, the Avengers are finishing the task they’d shown up to do last month before the attack of Arsenal: transporting Iron Man’s defeated foe the Unicorn to where he might get medical attention. Iron Man in particular is interested in who saved the Unicorn and sent him to destroy Tony Stark’s company, so the Armored Avenger hooks his foe up to a memory extractor, and we are treated to a series of flashbacks to both older issues and new in-between material. Here again, the identity of the Unicorn’s benefactor is concealed but it is obvious to any long-standing Iron Man reader. While this is going on, from afar, another figure is spying on Iron Man, working out the defenses of the place and preparing to assassinate Tony Stark. This is another plotline that Mantlo wouldn’t get to finish up, although his successors moved into it with the same overall solution.

At this point, no closer to discovering who it was who struck at him from the shadows using the Unicorn, Iron Man is ready to resume his everyday like as Tony Stark. But before he does so, he needs to deactivate the Tony Stark Life-Model Decoy that he’s been using to stand in for him over the course of several months. Many of the beats of Mantlo’s run contained echoes of Archie Goodwin’s earlier stint on the title, and Archie had famously done a storyline in which a Stark L.M.D became semi-sentient and tried to displace him. I don’t know if that’s where Mantlo was going with this subplot, but he’d never be able to take it to fruition, and in this instance, his successors went in a different direction.

And so, Tony returns to his penthouse apartment, hoping to get in some quality time with his girlfriend Whitney Frost, the former Madame Masque. But after he navigates the security measures that he’s put in place to safeguard his home, he is suddenly attacked as soon as he steps into the place. His assailants are a quartet of super-villains from Marvel’s past, alternately known as the Ani-Men or the Unholy Trio (though now that there are four of them, that sobriquet no longer applies.) These guys typically mix it up with Daredevil, so they don’t seem like a huge threat for Iron Man to deal with–if he was wearing his armor.

Accordingly, Tony Stark gets his ass kicked by the quartet of animal-styled villains, almost losing his life when Ape-Man accidentally hurls him over the balcony. All during the one-sided fight, Stark’s only real seeming concern–apart from surviving, of course–is the whereabouts and safety of Whitney Frost. The Ani-Men, though, prevent him from getting to his attaché case and the armor secreted inside it, And without it, he’s just a regular guy. As the four Ani-Men circle him, Tony is struck down from behind by an unseen figure, the identity of which should be obvious to all simply from this description.

That’s right, it’s Whitney Frost, Madame Masque, who has betrayed Tony and let the Ani-Men, her hirelings, into his private quarters. In a recent AVENGERS story, her father, Count Nefaria, was prematurely aged into infirmary. Now Whitney wants Tony Stark to undo this process–and rather than simply asking him, she’s chosen instead to attack him and force him to comply, in the manner of the criminal syndicate the Maggia which she and her father used to run. With a powerless Tony Stark down and out, that’s where this issue if To Be Continued!

And since we mentioned it above, here’s that Bullpen Bulletins page that heralds John Romita Jr.’s arrival on IRON MAN, as well as a number of other things that were then going on. While my interest would wax and wane depending on just what was discussed every month, these Bullpen pages really did do a good job of humanizing (or at least caricaturing) all of the assorted people who were then working for Marvel. It fostered a family feeling to the place, unlike the somehow more corporate and cold DC.