After surviving years when it was at best a second-tier title and at worst an afterthought, things were beginning to look up for IRON MAN. The current creative team of writer David Michelinie, penciler John Romita Jr. and inker and co-plotter Bob Layton built upon what their predecessor Bill Mantlo had done with the strip while simultaneously updating it, making it sleek and contemporary. Gone were the Cold War plotlines, replaced by modern corporate intrigue. Tony Stark himself got a bit of a makeover into a billionaire of the moment and found himself surrounded by new and interesting supporting cast members, including Bethany Cabe, Jim Rhodes and Mrs. Arbogast. What’s more, the combination of Romita’s solid storytelling fundamentals and Layton’s slick armored finish had the character looking better than just about any other time in his history.
Michelinie and Layton were taking some of their cues from the popular James Bond films, re-imagining Tony Stark as a figure who could walk through the most exclusive and expensive places in society, and who lived a life of stylish opulence. We weren’t quite in the era of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, but their take on Iron Man presaged that concept. Additionally, the medical woes that had gone from being an Achilles heel to an ever-present drawback had been discarded. There wasn’t any more talk about Tony’s injured heart putting him out of action. If anything, Iron Man became more dynamic than ever before, more prone to smash his way through any opposition with his technological might. In essence, Michelinie and Layton played him as an A-lister, and so he became an A-lister almost by default.
Recently, Iron Man had been experiencing unexpected and often life-threatening malfunctions in his armor, and as this issue opens and he’s flying back home after his last adventure, it happens again, causing one of his boot jets to fire off randomly and sending him careening into a nearby building. Realizing that something is definitely wrong, Tony examines every inch of his armor’s systems upon returning to his home offices, but he finds nothing amiss. Unsatisfied, he then sets out to put the armor through a series of performance tests in the hopes of identifying the problem.
But it’s all for naught. Try as he might, Stark cannot get to the bottom of the problem. And so, exhausted by his efforts, he decides to put the matter aside and get on with the business of being Tony Stark. That means checking back in at his office, where he finds an irate Bethany Cabe waiting for him. Cabe is worried about Tony and rebukes him about his bad attitude, especially as concerns Rhodey, who is in the hospital with injuries sustained in protecting Stark. Tony offers Beth a drink and turns on the charm–Michelinie and Layton have been subtly layering in the concept that Tony is self-medicating through the use of alcohol for a couple of issues already, and this plotline will become a front-burner matter in a couple of issues. But here, it’s seemingly just a minor bit of business.
By way of an apology for his behavior, Tony gives Bethany a Dior original gown and takes her to Atlantic City for a romantic getaway. But as Tony goes to open a second bottle of champagne, Bethany stops him, telling him that he’s maybe going at the booze a bit too hard. So instead, the pair exchanges one vice for another, heading into the casino for some high-stakes gambling. However, by a sheer coincidence, this casino is the target of a heist at that moment being carried out by a trio of Iron Man’s old foes: Blizzard, the Melter and Whiplash. The trio is able to break into the vault, but they wind up tripping an alarm as they do. In response, Tony dashes off with his briefcase, intending to become his armored alter ego.
So the remainder of the issue is a pitched battle between Iron Man and his enemies–one intended on some level to showcase how much mightier Michelinie and Layton were treating Shell-Head these days. In the past, any one of these guys might have given Iron man a problem for an issue or two, but here it takes all three of them working in tandem to make him break a sweat. Attacks that affected the armored Avenger in the past prove ineffective this time against his improved armor.
But we’re drawing to the close of the issue, and there’s a need for a compelling cliffhanger to be set up. And so it is, as the three villains combine their powers in a single attack. The disparity in temperatures between Blizzard’s icy rays and the Melter’s disintegration beam causes Iron Man’s armor to seize up as it attempts to stave off both extremes simultaneously. And with the Avenger momentarily paralyzed, Whiplash takes aim, intending to shatter both the armor and the man inside. To be continued! It’s maybe not the greatest cliffhanger ever put to paper, but it gets the job done here. And if nothing else, the whole issue is zippy and fun in a way that IRON MAN wasn’t typically in the past.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I really enjoyed this Iron Man era. The whole Fire ( Melter ) & Ice ( Blizzard — hated that they killed off the original ) thing doesn’t really work with the Official Handbook description for how the Melter’s beam works ( a magnetic induction field generator that could project an energy beam of the specific frequency required to loosen the binding forces between iron atoms, causing objects constructed of iron and steel to liquify ( thus apparently melting ) — hence why Tony never suffered burns from his “melted” armour ). Unless they killed of Whiplash/Blacklash too, he would be the only one still alive among this Super-Villain Team-Up.
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The layouts and visual storytelling moves Layton makes here are off the charts. I don’t think there’s better a better interpreter of ol’ Shell Head than Layton. JrJr of course is great, but look at how Layton can be so spiffy and imaginative on page 6, then on the final page — just a nice, restrained panel to show how boxed in Iron Man is.
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I agree that the layouts are impressive, but Bob wasn’t doing them, JRJr was. The finishes were great too, though.
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Let me amend what I just said. Sean Chen working under Kurt Busiek is up there too. Their run on Iron Man is so good — no wonder aspects of it made it into the MCU.
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I was never a big Iron Man fan. Strangely, I liked him in the Avengers but couldn’t care less about his own book. This was a time when I was at least looking at his book and thinking, maybe I will pick up an issue or two.
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This was a typically neat issue in this run. Art-wise very solid especially in the finishes… JRJR was still finding his way when it came to body proportions imo, but you could see the improvement issue to issue.
I prefer a more powerful Ironman. Mantlo’s was tough enough for me, but the Michelinie/Layton version really moved him up several notches to where he was beleivable as the “second strongest Avenger.” Gone were the days when he could be staggered by mobsters’ bullets or knocked over by a falling computer bank. I’d hazard to guess that there were fewer Marvel heroes with lower showing sthan Ironman considering he could crush cannonballs and catch rockets.
I recall that the Red skull on the cover was considered a clue in a letter page but was dismissed as an inadvertent coloring choice.
This is probably my favorite run of Ironman comics though I haven’t read it in years. Even though it’s very much of it’s time I imagine it probably holds up pretty well more or less. Tony with a constant girlfriend softens his playboy leanings to a degree where the “ick” factor is way reduced.
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We definitely got to see a powerful Iron Man in The Avengers#165 ( November 1977 ) when he overrode his suit’s maximum output limiters and poured every iota of its energy into a few concentrated blows, hoping to match Count Nefaria’s power and deck him. He say’s his strength is being amplified to an unbelievable level! Only seconds before it fades, though!
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I was a fan of this run, too, for the Bondian suspense and the great-looking art.
I was a little resentful of it, though, because I’d really liked the Mantlo run and was sorry to see him go, so it took me a while to warm up to characters like Mrs. Arbogast and Bethany; they felt to me, at first, like intruders, wiping away the stuff I’d enjoyed from the past.
My big two gripes, though, were that I always thought this era’s Tony Stark was a very low-rent billionaire, with the unbuttoned shirts and the gold chains and the semi-sleazy come-on lines; he felt more to me like a guy who would be hanging out in clubs in Jersey rather than a classy international jet-setter. And I was a huge fan of Madame Masque, and it seemed clear to me that none of them knew who she was, since she’d made such a sudden pivot from “girl brought up in the criminal demimonde but with a good heart” to “remorseless killer.” I had at one point semi-sold Denny on a MADAME MASQUE mini-series that would have “repaired” the character (at least to my mind) that evaporated when he left Marvel and returned to DC. And then I used some of that in AVENGERS, bringing the character back from death and making her morally conflicted again. But that didn’t last, and I had to learn the lesson: What a character is like in a popular run will resurface, regardless of what went before or after.
Still, no one can say Dave, JR and Bob didn’t catapult the character into the top ranks, whether I wanted to hold on to some earlier aspects or not.
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Wiping away the previous team’s IM supporting cast became Layton and Michelinie’s MO.
I liked Mantlo’s run quite a bit and I liked Madame Masque. When I eventually went back and read Goodwin’s Ironman run I was a cemented fan.
I’d like to see a not crazy/criminal Masque again. I think that’s become the character’s default.
The Tony in this era does come off a bit skeevy which was at least more accurate of the times than the stiff 1930’s aristocrat portrayal that dogged him sometimes. I take it as an effort to maybe throw off the Vietnam era munitions magnate aura by embracing 70’s-80’s hedonism? Tony could be borderline tacky but at least he was no longer a stick in the mud?
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Yeah, Tony was definitely in the need of some modernizing. I just didn’t think he felt like a millionaire playboy. More Tony Manero than Tony Stark.
But it worked for the audience of the time, even if it didn’t work as well for me.
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This was the run that made me an IRON MAN fan. Michelinie, Romita, and Layton were clicking on all cylinders.
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I had been reading Iron since about 1973 and never had a problem with how weak a character he was. It’s just what I bought into because he was a lower tier character when I started. Layton and Michelinie changed that forever. Everyone who did a story after about a powerful Iron Man with complicated foes and problems owes them a debt of gratitude. This is even when I liked Romita’s art. I wish he were still being serviced by men like Layton and Dan Green.
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Art on this issue was sublime. Romita Jr and Layton IMHO were are the very top of their games and I rate their work right up their with Byrne/Austin. The first page title Splash may very well be definitive!
Of course the story-line is pure all-time classic and added so many layers of depth to Tony Stark who prior was pretty much a cookie cutter character.
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This was the first issue of Iron Man I ever bought. The DC Implosion left me with more spare change than there were DC comics to buy. So I started looking at Marvel titles to buy. I think I got this one because I was happy to see this is where Bob Layton got to. (I loved his inks over Joe Station for Justice Society and Rich Buckler for Secret Society.) I really liked what I saw in this issue of Iron Man and made it a regular purchase from the ol’ spinner rack from here on out.
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This was a great time to be a Marvel fan. X-Men, Daredevil and Iron Man were each in the midst of great runs. Not too shabby for “B-listers”.
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