BHOC: TALES OF SUSPENSE #66

I also bought TALES OF SUSPENSE #66 during that trip to the Batcave comic book shop, and I did so for the most obvious reason: the copy I picked up was cheap. I bought it despite the fact that I already owned copies of the two stories that were published in it, in an issue of MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS and the BRING ON THE BAD GUYS volume, respectively. But what I was saying yesterday about age was a motivating factor. In my comic book collecting crowd, reprints were valueless, and there was always a certain amount of emphasis on the value of one’s collection. It was a way of justifying one’s addiction beyond simply a love of the material–this stuff is going to be worth big bucks someday. So the appeal of this as the original rather than a later reprinting was a strong motivator for me–as was the rock-bottom price. (I don’t remember what it was, but it couldn’t have been more than a buck or so.)

The lead-off story was an Iron Man adventure by Stan Lee and Don Heck that matched the armored Avenger against the undersea barbarian Attuma. stan had a strange fondness for Attuma, and after Jack Kirby and he had introduced him in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, he quickly had the baddie go up against Iron Man and Giant-Man in rapid succession. According to Steve Ditko, Stan also pushed the idea of Attuma battling Spider-Man at one point, but Ditko was able to convince him otherwise. I don’t know what it was, but something about the character grabbed Stan, at least for a while.

After a rocky start involving multiple assorted writer and artists and a complete redesign of the character, Stan finally had the Iron man strip working well. The secret, it turned out, was soap opera–the same thing that had been driving interest in Spider-Man. Stan and Heck built up a small coterie of personalities around Tony Stark and let their interactions become a driving force in the ongoing narrative. In this tale, Senator Byrd, the firebrand government man who dislikes Tony Stark, demands that Stark test the new submarine prototype he’s been developing for the military. Happy Hogan, who has been mooning over Stark’s secretary Pepper Potts (who only has eyes for Tony, ‘natch) demands that he be the one to test the prototype. But Stark knows it’s too dangerous to send Happy out in it and instead he chooses to do the deed himself in his other identity as Iron man. This causes Happy to quit and storm out.

We’ll make a brief stop here for a house ad showing off four other contemporaneous Marvel titles. for whatever reason, in this issue the covers are run in black and white rather than full color–possibly the coloring hadn’t been completed in time on them. Either way, it was still always cool to see these other books and ponder what wonderous stories might be contained within their pages.

Piloting the submersible, Iron Man stumbles across the undersea forces of Attuma, who are planning to attack the surface world with a colossal weapon they’ve devised. The Golden Avenger throws himself into the fray, despite being on a limited oxygen supply within his armor. In the end, unable to make it to the weapon any other way, Iron Man returns to his sub and sets it on a collision course with the gun. Both are destroyed, though Iron Man himself is able to get out before the blast. But he doesn’t want to tell Senator Byrd about Attuma’s aggression, so he has to let Byrd think that Stark’s sub was a failure. What’s more, Pepper is distraught over the fact that Happy has taken off. So this story reaches its end, but certain subplots are To Be Continued! That was the magic formula that Marvel began to employ more and more heavily, treating each of its series as an almost-unending serial so as to bring readers back for subsequent issues.

Next up is a one-page announcement about the impending Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page, which is couched as a central hub for members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club. What’s more, Stan intends to print the names of all of the members of the club in each issue, 25 at a time. This was a powerful motivator for fans to check out every issue of every title to see if their name had been printed, and it might prompt a fan to pick up a book that he might not ordinarily buy if his name was included in it. This was a pretty canny move on Lee’s part.

The back half of the issue was dedicated to Captain America. At this time, the strip had wound back the clock to World War Ii and was recounting Cap and Bucky’s adventures in that timeframe. In fact, Lee and Kirby were legitimately retelling and updating stories that had appeared in Simon & Kirby’s CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #1 decades earlier. this strikes me as Lee’s idea–it was easier than coming up with new stories. But having reintroduced the Red Skull last month, either Kirby or Lee recognized that his original origin as an American industrialist committing acts of sabotage and murder for the Nazi powers in exchange for a payday wasn’t conducive to what they imagined the character becoming. So with this issue, the stories became entirely new, though still set in that earlier period, and the team immediately retconned the story they had told the previous month (which might be something of a record.)

The story opens with Cap and Bucky having been captured by the Red Skull, who confirms that the Skull they had fought last issue was no more than a stand-in. Having Cap a prisoner, the Skull entertains him by telling his own origin: how he had been a nameless nobody whom Adolf Hitler had personally selected to be transformed into the embodiment of the evil ideals of Naziism. You can see a case where Lee diverges from Kirby’s intent on the page above: Jack’s art clearly shows the Skull coolly gunning down the Fuhrer’s chastised aide. But perhaps concerned about the Comics Code’s reaction, Lee scripts the scene as though the Skull merely shoots all of the buttons off the man’s uniform.

But it turns out that there’s a reason for the Skull’s storytelling. He’s buying time, because his scientists have subjected Cap to a drug that will deaden his will and turn him into a soldier fighting on behalf of the third Reich. And that’s where this installment is To Be Continued: with Cap giving a Nazi salute and the Skull announcing that he’s going to use his brainwashed super-soldier to assassinate the commanding general of the Allied armies.

And the issue wraps up with a single page letters page, Mails to Astonish, which also includes the month’s Mighty Marvel checklist. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for commentary, but Lee makes the most of what he’s got to work with.