Issue 170: And Who Shall Clothe Himself in Iron?! // Iron Man: Reforging a Hero
It’s May 1983, and Henry “Superman” Cavill is born on the third. Scientists announce their discovery that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes the condition known as AIDS. In this new era of science and superheroes, another major change has just happened. For those who caught our last article, Tony Stark has fallen off the wagon so hard that he has become unable to function as a human being, much less Iron Man. Wanting to help out someone he considers his best friend and boss, James Rhodes has chosen to don the armor of the Iron Avenger.
And he has no idea what he’s doing.
And Who Shall Clothe Himself in Iron?! is by the usual group of Dennis O’Neil, Luke McDonnell, Steve Mithcell, Rick Parker, and Bob Sharen.
Rhodey holds the hemet up high above his head, almost deifying the armor itself. He hesitates, obviously a nervous wreck. Not only is this Tony’s thing, but even Rhodey can admit to himself that he has no idea how Tony does anything in the suit of armor.
Hearing the combat against Magma in the distance, James realizes he has no choice and seals the helmet over his head. Luckily, him and Tony are close enough in size that the armor feels like a second skin. He’s got this!
We hope.
Rhodey also finds himself locked inside Tony’s secret sanctum, which somehow recognizes that the Iron Man gauntlet holds a different hand within. Ripping through the solid titanium wall, James realizes he’s going to need a crash course on his armor. Since Tony is still unconscious and likely won’t be in the mood to help Rhodey, the all-new Iron Man walks right into the R&D lab for Stark International and runs into new character Morley Ewrin.
Morley is hyped to help out Iron Man, who everyone still thinks is Tony Stark’s bodyguard. After all, Stark’s armor is some of the best tech on the planet at this point, and Morley is literally just two weeks into his job! He does have an odd question, though.
Rhodey charges out to tackle Magma and his mammoth machine. Literally!
While he’s down, he’s far from out. Rhodey jets back up into the air and cracks wise against Magma’s rambling. It’s only been a couple of pages, but Rhodey has already proven to be a different hero from Tony. While Tony’s Iron Man has been known to banter, it’s always been to make fun of the enemy. Rhodey is self-deprecating, pointing out that he eats up humiliation with a spoon! In a way, it’s injecting a touch of Spider-Man to the usually serious Iron Man, and it works really well.
Flying off for a quick think, Rhodey tries to plan. Magma’s suit is ridiculous, and Rhodey barely even knows how to run the new armor. Luckily, most of this model of Iron Man armor is mostly automatic, so the built-in AC unit kicks in to counter the boiling liquid spewed by Magma’s mechanical spider. However, Rhodey knows the lay of the land, Stark International. And what is there a gigantic tank of?
90 cubic feet of liquid oxygen erupts in a massive fireball that seems to take out a chunk of Stark International. For those who don’t know, liquid oxygen is remarkably combustible, and is one of the main items used in making fuel for space rockets. As such, it’s a miracle that Rhodey and Tony’s armor survive such a stunt. Magma’s probably out for the night, right?
Oh. Crap.
Luckily, the techs at Stark International are able to get the main power up and running again. This rouses Tony Stark, and he notices the “impostor” wearing his armor and fighting Magma. Tony figures he needs to stop both of them, and needs to break out some older armor. Fans get a peek at the old V-head version of the armor that Tony used to wear as he tries to open up a locked case with an identical-to-the-current armor.
Tony is still suffering, and his drinking has caused his brain to be coated in proverbial fuzz. Frustrated, he screams and pounds the case before going off to get a drink of whisky to clear his head.
Meanwhile, Rhodey has run out of so many ideas that he’s taken to throwing rubble at Magma.
I actually didn’t catch this reference as a kid. Likely from the fact that I was born in 1985, and wasn’t huge into baseball until 1996 with the semi-local Seattle Mariners. Fernando Valenzuela was, at the time, a professional baseball player for the LA Dodgers. His pitching was dominant, with a heavy use of the screwball, and he even helped take the Dodgers to the World Series in 1981… which was also his rookie year. He had a healthy career as a pitcher, and even made it into the MLB Hall of Fame in 2014.
So yeah, dropping a baseball reference isn’t something Tony normally does. It’s a nice touch to make Rhodey instantly feel different, along with the attempts at banter.
Rhodey retreats once more to talk with Morley Erwin about the armor, but Morley can’t make heads or tails out of a lot of the suit. It’s beyond what anyone else was teaching at MIT, and possibly beyond what anyone else has done on the planet. Feeling even more screwed than ever, Rhodey takes off as he realizes that Magma’s reached the very building Tony Stark is resting in.
Tony isn’t taking it well.
However, rescue comes from an unlikely source. While Rhodey is trying his best to prevent a clawed arm from crushing the building and his friend/employer, a steel-clad knight streaks out of the night sky and fires a projectile from it’s lance. Power explodes, and the monstrosity loses power instantly.
Yes, Obadiah Stane has sent his remaining Knight to take out Magma before it wreaks more chaos on what he feels is his. It’s a solid example of “only I am allowed to destroy you,” and it allows Rhodey to still win the day while underlining how screwed he really was.
Unfortunately, Magma had an escape hatch, and found the door that Rhodey ripped open to get out of Tony’s secret lab. And he’s found Tony!
Rhodey isn’t far behind, and the two face off in a duel. Magma spews his molten material across the lab, luckily not thinking of Tony as a threat. Dodging is far easier than flight, as James realizes he can move almost like a gymnast, dodging molten blasts without thinking. Getting overconfident in himself, Rhodes tries out the banter some more.
It’s just enough to distract Magma. Rhodey still gets splashed by the spray, but he’s unharmed. Tony rouses himself enough to suggest James use the arm-mounted repulsor rays, and the blast throws Magma into the case we saw earlier, shattering the glass… and burying Tony under the suit of armor. Rhodey is now cornered, and Magma takes aim and-
Luck is once more on Rhodey’s side on his maiden voyage as Iron Man, with Magma’s suit running out of whatever he was shooting. Delivering a solid punch, Magma is sent flying into the arms of the cops. James drops the massive walker off the local junk yard, and goes to find Tony. The man seems in better shape now, and has even dressed himself.
Tony doesn’t want the armor back, though. He claims whomever wears the armor is Iron Man, and that he just wants to “relax and have fun.” Not answering any more questions from Rhodey, Tony runs off to have cocktails with a random actress for lunch, and Rhodey doesn’t take it well.
Watching Tony go off to kill himself with alcohol, Rhodey realizes that maybe it’s up to him to stop the rest of Tony’s life from falling apart. However, he’s going to need a lot of free time to make sure that Stane can’t continue to tear apart Stark International. And that starts with making sure Iron Man’s time is freed up. It’s Saturday, which makes it an Avengers board meeting. Well, Iron Man has some news for them.
The story continues briefly into Avengers issue 231! The comic openly advertises that you need to read it to know what’s going on, but I’m gonna save you the troubles of digging up another old issue from 1983:
Avengers issue 231. May 1983. Roger Stern, Al Milgrom, Joe Sinnott, Christie Scheele, and Jim Novak.
Yep, that’s it. Rhodey-as-Iron-Man fumbles with the words, and quits the Avengers. It’s amusing that Cap argues they really need him as a member, with Wasp just going “well, screw it. Time to find someone new.” And they do. Iron Man wouldn’t be a member of the Avengers again for a few years, when someone wearing Iron Man’s armor would join Hawkeye’s West Coast incarnation of the team. We’ll see who it is… eventually.
This was a fantastic issue. Not only did it live up to the very concept of someone else taking the Iron Man armor, but it shows how different a hero can be just by having someone else under the helmet. As mentioned a few articles back, Jim Shooter was wanting to replace nearly everyone under the mask at Marvel with someone new. Investment Banker by day, Captain America by night. Ninja by day, Master of Kung Fu by night. You get the idea. Honestly, if even half of the execution of that idea was on this level, it would have worked. You can see how legacy could have become a big piece of Marvel Comics, allowing the books to grow, change, and still remain timeless at the same time.
It’s not unlike what DC would do a decade down the line, and this comic shows that it could have worked… maybe.
I must also admit to a complete shock over the letters pages from a few months down the line. Replacing a white guy with a black guy, I expected a whole lot of whining, whinging, and general complaints from the fandom. It wouldn’t be unlike the right-wing panic over Miles Morales when he premiered. However… either Marvel chose not to print those racist letters, or fans were actually enamored in this plan from Dennis O’Neil, as we see below.
Belinda Gale Beeler at first seemed to have the reaction I was looking for. But she expects Rhodey to get heroic a lot faster if Tony doesn’t get better. Calvin Collins already calls these comics the best of all time, but he does jokingly suggest suicide for the creative team since they’re keeping him in eternal suspense. The 80s were a weird time.
According to the editor, this issue alone generated more fan-letters than many issues combined. The feedback seems generally positive, or at least on the level of “I’m gonna stick around and find out what madness you have planned.” It’s genuinely surprising that fans were willing to give such a massive change a shot, especially when comic fandoms today have the hyper-vocal “MUH SJWs ARE RUINING MUH COMIX WITH POLITIKS” minority of fans these days.
And over in the world of Jim Shooter’s Bullpen, the EiC of Marvel interviews inker Vince Colletta. It’s mostly a puff piece to get a few words out of someone who normally doesn’t get to speak to fans, but there’s some nice insights into the Marvel Method of comic creation. Since inkers cover the pencils, all the reader knows is the inker’s art, and it’s entirely possible that a good chunk of any given book could be made up of more art from the inker than the penciller. Of course, they should mesh with the pencils on the page as best as possible, but it’s still an amazing piece of insight that doesn’t get talked about in most behind the scenes specials.
Meanwhile, in the Hype Box, we have Crystar! A warrior made of crystal, he was much in the line of Mattel’s Masters of the Universe line of sword-and-sorcery toys. His comic would last for 11 issues, and he would receive a toy line as well. The toys would sell decently, but wouldn’t make up for the fact that Marvel had built this idea from whole cloth with the idea to sell toys based on the comics rather than a cartoon. GI Joe was proving that comic-toy tie-ins was profitable, but they were missing a piece of the puzzle that would instantly turn into profit.
Speaking of profit and marketing comics, we also have U.S.1 premiering this week. Like Team America before it, U.S.1 is based on another weird toy property that doesn’t sound like it would make for good comics. Tyco Toys was making a line of HO-scale slot cars that were based around the popular things from the 70s, like semi trucks and truckers in general. In fact, it was more around blue-collar play rather than racing like usual slot cars did.
And so Marvel snatched up the license, because they have always had a bad brain for these things.
As such, writer Al Milgrom was given a literal blank canvas to make up a “hero” who was a blue-collar trucker in the midwest United States. He would fight zeppelin Nazis, evil bankers, villainous highwaymen… and he would even discover his metal-coated skull allowed him to mentally control his truck!
And then he became a space trucker. Because comics. We’re gonna have to go more in-depth in this someday, it’s a laugh riot of weird.
It’s the dawn of a new era in Marvel, as the mantle of Iron Man has been passed from Tony Stark to James Rhodes. What could be next for Marvel? How about having Iron Man take on one of the wrecking crew? Next time, Ball and Chain!
