Look, sometimes you just have to get trapped in a cave, build a suit of armor, and solve the Vietnam war to feel better about yourself

Iron Man #47 is a re-telling of the titular character's origin by the all-star creative team of Roy Thomas, Barry (Pre-Windsor) Smith and Jim Mooney. Following a brief run by Gary Friedrich and George Tuska that would resume in the coming months, we pick up with Tony Stark at the lowest point in his pre-Demon in a Bottle, pre-Armor Wars career. The last issue saw a battle with his former ally the Guardsman go horribly awary, resulting in the death of a friend who had grown bitter with his employer over, you guessed it, a woman.

Iron Man sulks and is briefly spat upon at the Guardsman's funeral, leading him down memory lane as he sad-flies across the Manhattan skyline. This is where Roy Thomas and Barry Smith get to swoop in and do a pretty bang-up job of reestablishing the character's origin and updating (as of 1972) the means by which Tony Stark becomes a P.O.W. and is forced to build his new identity from scratch. The main idea here is that Tony needs to reflect on his past bouts with reinvention and redemption and use those old lessons now. It's a thoughtful way to excuse an origin issue.

It also doesn't hurt that Iron Man has one of the more dynamic origin stories of any of the Marvel characters. Nearly as iconic as Spidey's origin in Amazing Fantasy #15 thanks to the 2008 film, Tony Stark's metamorphosis, while under duress, from arms dealer to futurist is a story that functions as it's own little Die Hard-style action movie. I'd go so far as to say it's more exciting than most of Iron Man's outings once he becomes an established hero. Thomas's minor retcon that Flashback Tony is working on "crazy gadgets to help end the bloodshed in Vietnam" doesn't change the fact that he's kind of a monster before his capture.

The Tyrannical Wong-Chu is set up as the warlord that will capture Tony and force him to build the Iron Man armor as a means of escape. Wong-Chu is a pretty flamboyant general who is also eager to best his detractors in one on one combat, if he is bigger than them. Otherwise, a coward's bullet is good enough for him. He's a charicature, and a pretty dated one at that, from a time when the satirical methods of old were clashing with the progressive virtues of the new. It's not really a big deal, though. Wong-Chu is just here to be a bad guy and get hoisted by his own petard.

"Why Must There Be An Iron Man?" builds to its most artistically potent sequence when Tony is powering up his Mark 1 armor for the first time, resulting in a splash page of the jangling armor prototype emerging from a slab like Frankenstein's monster. Smith's art makes Tony's first armor look like a shambling, jerky, unsafe, ghost in a suit of armor. The terrified Wong-Chu flees as long as he can, then orders the other prisoners executed just to spite the opponent he cannot defeat. Of course, Iron Man isn't about to let that happen and our hero smotes 'em all good.

Professor Yinsen plays a minor role in the story, and that's the only thing I feel is really lacking here and the only thing that keeps this version of the origin from feeling complete. Yinsen is the Elder that Tony encounters while prisoner, checking one of my favorite boxes on the Campbell Hero's Journey List. The Yinsen stuff is almost non-existent here, and when Tony tells the deceased mentor to "rest easy" at the flashback's end, it rings hollow.

The end of the flashback doesn't mark the end of the story however, as Iron Man still gets to spend another four or five pages debating with himself before the issue's closing. Once Tony gets himself all boned up to be Iron Man again and face a new day, we end with a splash page meant to call back to the earlier shot of the Mark 1 armor. This time, Tony is riding high and it's all fluid and dynamic and stuff. Cool.

The status quo that Iron Man returns to at that time from here doesn't really stand out to me as some of Marvel's best bronze age stuff. We're still in the middle of the Marianne Rogers saga, where Iron Man learns his girlfriend has E.S.P. and she starts wigging out on him and kinda leaves him for dead at one point. Yeah, it's pretty wild stuff in terms of throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks, but it doesn't sing like Gerry Conway's Spider-Man or Steve Englehart's Captain America.

Why must there be an Iron Man? Because magnets.

Lana Lang's thirst and the Saga of the Parakat

Today, we put the "back" in Back Issue Diving. As in waaay back. We're actually breaking the barrier of the late 80's and journeying to DC's silver age for a look at Adventure Comics #282. More specifically the cover story, "Lana Lang and the Legion of Super-Heroes!"

March, 1961. The allies are on the move and those clowns in Washington just might be able to put there heads together and get a bead on . . . the Reds? I actually don't know what was going on in the world in 1961, but if the contents of this comic reflected the world at that time, I'm kind of bummed they started purifying our drinking water.

I kid, I kid. DC's silver age comics weren't really known across the board for being socially relevant. That was Marvel's bag at the time. Particularly in the Superman line, silver age stories were about a rigid square butting heads with psychedelia and self reflection at every turn. The youth-focused stories of Adventure Comics, namely those starring Superboy and/or the Legion of Super-Heroes, would break away from this tradition at times, but not in any way that would seem out of place in
Archie's hometown of Riverdale.

(Hmm . . . actually, that current Riverdale show is pretty racy, so that comparison is broken now.)

"Lana Lang and the Legion of Super-Heroes!" could be an Archie story, if not for the fact is features more than a few superpowered characters. The Curt Swan cover tells the entire story: Lana is trying use Star Boy's affection to make Superboy jealous, but he isn't taking the bait, instead intending to pipe some other 30th century hussie. Not only is Lana a one-dimensional character who is motivated solely to win the attention of a man, but her fucking plan doesn't work and Superboy is like, way smarter and better than her. It's a Silver Age classic!

The real shame is that Superboy's future love interest as Superman, Lois Lane, didn't fare much better in her portrayals.

The Legion itself was pretty new at the time; this story marks only their fifth appearance in comics and the roster was pretty small at the time. You had the core members Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl, plus Star Boy, Chameleon Boy, and maybe a few others? At least, that's all who appear in this story. Really, we're just focusing on Star Boy in this issue anyway.

The plot follows the usual formula of building up to the cover image in about six pages and then racing headlong to a denumot from there. Superboy overhears Lana's aloud scheming after interacting with Star Boy and allows the silly girl to tire herself out, battling a random Parakat along the way after it escapes from a zoo or somesuch. The parakat is probably the strongest part of this issue. The panel of the year is Superboy swinging the Parakat above his head by the tail. I'd post it here, but then I feel like I would need to charge you admission or something. It's next week's meme. It's that good.

30th century gal Zynthia plays the Jezebel in this story, bringing Lana to tears. If the family of the Parakat from earlier attacked the city after Superboy returned to his time, and the last three pages of this story were a series of nine panel grids where Zynthia is ripped limb from limb by angry Parakats, that would be neat. But alas, this one wraps up with Lana getting the cold shoulder from Clark, who claims to have "lots of super-jobs to catch up on!" Ho, ho.

It's for the best really. Lana Lang couldn't birth Superman's Super-Babies. They'd tear through her like a pack of Parakats.

A retroactive generation

In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four #1 hit newsstands and set a new standard for superhero comics in terms of storytelling and characterization. It also marked the beginning of the Marvel universe, although writers and artists since then have incorperated more and more of Marvel's golden and atomic age roots. Marvel, as a shared universe, would continue to grow and prosper up until today, but with Stan Lee's dogmatic "illusion of change" hanging over the line, drastic steps would have to be taken to explain why these characters in the sixties were still quite young and vibrant decades later.

From this, the concept of "Marvel Time" was born. We're expected to believe that, no matter where we are reading from, the Marvel Universe and the interconnected stories within began about nine or ten years ago. This, of course, created another dilemma. Now there were several decades worth of actual human history that had been rendered blank and Marvel-less by the slow creep of Marvel Time. Captain America and most of the other Timely-era characters would stay entrenched in WWII, but there was still the matter of filling out the 50's, 60's and 70's.

In the year 2000, veteran Marvel creators John Byrne and Roger Stern believed they had a solution. Not lacking for ambition, their series Marvel: The Lost Generation featured an era's worth of new creations that had been retrofitted to fill in the blank space that had become the mid-20th century. The series revolved mainly around the superhero team known as The First Line and a futuristic anthropologist named Dr. Cassandra Locke who is tumbling through time, uncovering these "previously unmentioned" heroes and villains, revealing them to herself and the reluctant reader.

The heroes of the First Line are somewhat . . . shall we say cookie cutter? John Byrne's designs are strong, but one can't help but look at them as pastiches of older heroes. Byrne does a pretty good job of imagining what heroes created by the likes of Bob Brown and John Buscema would look like, and writer Roger Stern gives the script an old-school flavor. (Which shouldn't be difficult for the guy who weaved all of those incredible Avengers yarns in the 80's.)

The issue at hand (#7) takes place during the height of the Red Scare, with Skrulls in place of Commies and the potentially offensive Yellow Claw standing revealed as the true menace to both the Invaders and the First Line by issue's end. The cover is a classic "two teams clash while a nuetral party cries out in anguish in the middle" piece. The story here reminds me of the JSA: 1950 arc from Geoff John's storied run on the title, with the H.U.A.C. coming down on masked heroes while another menace takes advantage of the rampant confusion and paranoia cropping up in the American people.

The superhero melodrama is confined to two-thirds of the issue--quite literally, as the bottom of each page fills us in on the simultaneous adventures of Dr. Locke as she unearths the other half of the plot and, in this issue, runs afoul of the Human Torch. (Not that one, the other one.) This is a neat gimmick and a fun way to mess with the format, but I can also see it wearing thin over the course of a twelve issue maxi-series.

Another gimmick that made this series stand out at the time was the numbering. As Dr. Locke is falling further back in time, so do the issues count down from 12 to 1. It's cute, and ultimately non-intrusive, but I have a feeling the edgier fan of the approaching new millenium may have rolled their eyes at the concept. After all, prjects like this and Starlin's Infinity books would become rarer and rarer as the decade would unfurl and the Ultimate line is literally on the way before thise series could even finish its run.

Recent history (the last 20 years or so) has shown us that Marvel would find more success taking their present stock of heroes and de-aging them than they would in trying to retcon in new characters to account for Marvel Time. Unfortunately the real trick to appreciating Marvel Time is all-too-simple: Just don't think about it too much!