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.
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