Iron Man and Nick Fury

Since everyone had so much fun derisively laughing at my childhood dreams (*sniff*) here's some more fodder for your ridicule: the origin stories of Iron Man (1963) and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D (1965). Each of these comics is a one-shot story within a larger anthology showcase series ("Tales of Suspense," "Strange Tales") which should be understood to mean (as with "Spider-Man the year before) that Marvel did not have much faith in these two characters as commercial properties. It also means that they are very short stories (since each issue had a feature and a backup) -- 14 pages for Tony Stark's origin and only 12 pages for Fury's -- which, in my opinion, only adds to their quality.

The "Iron Man" story (which you'll recognize from the excellent 2008 movie that began the landslide which culminated in The Avengers this summer; they followed it extremely closely) should be interesting right off the bat because it's not a Lee/Kirby collaboration; it has a different writer (Lee's brother Larry Lieber) (Yes, "Stan Lee" is an invented name for yet another titanic Jewish comic book creator -- "Superheroes were all created by Jews," as Frank Miller pointed out) and a different artist, Don Heck, whose workmanlike, contemporaneous style, while very good, will help emphasize why Jack Kirby was so revolutionary. Tony Stark (and his "transistors" -- the precursor to today's "arc reactors" and "repulsors" -- which Octopunk found so amusing) is captured by the Viet Cong (the "Commies") rather than Middle Eastern revolutionaries (the "terrorists"), but it makes little difference to the story; you can be the judge of whatever profound meaning this suggests.

The Supreme Headquarters of the International Law-Enforcement Division (now the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate) was invented by Stan Lee as a blatant attempt to get in on the mid-sixties James Bond craze, using an existing Marvel property: Nick Fury, a (Caucasian) WWII soldier who'd starred in several "blood and guts" Marvel war comics and was popular for his cigar, eyepatch, and down-home, John Wayne style. (He talks like every other "salt-of-the-earth" Lee character including Ben Grimm and Rick Jones.) This is twelve pages of 100% Lee/Kirby badassery, including a cameo by Tony Stark (and his "transistors") and the first view of the famous S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier (which, as a kid, I never dreamed would one day be painstakingly recreated for the movie screen by ILM). Admittedly not, as the cover claims, "The Greatest ACTION-THRILLER of All Time!" but still pretty good (and what would Marvel Comics be without insane degrees of hyperbole concerning what you were getting for your twelve cents -- just a penny a page?)

As I continue to point out, it all starts here, with tabloid-sized bristol-boards covered in blue pencil and India ink in Midtown Manhattan offices in the middle of the Don Draper era, against frantic deadlines for by-the-page fees by artists and writers who owned nothing that they wrote and drew; who moonlighted drawing magazine ads to get some extra cash; who thumbed through old high school mythology texts and Ian Flemming novels for material; who stuck around late in badly-air-conditioned offices through the hot New York summers just trying to get that week's pages off to the compositor. Of course the material has none of the decades of cultural seasoning that brings us Robert Downey Jr.'s van dyke and Samuel L. Jackson's leather duster and Weta Digital's millions of render-farm computing cycles getting the prismatic sunlight to refract properly through the ocean's fine spray as the helicarrier gets airborne, but, nevertheless, the mythos begins here. Enjoy!

http://www.jordanorlando.com/iron_man
http://www.jordanorlando.com/nick_fury