The Man of Iron with a Heart of Glass

Stan Lee said he was surprised to learn that Iron Man was the favorite Marvel superhero of female readers, but it makes sense, really.

Tony Stark was rich and handsome and brave, all familiar ingredients for romantic fantasy. And he had another advantage. Literally, Stark had “a broken heart.” He had all the qualities to be some girl’s perfect mate, but he nobly refused to commit himself to any of them because he might die at any moment.

That poor, poor rich guy. Irresistible.

By the time Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby debuted Iron Man in Tales of Suspense 39 (March 1963), the outlines of what would become the Marvel Comics universe had emerged.

That same month, Ant-Man was battling the extra-dimensional tyrant Kulla and Thor was corralling the mobster Thug Thatcher (Funny. You’d have thought it would be the other way around). The Incredible Hulk, battling the Metal Master in his last issue, also crossed over to the Fantastic Four title to fight them. Meanwhile, in his first issue, Spider-Man also dropped in on the FF to put in a job application (after fighting them, of course). In his solo feature, the Human Torch got conned by criminal Carl Zante, the Acrobat, into leaving the FF briefly.

This interconnected Marvel universe, now established, was expanding into both future and past. Zante would return shortly with another con, disguising himself as a long-vanished hero named Captain America.

Each Marvel superhero was distinctive — a monster, a myth, a miniature man, an alienated teenager and now a knight in technological armor. Even the character’s initial bulky, robot-like armor was intriguing. Though hardly stylish, it was the opposite of the customary cape and tights.

Iron Man hit the ground running. By his third adventure, he was already proclaimed as world famous. He’d even repelled an alien invasion by the time-tested Silver Age method of convincing the invaders that everyone else on Earth was like him.

I liked Iron Man from the first, and years later came to realize that he was among the most morally admirable of the superheroes, who are all pretty good eggs, after all.

Like Batman and Adam Strange, Tony Stark had powers, strategies and solutions that came entirely out of his own head, that were created solely by his own determined efforts. Stark was American know-how on steroids.

That’s why the plot of the third Iron Man movie did not entirely work for me. Tony Stark would be the last superhero on Earth to fear that he’s being “taken over” by his heroic identity.

His abilities are not arbitrary. His fate is not accidental. Tony Stark was not bitten by a radioactive spider or blinded by radioactive chemicals. Iron Man is entirely his own conscious creation, his tool, and Stark knows that fact better than anyone.

Seeing Things Clearly in the Twilight Zone

How America Was Lied into War

George W. Bush’s CIA lapdog George Tenet admitted that Bush and Cheney lied us into the disastrous Iraq war.

Tenet wrote, “The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that ‘we settled on’ because it was ‘the one issue that everyone could agree on.’”

Journalist Robert Scheer remarked, “The very idea that this country’s leaders can decide to go to war on the basis of their ‘core beliefs’ which they leave ‘unarticulated' while frightening the public with exaggerated claims makes a mockery of the notion of self-governance. Some would consider it an offense worthy of impeachment. As a tactic, panicking the citizenry with the phantom of Saddam’s WMD in the hands of 9/11-type terrorists is no different than Adolph Hitler blaming international Jewry and foreign communists for the Reichstag fire.”

Crimebuster: A Tough Teen Tackles Trouble

In 1942, Charles Biro’s Crimebuster anticipated a question that would help propel Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man to fame two decades later: Why wait until you’re an adult to become a superhero?

Like Spider-Man, the Boy Comics headliner was a teenager who wouldn’t be relegated to the sidekick sidelines. And like Batman, he was a child morally reforged in the murder of his parents.

Chuck Chandler was a surprisingly tough and effective character, even a grim one. A hockey star at Custer Military Academy, Chandler rushed from the rink to a hospital after learning that his journalist dad had been shot by a Nazi agent. His hockey jersey bearing the letter C, along with a military cape he’d quickly grabbed to keep warm, would become his superhero costume, such as it was.

Chandler was powerless when the Nazi agent, Iron Jaw, returned to murder his father and mother and a doctor in the hospital. That horror turned Chandler into a convincingly implacable enemy of crime.

Biro said that Chuck Chandler wasn’t a “super boy,” but just an ordinary American teenager with the stuff to get ahead. Biro’s opinion of American boyhood must have been exceedingly high, because Crimebuster routinely shrugged off death traps and gruesome torture while he beat criminal gangs into submission with the help of no one but a monkey, Squeeks. His bravery was unshakeable, and his level-headed focus on street-level crime gave him a no-nonsense air.

Part of what made Crimebuster so effective was the gravitas of his genuinely chilling archenemy Iron Jaw, so called because a French Resistance bomb had blown off the lower half of his face.

“Iron Jaw, a name that still raises the hair on the back of my neck,” comics historian R.C. Harvey recalled. “A champion baddie of the Golden Age, Iron Jaw may have been ahead of his time, the prototype of today’s soulless super-thugs. He was one of few transgressors who made encore appearances in those days. He was eventually motivated not by greed or by a desire for power (the entire gamut of motives for most villains until the Silver Age), but by the obsession to murder the good guy who repeatedly apprehended him and threw him in the hoosegow. Sometimes, instead of being captured, he died horribly in a ghastly conflagration, the inadvertent result of some scheme of his own gone awry. But he always escaped or came back to life (because he hadn’t really been killed; it only appeared that he had been). In all of this, as you can plainly see, he was a thoroughly modern — i.e., contemporary — villain.”

And, when the popularity of superheroes waned in the late 1940s, Crimebuster’s minimalist costume was easily doffed.

“As the genre fell out of favor with the comics reading public, his adventures took on human interest overtones,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Eventually, things got so non-heroic, Squeeks got his own comic.”

“C.B. started wearing regular clothes because a girl told him he looked silly walking around in a hockey uniform all the time. His new outfit had roughly the same color scheme, and still displayed a big ‘C’ on the chest, but it looked more like a sports star’s letter (which, actually, it was all along) than a superhero insignia. The other kids still called him C.B. instead of Chuck — at least, until #112 (June 1955), when he apparently decided enough was enough. … C.B. went back to being Chuck Chandler, a name he hadn’t used in years, and remained Chuck Chandler for the rest of his days. Not that he had a whole lot of them left. Lev Gleason got out of the comic book business in 1956. The last issue of Boy Comics was #119, dated March of that year.

‘Marvel Comics (which had already appropriated the name of one Lev Gleason character, Daredevil) brought out a minor supporting character named Crimebuster in Nova #13 (Sept. 1977). This one never went anywhere, and was killed off a few years later.” Crimebuster’s more-than-respectable 14-year run had an interesting postscript. Pop artist Mel Ramos featured Crimebuster in a 1962 painting, and that was used for the cover of the 1996 album Evil Empire by the band Rage Against the Machine.

Thrill After Thrill with Tarzan the Metaphor

I was 6, lying on my grandparents’ porch with the Effingham Daily News spread before me, reading a movie ad to my buddy Leslie.

“Stupendous new excitement!” I read. “Sensation upon sensation! Thrill after thrill!” My grandparents were nearby on the porch swing, and I caught them smiling at each other slyly and wondered why. I learned later they were simply proud to hear me easily read words like “magnificent” and “stupendous” to my older friend, who had trouble with them.

Whatever.

I wasn’t concerned with words at that moment, but action — knife fights with crocodiles, wrestling matches with lions and the rest of Lord Greystoke’s derring-do had already kept America entertained for a half-century by then, in 1961.

My grandmother’s view of Tarzan had been formed by Elmo Lincoln, whom she saw in the 1918 silent film, and by a hardcover edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes that she passed along to me.

Everybody’s favorite Tarzan was Johnny Weissmuller, whose dozen films for MGM and RKO were an afternoon-movie staple on local TV stations nationwide.

Everybody but me. My favorite Tarzan was Gordon Scott, the lifeguard turned actor whom I’d seen a year or so before in the aptly named Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. With location shooting, visible production values and a genuine nod at adult suspense, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent remain two of the best of the dozens of Tarzan films that have been made.

Born in 1912, Tarzan was arguably the first American superhero, or the second if you count his older brother John Carter of Mars.

Later superheroes are often immediately recognizable in their skintight circus-derived costumes, an arresting and mildly erotic kind of colorful nakedness. Tarzan showed them the way by being actually naked when he went into action, or the next thing to it.

This century-old superhero inspired some great art along the way. My favorites are probably the Ace paperback cover paintings of the 1960s, spotlighting the aggressive musculature of Frank Frazetta and the lithe lyricism of Roy G. Krenkel.

Tarzan’s value as a metaphor for the arguable superiority of the man in nature over the desiccated, debilitated, dissociated human product of post-industrial society is at least as valid as it ever was, given the fact that the digital age seems to be continually pushing us all further away from existential reality.

But Tarzan was also the original of the white jungle god, and that inherently racist archetype will no longer play without some seriously fancy footwork.

There’s also the problem that Africa hasn’t been a metaphor for mystery for a long time. The 2016 Disney film Legend of Tarzan is using it, instead, as a metaphor for colonial injustice.

Precisely

The Ghost Who Walked from the Funnies to Pulps

The 1950s were pretty much a desert for kids who loved superheroes. You had Superman and Batman in the comics, Superman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger and Mighty Mouse on TV, and little else.

One other oasis was found in the King Features Sunday newspaper comics section — the adventures of Lee Falk’s Phantom, a purple-clad masked champion who seemed to be a cross between Batman and Tarzan.

Created in 1936, the Ghost Who Walks was well known worldwide, and had been featured in a 1943 Columbia movie serial and a 1944 hardcover novel.

At Halloween, you could dress up as a plastic and vinyl Phantom in a Ben Cooper costume that cost $3. If you were lucky, you might even run across a Harvey Hits Phantom comic book. They were rather odd-looking repackaged newspaper strips, and eight Phantom issues were published sporadically, beginning in 1957.

“The Phantom was the first fictional hero to wear the skintight costume which has become a hallmark of comic-book superheroes, and was the first shown in a mask with no visible pupils (another superhero standard),” Wikipedia notes. “Comics historian Peter Coogan has described the Phantom as a ‘transitional’ figure, since the Phantom has some of the characteristics of pulp magazine heroes like the Shadow and the Spider, as well as anticipating the features of comic book heroes such as Superman, Batman, and Captain America.”

The Phantom fought criminal conspiracies in the jungle and worldwide without the aid of the super powers possessed by his comic strip “brother” Mandrake, although he pretended to have them to give himself a mysterious edge. Really the 21^st in his line of champions, the Phantom posed as being an immortal who’d lived since 1536.

Tough, durable and admirably optimistic even when the odds were against him (which they often were), the Phantom was a pulpish character from a pulp era. In fact, like the Lone Ranger and the Black Hood, he could easily have headlined his own pulp magazine.

The Phantom did finally get his pulp adventures, beginning in 1972 in a series of 15 Avon paperback novels written by Lee Falk and Ron Goulart. The handsome covers seen here were by George Wilson, who’d previously produced similar paintings for the covers of the Phantom comic books published by Gold Key.