Saturday, December 09, 2023

Saturday Splash Page #102

 
"Prisoner of the Bottle," in Tales of Suspense #60, by Stan Lee (writer), Don Heck (penciler), Dick Ayers (inker), Stan Goldberg? (colorist), Sam Rosen (letterer)

Another book that started with the "monster of the week" and sci-fi tales of terror before shifting to superheroes. It was Iron Man's book for a while, and then he shared billing with Captain America for the last 40 or so issues. The only stories I own are Iron Man's, and then only the ones involving Hawkeye. Three were included in Thunderbolts #39, as one of those "100-Page Monster" comics Marvel did for a hot minute.

So we got Tony Stark, pretending to be his own bodyguard as Iron Man. The transistor-powered sentinel of American ingenuity, up against those stinkin', thieving Commies. The briefcase armor, the excuses to duck away at the sign of trouble. We got the love triangle with Happy Hogan mooning after Pepper, who is locked on Stark, who is into her, but doesn't dare allow her to know his secret. You know how that goes.

Meanwhile, enter Hawkeye, who decides to become a costumed adventurer after Iron Man gets all the oohs and ahhs by saving the people at Coney Island from a falling Ferris wheel. When a cop spies him holding the jewels he just stopped another guy from stealing, he decides there's no point trying to explain and goes on the lam, only to be picked up by the Black Widow (still in her cocktail dress and cigarette holder femme fatale stage) within a few blocks.

Simple country boy he is - though no backstory beyond "archer" is established yet and Clint must be fairly smart since he makes most of his tricks arrows - Hawkeye falls for her like a ton of bricks. "Sure, I'll fight a guy wearing essentially a flying tank for you, with nothing but trick arrows and my huge balls!"

As it turns out, that's what costs Hawkeye, as in two of the three fights, he breaks off when Natasha gets hurt to get her to a doctor. In the other fight (in issue 60), Black Widow's not there because she's been ordered back to the USSR for her failures. Interestingly, Lee writes her thinking of Hawkeye as 'my darling', so at some point between appearance 1 and appearance 2 he progressed past being a patsy she was just using. Although earlier in the same issue she feeds him a line about only being interested in international peace and thinks about how he believes any lie she tells him, so there's still a lot of dishonesty going around.

But things move fast. Clint goes from jealous carny to working for Natasha in 4 pages. In issue 60, Stark's afraid to take his armor off because he needs to extra power to protect his heart. Which means Tony Stark's missing and Iron Man won't explain, so everyone's looking sideways at Shellhead. By issue 63, no mention of that, but now Stark's engaged to someone other than Pepper, and the Black Widow comes back with some fighting gear of her own.

Don Heck draws the three issues I've got. I think his work looks best in issue 60, when Dick Ayers inks him. Ayers smooths the lines out a bit, keeps the people from looking too stiff in the face, and I think that splash page up there's pretty nifty. The armor tends to look kind of puffy, not the Michelin Man, but it's not a sleek, streamlined piece of equipment yet. It looks like something Stark designed to fit over regular clothes, probably without rumpling them. Peter Parker can go around looking like he just crawled out of the laundry hamper, but that's not going to cut it for a cool exec with a heart of steel.

And with that, we conclude the "T"s.

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