Marvel 1974 Week--Iron Man #71!!

The snows have started falling hereabouts, the days are getting ridiculously short, and the cold chill of winter has begun to envelop our souls.

Good excuse, then, for a theme week to distract us from the meteorological winter of our discontent...made glorious summer by Marvel 1974 Week!!!

Set the Wayback Machine for 25 years ago, and let's check out what was hopping in the Marvel Universe in December of 1974...

OK, I have to confess, I'm cheating a teensy bit here. I would normally stick with December cover-dated issues. But, with Shellhead that creates a problem. Due to lackluster sales, Iron Man was demoted to bi-monthly status for 1974 and part of 1975. So there was no December 1974 issue of Iron Man!!

Well, my blog, my rules, and my arbitrary enforcement of said rules. We're going with this issue, if only for the awe-inspiring last panel (be patient!).

So, for a mag that was having sales problems, that sure was a generic cover, eh? Nothing much to goose up sales there. Let's try the splash page:

See? Why wasn't that on the cover?? Yellow Claw was a fairly big player in the Marvel Universe in the early 70s...why not advertise him as your villain??

Who's responsible for this issue?

Of course, we all know the recently-departed George Tuska. Mike Friedrich was nearing the end of a 30 issue run on the Golden Avenger. You know how we can tell it's an early 1970s Friedrich script? The annoyingly self-aware, fourth wall breaking captions:

Man, sometimes, Mike Friedrich wrote like Stan Lee on ecstasy. A little too "call attention to itself" a writing style for my tastes. But maybe that's just me. Anyway, time for the obligatory exposition:

What?!? The Mandarin is dead?!? (SPOILER ALERT: it didn't take) Tell us more!!

Damn. That's one hell of a lot of exposition. And people claim modern comics are too hard for newbies to pick up on....

By the way, do you know how close we came to having "Events" a decade early? In this storyline, the mysterious Black Lama was going around setting up a "War Of The Super-Villains," wherein all the big bads would fight to the death, with the winner being given a grand prize of conquest of the Earth and ultimate power (really for the Lama's own nefarious purpose, of course). This was intended to be a line-wide event, crossing over to most other Marvel books, as this reply in the letter column tells us:

For whatever reason, it never happened, and our "Marvel-wide" story never went farther than the pages of Iron Man. We still got to see Yellow Claw vs. Mandarin and M.O.D.O.K. vs. the Mad Thinker (M.O.D.O.K. got a mecha!!). But apparently we were pretty close to seeing a huge "Event" ten years before Secret Wars was thrust upon us...

Oh, by the way, Black Lama was ultimately revealed to be Gerald Ford. Seriously.

But let's not forget whose comic book this is: Iron Man arrives to confront the Claw (accompanied by more self-aware narration):

Of course, Tony Stark was still Tony Stark, even in 1974. So, the "hero" we know is willing to deny the rights of those who oppose him, violate international law, and attack rather than talk--he was that guy, even then:


Yellow Claw was never as cool as Fu Manchu--who could be?--but when called upon he could be a bit of a badass. How badass??

He employs a "chief mutationist." That's badass.

The big slime thing engulfs Iron Man, but he manages to give us a huge Tuska-riffic escape:


Oh, but the Yellow Claw isn't done yet:


Really. That's his big design: small robots armed with small guns.

Oh, and they blow up real good when you hit them:

Now, this was the 1970's, so now matter how small the threat, you just know that Tony Stark would pull his Fred Sanford act:

Which enables the tiny terrors to dogpile him and prove just how ungeniuslike Tony actually was:

Yup, one single wire immobilizes the whole armor. If only the Skrulls had known it was that easy. But fear not--Iron Man manages to escape, the way he usually does--by blowing stuff up:

And we see the Yellow Claw do the next best thing to a spit take:

But the Claw is not done yet with his little menagerie:

I don't know what the hell that is, but it breathes radioactive fire!!

Tony's solution? Duh--kill it, in the name of dubious Marvel science!!

And now--it's time to blow up things on an even more massive scale:


Man. For supposedly the third smartest man in the universe (ask Eternity!!), Stark sure takes the blunt instrument approach to solving problems, doesn't he? But of course, the Claw gets away:

If he had time to sky write that much, you were never close to catching him, Shellhead...

So Stark returns home, and we resolve a portion of his current soap opera, as Pepper and Happy come back to work for him.

And we conclude with the most 70s panel ever written:

"The iron can only get it on when the man inside is...together...AND BROTHER, NOW HE'S TO-GETHER!" That is so my new mantra.

Next up for Iron Man:

Seriously? The San Diego Comic Con?? And we missed it?? Damn...

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of bi-monthly...

I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth keeping in mind: The X-Men used to be hideously unpopular. So unpopular that, not only was it made a bi-monthly, but it was made a bi-monthly REPRINT comic (this particular one reprinting X-Men #43). Despite the presence of Neal Adams, sales on the title sucked swamp water. So from March 1970 until July 1975, there were no new X-Men stories, aside from an occasional guest appearance.

Don't worry, mutant lovers--we were mere months away from the All-New, All-Different rebirth of the X-Men. But let this serve as a reminder: whatever today's sales trends are, whatever the red-hot properties and the bombs, it can all change pretty damn quickly...