Comic book superheroes often fight enemies who are either their mirror images, or their reverse mirror images. In his second adventure in Tales of Suspense 40 (April 1963), Iron Man faced a foe who combined both.
Having developed his super-armor to defeat communist captors in Vietnam in Tales of Suspense 39, playboy industrialist Tony Stark is back in the U.S. and has already established Iron Man’s reputation as a powerful force for good.
Written by Stan Lee and Robert Bernstein with art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck, the issue begins Iron Man’s tradition of fairly constant refinements to his armor when, while corralling escaped big cats at a circus, his grim-looking gray armor frightens a child. One of Stark’s disposable lady friends suggests that people wouldn’t be afraid of Iron Man if he looked like a knight in shining armor, so he paints his costume gold.
“As with Thor’s first appearance, Iron Man’s debut was an exciting origin story with no room for anything else, so it’s left to the second appearance to start fleshing out character and setting details,” observed comics historian Don Alsafi. “So we see Tony developing high-powered roller skates for the US army (!), charming a dazzling international socialite, recharging his life-giving iron chestplate via a standard electrical outlet, apprehending a mad scientist who’s created a shrinking ray and engaging a pack of escaped circus lions. The menace of Gargantus doesn’t come in until the last few pages — and we’re not too surprised that it isn’t nearly as interesting as everything else!”
Gargantus would seem to be a reverse mirror image of Iron Man — a gigantic cave man matched against a scientific marvel, the primitive versus the futuristic. But in fact, he proves to be a mirror image foe, a technological marvel in the form of a robot created by alien invaders who thought the Earth was still inhabited by Neanderthals.
The story thus echoes another Lee-Kirby tale, The Gladiator from Outer Space, in Incredible Hulk 4 (November 1962). There, the Hulk faced a powerhouse “alien invader” called Mongu who turned out to be a Russian robot designed to entrap him.
Iron Man would go on to battle many other mirror-image foes, who often possessed armor or other technological wonder-gadgets — Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, the Black Knight, Hawkeye, and so forth. Similarly, Daredevil would specialize in facing other costumed acrobats and Spider-Man would square off against other hybrid man-animals.
Like prize fighters, superheroes tend to stay within their weight class.
About Author
