We can safely say that Jack Kirby liked the look of a heavy metallic face mask studded with rivets.
After all, he employed that look for three characters appearing in three separate Marvel Comics titles during roughly the same period. It’s one of several visual themes that make Kirby’s work so distinctive.
Readers perusing the newsstands in April 1962 might have done a double take, seeing essentially the same mask design on both Fantastic Four 5 and Tales of Suspense 31.
The Monster in the Iron Mask (Tales of Suspense 31, cover-dated July 1962) features a giant alien invader who can tear apart tanks and shrug off not only artillery shells but even atom bombs.
In a typical Marvel twist, the world is saved by a much-ridiculed, unsuccessful stage magician who realizes that the monster is using misdirection to make military forces think he’s wearing a mask that protects him from gas attack. In fact, tear gas fells him and drives him away from Earth.
The title and conceit of the story was an obvious reference to “The Man in the Iron Mask,” an unidentified French prisoner (The mysterious prisoner’s actual mask was of black velvet cloth, misreported by Voltaire as an iron mask). He was made even more notorious in the late 1840s by Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, the final installment of Dumas’ D’Artagnan saga.
Kirby used the same mask design the same month in Fantastic Four 5, the debut of one of comics’ greatest super-villains. Dr. Doom.
“Doom is another monster, albeit a human one, establishing a sort of ‘Man in the Iron Mask’ theme melded to an ambience of Eastern European folklore and wizardry,” observed Norris Burroughs.
The sales figures from those first two “iron mask” covers were presumably good. Yet another Kirby heavy in a similar iron mask — a gunslinging villain called, aptly enough, “Iron Mask” — appeared in Kid Colt Outlaw 110 (cover-dated May 1963, on newsstands in February 1963). Kirby drew the character only on the cover, with Dick Ayers providing the interior art.
The armored villain returned in Kid Colt Outlaw 114 (on sale October 1963) and Kid Colt Outlaw 127 (on sale December 1965).
And by that time, Dr. Doom had already been cover-featured a dozen times in The Fantastic Four, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Diabolical mastermind, hulking monster, western gunslinger — Kirby’s single striking design covered a lot of ground for Marvel.
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