TALES OF SUSPENCE #50 (1964)
by Stan Lee & Don Heck
cover by Jack Kirby
I haven’t scheduled Iron Man villains for the villain origins retrospective. Nothing against them, but for the most part they’re kind of cannon fodder and they’re very rarely in the spotlight.
With one obvious exception: the man who immediately rose to the rank of Iron Man’s nemesis… only to slowly fizzle out.
I’ll talk about later about the many atrocious looks the Mandarin has had over the decades, but not only his first costume is among the worst… the Don Heck artwork doesn’t do him any favors.
The early Iron Man stories are filled to the brim with anti-communist propaganda… although weirdly enough not as much as Thor… so you might imagine the Mandarin to be painted in same light. But surprisingly enough, China’s Communist Party despises and fears him!
For historical perspective, China didn’t have nuclear weapons at this point. This issue has a cover date of February 1964; the first Chinese nuclear testing didn’t take place until October of that year.
Iron Man is dispatched by the Pentagon (!!!) to learn more about the Mandarin.
Just in case you’re wondering, Iron Man’s civilian plots are as boring as the Daredevil ones.
I’m far from being the first one to point out that the dynamic of both heroes are basically the same: they are both in love with their secretary (Karen Page and Pepper Potts), but keep avoiding her because of health problems (blindness and a heart condition), driving them into the arms of a close personal friend with a silly nickname (Foggy Nelson and Happy Hogan).
The difference is that the early Pepper is SLIGHTLY more tolerable than the early Karen…
…and that the friendship with Happy generally feels more natural than Foggy’s.
Of course Happy will slowly fade away and Foggy will get lots of character development, but early on the difference is pretty stark (pun intended).
Iron Man reaches China, managing to get spotted by the Mandarin’s guards. They’re quickly defeated, but he really sucks at the whole espionage thing.
Sometimes I wonder how did Iron Man manage to survive his early adventures, because it seems his armor is constantly glitching.
It doesn’t take much for Iron Man to get inside the Mandarin’s stronghold…
…and immediately realize A) he looks absolutely ridiculous B) he’s kinda dangerous.
Unfortunately for him, the Mandarin contemplates his lack of fashion sense with a deep knowledge of Bulls##t Science.
Little known fact, all Chinese people are actually masters of Japanese martial arts. True story*.
(*not a true story)
So… is the Mandarin super-strong or not? First he breaks an iron bar with his bare hands, but Iron Man has to point out that he’s a physical threat because he’s tampering with his armor… which is it?
It’s also weird to consider that, thanks to his rings, we’ll see later that the Mandarin has TEN DIFFERENT SUPERPOWERS… but he decides to fight hand-to-hand!
Iron Man manages to escape defeat thanks to the highest technology available to his futuristic armor: a slide-rule calculator! I’m sorry, “calculater”.
Is this an old-fashioned spelling I’m not familiar with, or is this a spelling error? If so, was this present in the original version too? I only have the modern digital printing.
Get this: in the middle of the fight (WTF?), Iron Man was able to calculate the exact way to position himself to avoid damage (double WTF?), resulting in the Mandarin injuring himself (triple WTF?).
And that’s with a freaking glorified slide rule! Can you imagine what Iron Man could achieve with an actual calculator!?
Despite his earlier vow to stop the threat of the Mandarin, Iron Man has a plane to catch so he just… leaves.
Why was Tony in such a rush? Well, he just wanted to turn a twosome into something more.
Sounds legit.
Historical significance: 6/10
The Mandarin has obviously a great impact: not only he faces Iron Man countless times, he’s the man behind A LOT of different supervillains and shows up when you least expect him… but on the other hand, basically nothing in the story outside of the Mandarin existing has an impact. And he’s not yet the Mandarin we know.
Silver Age-ness: 4/10
The alien origin of his rings is not even mentioned!!!
Does it stand the test of time? 4/10
Not the worst of the early Iron Man stories, but pretty lackluster. The Mandarin is extremely generic at this point and the story is surprisingly quick and light on any sort of nuance or characterization.
The Don Heck artwork doesn’t do the issue any favor: he seems to be a very bad match for the character and his world!
How close is this to the modern character? 3/10
Oh boy. The Mandarin is almost unrecognizable, and not only because of his looks: he BARELY uses his rings! Which is amazing considering that they grant him ten different superpowers… that’s a Martian Manhunter level of superpowers!!!
Which sadly means I don’t get to talk about the craziest part about the rings… that they’re actually power sources for the spaceships of alien space dragons. The same race that Fin Fang Foom is from, actually!!!
Not only there’s the glaring omission of the rings, but the Mandarin is quite generic in his first story. He’s not entirely a creature of his era like Yellow Claw… despite having all the hallmarks of the classic “yellow peril” villain, his Chinese origins don’t factor all that much into his character.
Besides, he’s not even fully Chinese: many readers don’t remember him, but his mother was actually white and from the UK!
It still baffles me that, out of all the Iron Man villains, the Mandarin turned out to be his nemesis… because the two of them don’t have all that much in common.
Seriously, how does “billionaire genius playboy philanthropist” match with “Chinese warlord with quasi-magic alien rings”!?
The Mandarin was fine for the 70s and 80s, but later he REALLY struggled to find his niche. He’s been dead since 2012 and Iron Man has grown so much past him that at this point I’m not even sure he’s going to be resurrected!
And as I promised, let’s talk about the various Mandarin looks and how much most of them suck.
Just look at his original costume! What’s up with that silly mask that doesn’t even cover his face!? Even the classic villain green&purple combo doesn’t to anything to him.
The giant M on his chest also looks ridiculous.
Maybe changing the mask to cover his face and moving the M to his belt will make it work? Nope, this still sucks.
It’s amazing how ALL the variations of his original costume manage to completely suck.
When even Jack Kirby can’t make your costume work, you know it’s just the worst.
It could be worse, though. AND IT HAS.
I’ll even take the armor that the Mandarin wore around the time of Acts of Vengeance over that embarrassment.
Still better than trying to copy the Yellow Claw style.
Is it any wonder that the character completely changed his looks, getting involved with Chinese mysticism?
Sorry, that was Lo-Pan from Big Trouble in Little China, my bad. This is the totally different Mandarin look.
Jokes aside, that was the first GOOD costume that the Mandarin ever wore!!!
Even when he went back to alien technology in the 2000s, it was clear that the “long green robes with gold trimmings” was the way to go to replace the green&purple combo.
And yet he STILL found a way to get himself another awful costume. Seriously, this guy just CANNOT find a good costume!!!
When he was re-introduces in the 2010, he ditched the costume entirely and went around as a Chinese businessman. Since at this point Iron Man’s identity was public, this was a great move as it made him a great adversary for both Iron Man AND Tony Stark.
If they bring him back, I sincerely hope they go with THIS approach.
It’s also basically the same look he sported during his X-Men stories in the 90s.
Weird how influential he was there (he’s the one responsible for turning Psylocke from Caucasian to Japanese Ninja!!!) and then he just kind of vanished from their history.
Re: the Mandarin using karate, rather than a Chinese martial art such as kung fu. I’d put that down to this being a 1964 story. At that time, eastern martial arts weren’t very well known in the west; judo was an Olympic sport, but there was an almost mystical aura around karate due to it not being well-known yet. Karate exponents seemed to be capable of superhuman feats in the few exhibitions that were made at the time. In Ian Fleming’s novel, GOLDFINGER, the titular villain’s henchman, Oddjob, was one of a handful of karate masters in the world, and while Bond knew judo, he was utterly outclassed by Oddjob in a fight. (Oddjob was Korean, by the way.) GOLDFINGER was first published in 1959, just five years before this story.
Good point. I don’t have an issue with the Mandarin knowing Karate, it’s actually more interesting than him knowing kung-fu just because he’s Chinese. What I find funny is… THAT is how he fights Iron Man?
It’s like if Doom used a regular sword to fight the FF: I don’t doubt he can use it, but why? 🙂
Bond apparently hasn’t even *heard* of karate in the novel (though obviously Fleming had at least a hazy idea). Strangely the protagonist of Farnham’s Freehold, written about the same time, outdoes the master spy and has even taken lessons.
I was actually coming to the comments to make the exact same point about karate, even using the Goldfinger novel as a reference, but you beat me to it.
In modern times, we cannot really understand how exotic and scary karate was due to its modern day ubiquitousness. Nowadays, everybody and his sister has a blackbelt.
I might be in the minority, but I like it when Tony has to manually activate specific gadgets in his suit, and when it breaks down and he has to quickly fix it up. It makes it feel more like a machine he’s actually piloting, as opposed to when it works perfectly and with no visible effort on his part. It might as well be an innate superpower then, rather than a suit of power armor.
Yeah I always like it when Tony displays his intelligence and doesn’t let the armor’s AI do everything.
Though the, uhm, let’s say analog parts of his older suits haven’t aged well.
Having Tony calculate on a slide the perfect position for the fight, DURING the fight… that’s a bit much.
I just wish Tony would bring back his built-in boot roller skates from the 70’s.
He could use them in a team-up with Dazzler 🙂
I myself have thought it was interesting when Tony (or somewhat similar characters such as Cyborg) had to manually adjust their hardware. I suppose both real and fictional tech have moved beyond that.