Origins in War continued: the Fantastic Four and Iron Man

Fantastic Four

Carrying the same elements in their origin as the Hulk, Stan Lee’s origin of the Fantastic Four’s also ties into the same Cold War attitudes and atomic age stigma.  The foursome of Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, Susan and Johnny Storm gain their powers after they hurtle themselves haphazardly into outer space to investigate the mysterious cosmic radiation and unlock their scientific secrets in Fantastic Four #1 (1962).  Before launching, pilot Ben Grimm expressed concern over flying into the unknown in an untested spaceship to which Sue Storm responds with her own determination by exclaiming, “We’ve got to take that chance... unless you want the commies to beat us to it”.  This statement stems straight from the Space Race attitudes of the 1960’s when the USA was determined to have the foothold in space before the Soviet Union did.

The Cold War language in the Fantastic Fou

The stigma of the atomic age returns in this origin as well with radiation and the mysterious “cosmic rays”. Ben Grimm’s original warnings about the radiation go unheeded by the rest of the team  Eventually, soon after Sue Storm remarks how perfect the space flight was proceeding, Grimm sees that the cosmic radiation laid ahead and  “no one knows what they’ll do”. This is an allusion to the unknown powers of the nuclear age.  Though the radiation bestows amazing powers upon the four, Grimm is transformed, like the Hulk, into an enormous monster.  The dangers of radiation in that atomic age are reinforced by Lee here as Grimm forever is cursed and disfigured by the unknown powers encountered in the then-new scientific age.

The "Cosmic Radiation" Strikes

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Tales of Suspense (1963)

Iron Man

For Iron Man, Lee turned directly towards the military industrial complex and the Cold War. Premiering in Tales of Suspense #39, Tony Stark, while on a survey trip to war-torn Vietnam, finds himself injured by a bomb and then captured by a North Vietnamese Communist leader, who then orders him to design weapons. To escape and keep his wounded heart beating, he secretly constructs a “suit of transistor powered armor that gives him great strength and destructive power”. Another prisoner, Ho Yinsen, a physicist known by Stark, constructs a magnetic chest plate to keep the shrapnel from reaching Stark’s heart, keeping him alive. Once stateside again, Stark discovers that the shrapnel fragment lodged in his chest cannot be removed without killing him, and he is forced to wear the armor’s chestplate beneath his clothes to act as a regulator for his heart. He must recharge the chestplate every day or else risk the shrapnel killing him. A hero with an innate weakness, Iron Man comes straight from the Vietnam conflict.

Tony Stark's North Vietnamese captors.  Note the use of yellow ink
for the North Vietnamese characters.

Born directly out of war, Lee’s Iron Man is a character who “lives and breathes the military industrial complex”.  His enemies then in turn were stereotypes characterized as usually Communist in nature like his arch-nemesis the Mandarin, a Chinese warlord. Lee wanted hero literally from the front-lines of the war to take on the Communist threat like the the Soviet Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man. Iron Man may not have been linked to the super science of radiation and atomic energy like the Hulk in his origin, but he was most definitely a superhero born of war itself.