Anguish, Once Removed!

Book: The Invincible Iron Man

Issue No.: 116

Published: August 22, 1978

Title: “Anguish, Once Removed!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Original paper copy

I love a good comic book cliffhanger. Even though sometimes the cliffhanger is better than the payoff. This issue of Iron Man is the payoff for the previous issue’s top-notch cliffhanger, where Iron Man’s alter ego Tony Stark was betrayed by his girlfriend Madame Masque and attacked by the weird and dangerous Ani-Men. But this payoff really delivers. Iron Man no. 116 is a page-turner from start to finish.

In the course of this story, we find out Madame Masque’s motivation for betraying Stark. Masque’s father, Count Nefaria, is dying, and given that Nefaria is a bad guy (as you might have guessed based on his name), Masque fears that Stark won’t let her use Stark’s super science to save Nefaria. Nefaria is also the creator of the Ani-Men, a weird group of animal-based super goons. There’s Catman, Bird-Man, and Gort, who I believe is some kind of ape guy. There’s also a frog guy, but I’m not sure if he’s Frog-Man or Frogman, because the hyphenation rules are unclear in Marvel comics in general and in this book in particular. I mean, we have a Bird-Man (hyphen) and a Catman (no space, no hyphen) in an Iron Man (space, no hyphen) comic book. I am just enough of a copyediting enthusiast to be bothered by that sort of thing.

Anyway, Stark manages to survive his fight with the Ani-Men long enough to get into his Iron Man suit. At which point he gains the upper hand. But! Just as Iron Man is about to defeat the last of the Ani-Men, a bomb goes off, courtesy of a costumed guy called the Spymaster who is apparently doing a blowing-up-Tony-Stark-for-hire job.

Iron Man is worried that Madame Masque was killed in the explosion. He still loves her, despite her recent heel turn. After a panicked search, Iron Man finds that both Masque and Nefaria survived the explosion. Iron Man basically tells her, look, we obviously have some issues to work through, and I gotta hand your dad over to the authorities because, despite his illness, he’s a dangerous super-villain.

This is not what Masque wants to hear — she is completely ride-or-die for her father at this point. So she attacks Iron Man with one of his own pieces of gear, a nigh-indestructible tank-like vehicle that he invented to explore the surface of Jupiter. I don’t think actual Jupiter has a surface — gas giant planets are weird. But the point is the super-tank is formidable.

Oh, I forgot, before Iron Man faces the Jupiter tank he has to fight a Tony Stark android that’s also pretty formidable and makes for an exciting two-page fight.

Iron Man manages to defeat the Jupiter tank without harming Madame Masque, who was piloting the tank. But! There’s a lot of collateral damage, and it turns out Count Nefaria was killed during the tank battle. Madame Masque is devastated. She tells Iron Man she loves him, but she doesn’t know if she can forgive him for killing her dad.

I guess my one gripe with this story is Madame Masque. I really like her cool/mysterious vibe (she apparently never takes off her golden mask) and her reformed-villain backstory. But she spent several pages of this book trying to kill Iron Man with a super-tank and then got mad at Iron Man because he accidentally killed her dad while trying to defend himself. Spider-Man famously learned a lesson when his inaction led to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben. But Madame Masque obviously didn’t learn anything when she accidentally killed her super-villain father while trying to kill her superhero boyfriend. That kind of hubris makes me think that Madame Masque might not be cut out for non-villain work.

Next time — Blazing battle action with the Howling Commandos!