Issue 167: The Empty Shell // Iron Man: Reforging a Hero

It’s February, 1983. Multiple NBA teams were beginning notable losing streaks, specifically the San Diego Clippers with 29 games straight and the Indiana Pacers with 28 games in a row. Multiple award winning juggernaut television dramatic comedy M.A.S.H. was also closing out on the last day of the month, drawing an estimated 125 million viewers during their two hour series finale.

And speaking of losing streaks and endings, Denny O’Neil is also busy making Tony Stark’s life a living hell.

The Empty Shell comes to us from Denny O’Neil, Luke McDonnell, Steve Mitchell, Rick Parker, and Bob Sharen.

Honestly, this cover is kind of amazing. While corny, it perfectly nails exactly how screwed Tony is right now. Obadiah Stane has made it his personal mission to wreck Stark for little given reason, and it feels like a fitting metaphor for where the book is at. It’s not as iconic as anything from The Dark Phoenix Saga, but I feel it’s up in the top 25 stories for the 80s.

Tony Stark is right where he was left last time, at home, with a bottle of scotch staring him down.

Rather than succumb to the worst parts of his personality or throw the bottle away immediately, O’Neil and the crew have Tony muse over the bottle. Maybe this is a gift. His office is wrecked beyond what he can afford for repairs, his main suit of armor is wrecked, Rhodey is gone, and Stane is trying to kill him. Just a few drops, and he could rest. Summoning up the last dregs of his willpower, though, Tony hurls it away dramatically.

Huh. A Queen. We’ve not seen him play that piece yet.

The next day, it’s becoming more obvious that Tony is fraying at the seams. He yells at his secretary, he explodes at his chief of security. But no one can bring themselves to tell Tony that he’s falling apart. Flying to Switzerland for an important meeting, Tony finds himself putting on his armor for comfort. For more comfort, he finds himself staring at an 8x10 of Indries Moomji, his latest lady love.

Indries is at her apartment, and Tony has showered her with flowers once more. Enough to fill her apartment, with more on the way. While he also doesn’t have enough liquid funds to repair his office from the Melter’s escapade last issue.

As if the audience needed to know more about how bad Tony has it, O’Neil springs this on the reader.

Tony normally doesn’t use the “L” word in his books, at least not in the 80s. He’s flirted with ladies constantly and even had steady girlfriends or lovers… but he’s never admitted he loved any of them, outside maybe Pepper Potts. And Moomji doesn’t reply, either, with Tony simply saying he’ll call her again tonight.

Stark then flies out his hotel window and decides to scout out the area, figuring someone’s going to attack him like they have nearly every issue since O’Neil started his run. And someone’s watching him, letting Stane know he’s left. Stane calls in his next goons of the week, a shock to readers who didn’t think this was coming. Since his minions have been chess themed, well… all chess pieces come as a set except for the King and Queen, right?

The Bishop, or the second Bishop at least, strikes Stark as he flies by an alpine cable car. This one doesn’t seem to have the same weird relaxing radiation that the previous one had, but this one is also a little more brutal. Unfortunately, he’s also not alone.

The second Knight of this chess set is here, and while his plan to skewer Tony in the back fails, he strikes a cable car and snaps the alpine transport’s cable. Desperate to keep the civilians from dying, Tony is barely able to catch the cable car, dropping it off on a nearby mountainside. He pays for his altruism by being rammed by the Knight, getting thrown down the mountainside. Meanwhile, Obadiah Stane has entered the meeting Tony went to Switzerland for, and is putting one of his many plans into motion.

Yes, to make the richest men in the world sound like farmyard animals!

Well, actually, the second Rook has been commanded to use the hypnosis headsets from Stane’s first strike at Stark to brainwash the people Tony was planning to meet with. The meeting itself is admittedly vague, since it’s not the focus of the story, but we can only assume they would be carrying contracts to infuse Stark International with cash, or other jobs that Tony needs right now.

Tony survived his fall, landing in a soft snowdrift at the base of a cliff. He uses it to blindside the Rook and Bishop, dragging the latter deep into the cold snow while skewering the flying steed of the former to strand them both in the Alps. Cold, irate, and bruised, Tony finally comes to the meeting hours late. He’s welcomed warmly by Stane.

It looks like this meeting was a verbal sparring match between investors for Stane and Stark, as Tony unleashes a speech about how Stark is for the individual - be it an individual person, or an individual nation. Meanwhile, Stane apparently plans to operate across national boundaries, and seeks to undermine laws and traditions that keep up separate.

You know, aside from being obviously homicidal against Tony and his armored persona, it’s hard to argue that Stane is in the wrong from this aspect. It’s shallower than most of O’Neil’s works have been so far, but Tony also is nowhere near as eloquent as someone like Green Arrow. He’s also a major wheel in the military-industrial complex that has been fighting constant proxy wars since the 1950s to prevent countries from making up their own minds about Communism or Capitalism. I’m not going to pull a 180 and claim Stane is now the hero of the book, but the MeMeMe 80s angle of the rugged individual who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps doesn’t age well in the hangover of 2021.

Tony loses the bids, as Stane has brainwashed everyone to just give him money. Bitter and dejected, Tony finds himself actively trying to avoid the bars he keeps seeing in the area, screaming to himself.

While Tony slowly goes back home, we cut to Scotland where Rhodey is still alive! He’s shirtless and trying to hitch a ride from a samaritan, before the driver is shot in the arm by a pair of goons who are trying to assassinate Jim! He escapes, and the goons lament they couldn’t kill him. The injured Scottsman calls them bigots (word of the day: Scunner, Scottish slang for someone with an unreasonable amount of prejudice).

Back at Stark International, Tony finds Indries waiting for him in his office. Thrilled, Tony tries to go in for a comforting hug.

Oh.

Shit.

For those of you who noticed Indries was not getting a lot of development, there was a good reason for that. Indries Moomji was the final piece in the chess set that Obadiah Stane was employing against Stark. A queen against his heart, a secret weapon designed to break Tony from within and rip his sense of self asunder. Special credit to the art team making her entire body language change at the drop of a hat, adding in things like her smoking despite never doing so before. It’s cold, it’s harsh.

And it’s ensured that Tony Stark has lost the battle and the war.

I still get chills from this issue. I didn’t own it as a kid, but when I was finally able to read this storyline through? I didn’t get a lot of good sleep that night. Seeing a man so utterly broken collapse into his worst point is fantastic storytelling, but also completely distressing. Compare that to the more recent times Tony Stark has fallen off the wagon, and there’s no contest on the raw emotion and pain on display.

Fear Itself #4. Setember 2011. Written by Matt Fraction, pencilled by Stuart Immonen. Inked by Wade von Grawbadger, colored by Laura Martin, lettered by Chris Eliopoulos.

There’s nothing structurally wrong with this moment on a conceptual level. Tony is sacrificing his sobriety to get the attention of Odin in Fear Itself, and it’s a strong execution that works. It’s a powerful moment, seeing Tony willingly give up his sobriety for the greater good. It’s a smaller moment in a large event that has heroes facing their worst fears, and is one of the rare ones that don’t involve punching.

However, it winds up being contained to the event itself, with Tony never falling off the wagon in his own book. It makes the event feel shallow in the larger landscape of Marvel.

AXIS #6. November 2016. Written by Rick Remender, pencilled by Terry Dodson. Inked by Rached Dodson, colored by Edgar Delgado and Jesus Aburtov, lettered by Chris Eliopoulos.

The event of AXIS put forth the idea of making good guys and bad guys invert their moralities because of magic and technology blowing up. It’s far from a bad idea, and had some genuinely great moments outside of the event book. The Inversion of Tony starts drinking because he’s the opposite of normal Tony… and that’s it. No build up, no major character repercussions, it’s used as a way to show that Tony is now wrong somehow.

Tony escapes being flipped back to normal, and is given a series called Superior Iron Man that tries mimicking the popular take of the Superior Spider-Man from a year or two back with an amoral “hero” as the main character. When Tony is eventually restored through hand-waives and super science, it’s like he was never drinking in the first place. It feels cheap.

But this book? Denny O’Neil’s run on Iron Man? Tony will not be sober for a year and a half of comics, and he has a long way to fall. Tony has dealt with alcoholism both before and after this event, with the most famous being The Demon in a Bottle storyline. But none of them will have the length or span of this story. We’re going to be in for one hell of a ride, people. Strap in.

But before we go, no letters page this month. We do, however, have our ever-faithful Bullpen Bulletins.

Jim Shooter takes the time to brag about how awesome Marvel was doing at this time. To be honest, I actually believe him. The shockingly popular Star Wars comic was still selling well, with the Return of the Jedi movie having just left theaters. This would give the comic one last sales bump before ending with issue 107. Spider-Man was now popular enough to have an entire third comic dedicated to reprinting his stories from the 60s, while also headlining Amazing and Spectacular. Marvel also had cartoons on the television, the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV show was becoming a cult classic on syndication, and Marvel had their thumbs in the GI Joe and Transformers pies to bring in more than a pretty penny of cash!

However, the rumor of the month is interesting. I’ll reprint it here so it’s easier to read.

Jim Shooter casually dismisses rumors that he wants to destroy the Marvel Universe. The thing is, this is exactly what he wanted to do in 1983. There were rumors that DC Comics was going to celebrate their 50th anniversary in 1985 by changing their universe forever, streamlining things with the excuse of making it easier for new readers to jump in. Marv Wolfman wanted to do that for years, and he was now in a position of some power there. Comics being a rather inclusive boys club then as now, rumors spread like wildfire. The base bricks were even being laid by Wolfman in his Teen Titans run around this time with the character of the Monitor being vague and weird.

So Jim Shooter wanted to beat them to the punch, or at least follow up with a similar idea. 1986 was going to be the 25th anniversary of Marvel Comics, or at least as the company named Marvel Comics. An interview with Marvel creator Doug Moench about Moon Knight was transcribed for website Comic Foundry some time ago, and while the website has faded from the internet, it was archived by a blog dedicated to Marvel in the 1980s.

You can find a link to it here, but it is really interesting. Essentially, Shooter was running what Moench calls Jim Shooter’s Big Bang of the Marvel Universe. How this would work is that characters would die and their heroic titles would become inherited by another person. Moench specifically mentions that Shooter planned to kill off Steve Rogers, but that an investment banker would pick up the shield of Captain America and carry on the fight against evil. Not only is that remarkably on-brand for the 1980s, but it’s also not entirely unlike what DC Comics would do in the 90s with legacy and character reinvention.

Doug Moench was a Marvel mainstay on many books, such as the above.

Moench alleges his books would have been Ground Zero for this Big Bang, with Shang-Chi being killed off in an issue of his run. He would then be replaced by a new Master of Kung Fu (assumedly changing the name on the cover, or making the Master of Kung Fu the main title), with someone else taking over the role of Master of Kung Fu. Going with trends at the time, Shooter wanted a ninja. Moench seems to have had more knowledge than some during the 80s, because he did take the time to explain how a Ninja is Japanese, while the art of Kung Fu is Chinese. Having written Shang-Chi for 8 years by this point, it’s safe to say that Moench had some investment with the character.

Shooter also seems to have made his point clear, with someone else finding the hammer of Thor after something happened to Donald Blake, Thor’s civilian identity at the time. Before Thor, however, Moench’s creation of Moon Knight was also up on the chopping block. Rather than continue with what he felt was madness, Doug Moench left the company and became a writer on DC’s Batrman. While this does boil down to hearsay, it does match another Moench interview from volume 3 of Comic Book Artist Collection, and it’s not far off from the background information found in Marvel Comics: the Untold Story by Chris Howe.

Thankfully, this didn’t explicitly happen as Moench claims Shooter wanted it. It does seem that Shooter would get his way in some respects down the line, though. Walter Simonson’s Thor run would replace Donald Blake with another hammer user in Eric Masterson. John Walker would replace Captain America when Steve would don the identity of The Captain during the 80s. We also have this run, where the status quo will be shaken beyond what most would consider repair for a time.

DC would also do similar things during the late 80s and early 90s, with Batman and Superman being temporarily replaced by new blood under the costume. Green Lantern and Flash would be the biggest changes, resulting in a theme of legacy and a connected thread of heroics going back to World War II. This is already after DC would do a “big bang” of their own by rebooting their universe with The Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, though that kept most of the characters the same while updating them for a new decade.

Needless to say, almost everyone behind the scenes hated it, with almost every writer Shooter was allegedly forcing into this proposition quitting rather than continuing. No one wanted to risk the ire of fans even then, and it would also mean potentially losing the marketing value of their entire superhero catalogue. Jim Shooter would relent, eventually turning his idea for a fresh comic world into the New Universe, a 1986 attempt at a more realistic comic world that would be set in “the real world.” It wound up coming in over budget, underfunded, and generally ran on promises and IOUs rather than the revolutionary new entity he wanted.

In some ways, The New Universe was ahead of its time while also being stuck in the style of the day. But that’s a story for another day.

This month’s bullpen also has ways to get in touch with comic shops, as well as general Q&As for subscription members. It’s a nice peek into the past, before the internet.

As for great comics this month, we have one of the last good issues of What If…?’s first volume. Issue 37 would look into what could happen if the Thing and the Beast continued to change and mutate, which would amusingly happen in years down the line multiple times. 

Uncanny X-Men #166 would bring an end to the Brood Saga, with a special double-sized issue that would cure the X-Men of their brood infection and set up the epilogue where it turns out Charles Xavier has been infected by the Brood. This would also result in the first X-Crossover, with the New Mutants guest-starring in Uncanny X-Men #167 as they storm the X-Mansion to save what remains of Xavier.

Invincible Iron Man #168 is the beginning of the end of Tony Stark. Join us, won’t you?