I've linked to Steve Donoghue's videos on classic comics before (here and here), and now he's got a new one out.
As I mentioned before, what's great about the Steve Donoghue commentary is that he's got all the comic-book knowledge of a nerd, but none of a nerd's reverence for these early issues. I love the way he rips into them.
I've also read these early issues of Iron Man. I picked them up sometime around 2005 when I was living in Gifu. American comic books were usually really hard to find in Japan, but someone had left the Iron Man Essential (W) Volume 1 on a book exchange table at a bar I frequented. So I picked it up.
As Steve Donoghue mentions, the actual stories are pretty boring, but the artwork did sometimes do a good job of capturing Iron Man zooming around through the air in a way that every once and a while made you feel the kinetic energy of a superhero who could fly.
What really struck me about those issues, however, was something that Steve Donoghue only barely mentions--the cold war politics as filtered through children's entertainment. In these early Iron Man comics, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Soviets are not portrayed merely as geo-political rivals, they are portrayed as pure evil. I wasn't quite sure whether to regard this as just over-the-top cold war retro-kitsch (in the same way we laugh off Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon stereotypes). Or to get offended by how this comic book was propagandizing to children to hate a certain type of people. (I talked about some of this before in my 2009 review of the first Iron Man movie.)
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