Iron Man (1968 series) #45

And now, “Iron Man Fights a Huge Robot in a Small Apartment—Part 2!” Really, that’s all there is to it. Anyway, a new writer, Gary Friedrich, takes over for two issues, and it looks like here just to clear out the old to make way for some new. And how does he start? With a Beatles song! He came in through the boardroom window! Protected by a shining suit! Kevin the Guardsman literally crashes the party to offer his services to the bad old board in defeating Tony Stark! Kev’s insane jealousy turning him into a supervillain strains credulity but it was apparently the best they could come up with as a pretext for having the two friends fight. Mind you, a guy who doesn’t think to use a door is not a dire threat but that’s what we’re given. Meanwhile, they reached all that way back to 1968 for a dramatic backdrop—anti-war protests! But then this is the company that created the ultimate fad character—Dazzler—years after the fad had passed—and kept her around forever! And the issue ends on a less-than—climactic moment, suggesting the previous story ran over the page limit and they had to push this one off into the next ish. And that’s where things get weird…. Biggest unanswered question: why didn’t they put the end to the Kline/Night Phantom story at the end of the previous issue instead of the Ant-Man saga?

Review/Commentary: So what happened to Mister Kline/the Assassin that led to his comically abrupt departure from this issue? Well, in DAREDEVIL #84, Kline approaches the Black Widow in Switzerland claiming to be a doctor who has discovered a cure for blindness; Natasha calls Matt to come meet her. There, Daredevil learns that Kline/the Assassin is an android, sent back from the 50th century by his master Baal who is a massive computer which gained sentience and will be the sole ruler of Earth (officially Earth-711042); Kline’s mission was to mess with the timeline to prevent certain threats to Baal’s future posed by DD and Iron Man. During the battle with Kline, two of the Final Sons of Men, rising in the wake of the death of Baal, have come back to tie up the last loose ends, and they destroy Kline. Biggest unanswered question: Why would Foggy Nelson being elected Governor of New York in 1971 affect anything on Earth in the 50th century? In this context, the current Iron Man issues make even less sense: what did fighting a robot double of one of his more obscure foes have to do with the epic Terminator/science fiction plot that DD #84 only hints at? A plot so fragmented that it makes no sense at all and just comes across as a random series of adventures until writer Gerry Conway chose to end it by dumping an overly complicated time travel epic on an overwhelmed reader—with no hints of this given in Iron Man’s book?

Comments: Final appearance of Mister Kline in this title. First appearance of Simon Gilbert, father of Firebrand (though that has not yet been revealed) and future love interest Roxanne (to be introduced in issue #59). Kevin uses the name Guardsman for the first time.