The Vietnam War in Comics: IRON MAN

I spoke too soon when I called the Mighty Thor the first superhero to get embroiled in the Vietnam War. How could I forget the one hero whose very origin goes back to the earliest days of the war? In the pages of Marvel's TALES OF SUSPENSE #39 from March 1963, millionaire industrialist Tony Stark gets himself injured by a booby-trap in the jungles of Vietnam, while demonstrating his high tech “transistor-powered” weapons to the U.S. military. He's then captured by Wong-Chu, the yellow-skinned “red guerrilla tyrant” of Vietnam, who forces Stark to build weapons for the Commie cause. Instead, Stark builds a suit of armor he uses to blast the Commie bastard back to the stone age.


















And thus, Iron Man was born.