Iron Man (1968)

Iron Man #255
Issue(s): Iron Man #255
Cover Date: Apr 90
Title: ”Switching channels”
Credits: 
Glenn Herdling & Fabian Nicieza - Writer
Herb Trimpe - Penciler
Herb Trimpe - Inker
Len Kaminski - Assistant Editor
Howard Mackie - Editor
Review/plot:
A clever little fill in. At first it seems like we’re going to get a split book story like Fantastic Four #277, half about Iron Man and half about the Crimson Dynamo. And the book is in that format, with the top and bottom halves split between the two characters.

But the twist is that Iron Man and the Dynamo’s minds get swapped. Crimson Dynamo is in a training session with a redesigned Devastator. As we’ve seen previously, the Devastator gets his powers beamed to him from a satellite. And the person Iron Man is fighting, ”Freak Quincy”, is a person driven crazy from the fact that satellite signals are being beamed into his head. So during the fights, Tony and the current Dynamo (Valentin Shatalov) get swapped thanks to the Devastator’s signal getting sent through Quincy.



Thanks to the fact that Tony deactivated the last Crimson Dynamo, this one’s armor is more primitive, so Tony winds up getting knocked out.

Valentin, meanwhile, blows off Freak Quincy’s arms.

Holy crap!
Neither person is too nice about being in the others’ body. Valentin sets about learning Iron Man’s secret identity, and then taking advantage of the fact that he is Tony Stark to steal technology secrets. But Tony takes advantage of the fact that he’s not in a body held upright by a microchip to have sex with Valentin’s girlfriend.



Not cool, dude! Pretty gross, really.
Tony also learns that while Crimson Dynamo’s armor may be primitive in some ways, it’s really advanced in others.

Eventually Tony is able to contact Freak Quincy and opens a connection while tricking Devastator to blast him again, so that the mind swap is reversed. Valentin finds that Tony had already arranged for him to be suspected of stealing state secrets, so Valentin is arrested when he returns to his own body.
Tony briefly considers killing Freak Quincy to avoid being messed with further, but instead he vows to help him cope with his situation.

Quincy won’t ever appear again, to my knowledge.
The next issue blurb and a note in the lettercol are apologetic about the deadline-induced fill-in that has delayed the prologue to Armor Wars II. The letters in the lettercol are mainly from people critical of the resolution to Stark’s paralysis. Some of the letter writers are in wheelchairs themselves, and they find the solution to Stark’s problem to be cheap. The response is that creative team changes and Acts of Vengeance have gotten the book sidetracked, but they never intended for that to be the final solution to the story. ”There are going to be consequences resulting from Tony’s arrogant attempt to buy his way out of his disability - serious ones.” There are a number of references to Tony’s chip in this issue, probably not a coincidence.
It’s refreshing to see that Tony is referred to as ”arrogant” by whoever wrote the letter response. I’ve definitely felt like Tony is arrogant (at a minimum) in the past few years (at a minimum) of the series but it hasn’t been clear to me that the writers intended for him to come off that way. This seems to be an indication that they did, or at least that editorial is acknowledging it now. I like Tony Stark to be an arrogant, morally questionable sort of character, as long as we’re not meant to think that he’s a clean hero.
Certainly in this issue Tony comes across as pretty awful - sleeping with Valentin’s girlfriend and considering killing Quincy - but as long as we’re all cognizant of the fact that he’s awful, i like it.
Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1
Chronological Placement Considerations: We see Valentin Shatalov acquire the Crimson Dynamo armor in 1992’s Soviet Super Soldiers #1, which takes place prior to this issue.
References:
• Tony Stark got a chip to cure his paralysis in Iron Man #248.
• Tony disabled the previous Crimson Dynamo’s armor in Iron Man #229.
• When Iron Man wonders what happened to Dimitri Bukharin, the previous Crimson Dynamo, we’re given a footnote to his first appearance in Iron Man #109. Iron Man must not have heard from Cap about Captain America #352-353.

Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
Inbound References (2): show
Characters Appearing: Crimson Dynamo VI, Devastator II, Iron Man, Mrs. Arbogast

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1990 / Box 29 / EiC: Tom DeFalco
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Punisher War Journal #17-19
14 Reader Ratings








Comments
Fnord, I think you’re understating the seriousness of Tony’s actions. What Tony did was basically RAPE. Bukharin’s girlfriend didn’t consent to sleep with Tony, she consented to sleep with Bukharin. It’s impossible to root for a rapist protagonist, even if we’re aware he’s awful.
And this isn’t the last time a backup or fill-in turned a character into a rapist. The backup in 1991 turned Starfox into a rapist.
Posted by: Michael | May 20, 2015 9:00 PM
Obligatory TV Tropes link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BedTrick
Posted by: Morgan Wick | May 20, 2015 10:07 PM
I think calling what Tony did here ”rape” would be wrong. I’m not saying what he did was right, mind you--but it really isn’t ”rape”. Tricking someone into bed by pretending to be someone or something you’re not isn’t rape. Otherwise every cheater who takes off their wedding ring and hits a singles bar, for example, is a ”rapist”.
I realize this is a bit different from that because Tony is wearing another man’s body (although NOT by his choice), but I really don’t feel that ”rape” is the right word for it. There is absolutely a form of violation happening here, but ”rape” implies a deliberate act of assault (which isn’t the case--SHE initiated the encounter) as well as a lack of consent. She did consent--and, as noted, initiated it. Tony took advantage of the fact that she was mistaken about his identity...but he didn’t force anything on her.
I think part of the problem is that this sort of violation isn’t currently possible in a real-world scenario, a word hasn’t been invented for it yet. ”Rape” goes too far, but ”tricked into bed” doesn’t quite go far enough.
Posted by: Dermie | May 21, 2015 12:04 AM
Dermie, several jurisdictions ARE making it illegal to sleep with a woman while disguised as her boyfriend. That was the major criticism of the scene in Revenge of the Nerds, where Lewis disguises himself as Stan to have sex with Betty. 
And yes, she initiated the encounter but Tony could have easily said ”I’m not feeling well because of my injuries, can we save this for another night” without making her suspicious.
And saying that she initiated it wrongly places the burden on her- ”Women shouldn’t have sex with their boyfriends, because they might be body swapped with strangers”.
Posted by: Michael | May 21, 2015 8:05 AM
Don’t assume fnord doesn’t consider this kind of behavior rape. The Squadron Supreme entry makes his viewpoint very clear.
Posted by: JP | May 21, 2015 9:55 AM
I do think it’s rape. I don’t want to risk a semantic argument that gets into Whoopi Goldberg ”it’s not rape-rape” territory, but i recognize Dermie’s point that what happens here is different than someone breaking into a bedroom window, or even date rape. JP bringing up the Hyperion/Power Princess situation is a great way of looking at it. If we were made to care about Valentin’s girlfriend as much as we did Power Princess, we’d probably feel the violation more (i didn’t bring it up in the entry and it shouldn’t be relevant, but the story actually tries to depict her as being ”slutty” and show that Valentin doesn’t care about her, as if that should make it ok). Valentin’s girlfriend didn’t consent to having sex with Tony Stark, and that makes it rape.
But this is a situation that a lot of people would find ambiguous, and my point in the entry is that i think Tony Stark wouldn’t see it as rape (i could also, for example, see James Bond doing something like this). And like i said in the review, while i think that’s awful of him, i like a depiction of him as a character as someone who is more morally ambiguous, someone that in his pre-heart condition days was a high flying womanizing playboy and possibly worse. It’s usually subtext; between the Code and the fact that Stark is the protagonist, stuff like this shouldn’t actually happen, and i’m sure the reason it slipped through is because it’s a fill-in, as Michael notes, and the unusual circumstances.
Posted by: fnord12 | May 21, 2015 2:29 PM
Apologies, fnord, if you don’t want this convo to go on, here - but I feel compelled to not let it go by without saying something.
if a person claims they are collecting money for the homeless, or drug counseling, and presented themselves as such, and even seemed to have the paperwork to prove it - and due to this claim received money, which they then pocketed for their own profit - would that not be theft? Would that not be a criminal violation, not at all mitigated by the ”willingness” of the person who was under the impression that they were giving money to a deserving party?
The only way I can understand people claiming that Tony’s action above is *not* rape is because they want to maintain some category of sex-by-deception that is ”OK.” In a context of a patriarchal society, where sexual coercion (and differential consequences for sexual activity) is part of women’s everyday, and lifetime, experiences, I can’t find any positive reason for wanting to maintain such a category.
Hopefully ’Secret Wars’ will wipe this out! (to bring it back to comics)
Posted by: cullen | May 21, 2015 9:25 PM
https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/iron_man_255.shtml

Apr 1990

Marvel

071486024545

255

1990

1

United States

$1.00

(Bronze Age, from 1971 to 1985) & (Copper Age, from 1986 to 1992)

Copper Age

English

Magazine

2018-07-02 21:50:08

Chronicles

~$42.95

2026-02-07

2018-07-02 21:50:08