Six decades ago, Iron Man’s First Villain, which is a long-forgotten Marvel Villian kidnapped Tony Stark and that became the starting point of Invincible Iron Man’s journey.
Iron Man is one of the most popular and loved Marvel superheroes. Iron Man has been the face of MCU for decades. Tony Stark has enjoyed an illustrious career as everyone’s favorite billionaire playboy philanthropist. That career which involved threats coming from aliens and gods, he took down many villains but the question is who exactly was the Iron Man’s First Villain to trade fists with Iron Man?
To solve this mystery, we have to dig the 1960s content and should appreciate that content that inspired the superhero and Iron Man’s First Villain. The answer to this question can leave readers and movie-goers in shock surprise.
Iron Man’s First Villain, Dig Deeper
To solve the mystery of Iron Man’s First Villain, it’s important to keep one thing in mind that the initial origin of Iron Man took place in the middle of the cold war and eight years into the Vietnam War. The threat of communism, the so-called Red Menace, was vivid in the imaginations of American citizens and their children. Iron Man made his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39 which was published in 1963, in this issue Stan Lee purposely illustrated Tony Stark as Capitalism Incarnate. The man responsible for forcing Tony Stark to get in the Iron Armour was Wong-Chu, the Red Guerrilla Tyrant.
Same as in the 2008 Marvel’s feature film, Tony finds himself in a theater of war but this time he was in Vietnam not in the middle west, demonstrating his newly designed array of weapons, when his group is ambushed and he is wounded in an explosion. Wong-Chu a North Vietnamese warlord and deadly martial artist kidnaps badly wounded Stark in the hope of using his intelligence to make weapons for his army. This incident leaves Tony nearly dead, he has only a week left to see the world until the shrapnel of the blast reaches his heart. Before the days of arc-reactors and repulsors, the key to Stark’s survival and technological supremacy was his mega-powerful, electronic transistors.
The mechanical suit that he made kept him alive and gave him a chance to escape from the clutches of the Vietnamese Warlord from the “Iron Man’s First Villain”. The encounter was a small one as Wong-chu was just a bad guy with no superpowers so it was nearly impossible for him to face Iron Man’s power and his gadgetry. Wong-Chu is believed killed in a fiery explosion caused by Iron Man but would return in a future story to be killed by associates of Yinsen, another of his prisoners. Naturally, he was the one who forced billionaire Playboy Tony Stark to wear that Powerful Iron Armor.
