Who Was Iron Man’s First Villain in Marvel Comics?

Iron Man is one of Marvel’s most famous and successful heroes. A longtime Avenger and – for years – the face of the MCU, Tony Stark has enjoyed an illustrious career as everyone’s favorite billionaire playboy philanthropist. That career has involved taking down a lot of threats, from aliens to gods, but who exactly was the first villain Iron Man faced?

To answer this question, we have to go back to the 1960s, and appreciate the historical context that inspired the hero and his earliest villain. Readers and movie-goers alike may be surprised at the answer and at its stark (no pun intended) similarities and differences to the more recent animated and live-action adaptations.

It is important to keep in mind that Iron Man’s origin story initially took place during the heart 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. In his first ever appearance in the pages of Tales of Suspense #39, published in 1963, Stan Lee purposefully presented Tony Stark as capitalism incarnate, a Howard-Hughes-type character deeply embedded in the military-industrial complex. Naturally, Stark’s first adversary, the man responsible for putting him in the iron suit, is as much a product of the times as Iron Man himself. It isn’t another iron-clad titan he faces, but Wong-Chu, the Red Guerrilla Tyrant (shown below in a later retelling of the story.)

Just as in the 2008 Marvel feature film, Stark finds himself in a theater of war (Vietnam, rather than the Middle East), 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, captures a near-dead Stark in the hopes of using the American’s genius to build weapons for his guerrilla army. The incident leaves Tony mortally wounded, with a week left to live until shrapnel from the blast reaches his heart. Before the days of arc-reactors and repulsors, the key to Stark’s survival and technological supremacy were his mega-powerful, electronic transistors. The mechanical iron suit kept Stark alive and enabled his escape from the megalomaniacal clutches of Wong-Chu – an adventure which has been revisited and altered in countless subsequent stories.

Their confrontation is a short one, Wong-Chu – who possesses no superhuman abilities of is own – is no match for Iron Man’s power and technological gadgetry. The Red Guerrilla Tyrant’s camp is destroyed, while his soldiers flee into the dark jungle. 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. Before that, Wong-Chu is revealed to be an agent of Iron Man’s greatest comic book nemesis, the Mandarin. It isn’t a mystery why Wong-Chu – narratively unremarkable and shaped by dated attitudes – hasn’t enjoyed the same level of recurrence and longevity as some other of Iron Man’s foes. Nevertheless, his is the hand that turned billionaire playboy Tony Stark’s life upside down, and by whose actions theInvincible Iron Man was born.

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