As
Marvel entered the super-hero era,
Stan et. al sometimes tried to inject a little bit of that success into their Western titles, especially the villeins:
YOW!!
Here's the cover of a reprint of that story, by
Gil Kane:
It didn't take very long to bring the guy back:
A re-colored and re-dialogued version from a later reprint:
You can't keep a good villain down for long, as...
Sure, Iron Mask only got a blurb there, but it was a
Rawhide Kid/Kid Colt team-up. That's gotta be your cover.
Iron Mask had one last try left in him:
And he brought
The Circus Of Crime (ye olde West version) with him!!
Here's the cover from the reprint, with some retouching from
John Romita:
Now, the resemblance to prominent Marvel bad guy
Dr. Doom is kinda of obvious...
...but in all honesty, the "Western villain in an iron suit" wasn't all that
original of an idea,to begin with:
Indeed, one or both of these incarnations might have been inspired by
Ned Kelly, Australian outlaw of the 1870s, whose gang all dressed in handmade armor and masks for their final stand:
SPOILER ALERT: The whole gang except Kelly died in that showdown, and Kelly himself was severely wounded, so maybe the dressing up in "
bulletproof" armor wasn't such a great idea.
Marvel's Iron Mask has a a couple of time-travel based appearances since then, and an alternate-universe version of him showed up in one of the
Marvel Zombie series.
But surely there's some undeveloped story potential left. Maybe after his many defeats at the hands of Kid Colt, blacksmith/genius
Don Hertz traveled to the east, and met the monks who would later make Doom's armor. Throw in a side trip to
K'un-L'un, and stowing away on
Kang's vessel (from the time
Thor &
Hawkeye went to the Old West!), and we start to have a story maybe?
That's why I'm not allowed to write comics.