Mysteriously Yours... The Melter!

It's no surprise that a villain who calls himself the Melter would mainly spend his time going up against Iron Man--which, unless he was being groomed to be a villain on the scale of the Mandarin, could only take him so far as a viable character. There were only so many times when Iron Man could believably exclaim, "It's the mysterious Melter! The one foe I'm helpless against!" before that sort of thing grew tiresome; after all, Tony Stark is a brilliant engineer who you'd think would eventually upgrade his armor to be able to ward off the Melter's powerful melting beam, rather than be "helpless" every time the Melter showed up at Stark's factory. There was also the fact that, initially, the Melter's source of power, his chest beam, was also his main weakness, a bullseye which an engineer of Stark's caliber (or anyone with 20/20 vision) would be able to pick up on--one repulsor blast to that chest hardware and the Melter's threat is over.

What the Melter (a/k/a Bruno Horgan) did have going for him was his ruthlessness, which played out well on the comic book page and made it apparent that he had no problem with causing serious injury or even death to achieve his goals. In the beginning, his main goal was ruining Tony Stark, his business competitor who was siphoning away lucrative army contracts from Horgan's factory because of Stark's assessment that Horgan was using substandard materials. In designing his melting apparatus, Horgan, like many villains of the time, developed delusions of grandeur that his new abilities... er, ability could not only help him strike back at his enemies but make him all-powerful. It's a preposterous notion, of course, since Horgan has no defense against, say, a sniper, or explosives, or gas fumes, or any number of methods the authorities could use to bring him down. (Though more on that in a minute.)

One feather in the Melter's cap (or whatever that is on his head) is that he was a charter member of the Masters of Evil, along with the Black Knight, the Radioactive Man, and their leader, Baron Zemo, who upgraded the Melter's beam so that it wouldn't be limited to melting just iron (another factor that would no doubt have impacted on Horgan's ambitious plans for himself). Aside from his activities in Tales Of Suspense in battling Iron Man, his status in the Masters served to give him continued exposure in The Avengers, as well, not only in Zemo's group but also in other Masters lineups. Even so, the Melter would probably be appalled to discover that, in the long run, he would never amount to the kind of threat that he'd hoped to become. For what it's worth, he had a decent run, no argument there; but three costume changes and still no reputation to show for it made it apparent that this villain had perhaps run his course.

All of that said, it's interesting to note that the Melter's history encompasses over twenty years of Marvel stories. His final fate was a virtual slap in the face that befell a number of Marvel characters who were deemed to be, as Trek lore would put it, "dunsels"--but you can of course judge that for yourself.


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