Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and twenty-third week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.

COMIC LEGEND:

Tony Stark's girlfriend, Rae LaCoste, was going to be revealed as the new Madame Masque.

STATUS:

True

For many years, Madame Masque was one of Iron Man's more intriguing foes, as Tony Stark and Whitney Frost had a relationship before she fully became Madame Masque, head of a criminal organization.

Anyhow, time passed and she had not appeared in an Iron Man comic for a while when she was seemingly killed off in "Iron Man" #238 (by David Michelinie, Bob Layton and Jackson Guice)...

In "Iron Man" #245 (after Tony had been shot and he was getting used to being paralyzed), Tony called up "Whitney"...

it is important to see who he then met with, his girlfriend, Rae LaCoste...

Tony had met her almost two years earlier, soon after Michelinie and Layton had returned to their duties as the writers on "Iron Man," where they had Tony meet her AND get a sweet perm all at the same time...

However, after saving her from AIM in #247...

Iron Man then didn't see Madame Masque again for the rest of Michelinie and Layton's return run, as they were soon replaced by Johns Byrne and Romita Jr as the new creative team on "Iron Man." So they never got a chance to reveal who Madame Masque really was, so I'll say it right now - yep, she was secretly Rae LaCoste! I asked Bob Layton about it, and he confirmed that. He also let me in on another secret about Rae LaCoste that I think I'll wait to share until a future CBLR!

Kurt Busiek later explained in the pages of "Avengers" that basically they were all clones of Whitney Frost (the new Madame Masque and the one that the new Madame Masque shot and killed and "replaced"), and Frost went back to being the only Madame Masque in town.


Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at CBR: Was Ally McBeal going to leave Larry at the altar even if Robert Downey Jr. had not been fired?


OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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batshark

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...

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Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!