sineala:

I want to thank you for recommending this, anon; it was delightful!

(I haven’t read a lot of 70s comics because even though I tell myself that one day I’m going to sit down and read Avengers/Cap/IM from the beginning that day has not yet come and I have stuck to reading Things I Need To Know About For Fanfic, which in practice means that, of all the 70s stuff, I’ve only read, like, Secret Empire/Nomad and Demon in a Bottle.)

Also, you didn’t mention that this issue opens with Steve working out on the rings, which is one of my favorite training things for Steve to do. Check out that splash page:

I don’t even know what Steve and Tony were fighting about but man do I miss the era of comics when they could just make up and be friends again instantly:

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE, MARVEL. Also, aww, he’s SO CLOSE to telling Steve his secret identity. (”Keep your secrets” is such an odd phrasing from Steve because it… kind of implies that he already knows? Even though we know he doesn’t. I mean, Tony hasn’t even mentioned that he’s telling him a secret; he just says it’s something that he should have told Steve and… somehow Steve knows it’s a secret?)

(Also I have to say that “you lead, I’ll follow” is putting me in mind of Tony’s recent “I can’t say no to Cap when he begs” and all the gentle dom Tony headcanons floating around and this is me looking longingly at my 24,000 words of notes about such a story and shoving it back under the WIP pile. Probably my brain should not even have gone there.)

The actual plot of this issue: Jocasta. I guess this is when Jan finds out that Jocasta is the Sexy Robot version of her? Awkward.

This is going into my “all the Avengers are robot fuckers” file. (I don’t actually keep one of those. I probably should.)

And, aww, Tony catches Steve:

I like how he just assumes Tony’s gonna be there. (This is not the only time he has ever done this, either.) It’s like the deadly version of trust falls.

Anyway, thank you again! I enjoyed this!

sineala:

The thing about Steve is that Steve isn’t really very good at verbally expressing feelings in general, so there aren’t as many panels about Steve’s feelings for Tony not because Steve doesn’t care about Tony but because Steve is, frankly, crap at feelings. (Like, okay, take the panels I posted of Steve and Bernie the other day, in which Bernie tells him she loves him and he (1) doesn’t say it back and (2) goes home and angsts to himself about how he can’t even tell what he’s feeling. I feel like Bernie is doing the majority of the heavy emotional lifting in that relationship. And this is someone Steve canonically ends up engaged to! I note that she’s the one on her knees asking Steve to marry her.)

So most of the panels of Steve’s feelings for Tony tend to be Steve expressing his feelings for Tony to himself, in thought bubbles; Steve expressing his feelings about Tony to people who are not Tony; or other extenuating circumstances, like Hydra Steve.

We can see that pretty early on, here in Avengers #16 when the founders leave the team, Steve sure looks like he’s pretty specifically going to miss Iron Man (and Tony’s gonna miss him).

Much later on, when we get to the second drinking arc, there are a lot of instances of Steve expressing concern for Tony although perhaps not showing it in the best of ways. This is Steve in Avengers #233, his thoughts occupied pretty much entirely by Tony:

There is, actually, a lot more where this came from – slightly earlier in Avengers, Steve and Jan try to confront Tony about his drinking, and it doesn’t go well. This is Avengers #232:

Iron Man #172 is the classic issue for Steve caring about Tony drinking, and I think the panel of it in which Steve most clearly cares for Tony is also the one where he is expressing it again in his own mind:

And then, of course, later on, when we get to the nineties, we have the famed Tales of Suspense one-shot. Fandom calls this the “azure eyes” issue because, well, Tony’s thoughts about Steve are frankly kind of amazing, but Steve’s thoughts about Tony also make it clear that Steve thinks the world of him:

And then we have Hickman’s Avengers run, where Steve, uh. Steve has a lot of feelings about Tony, let’s just say, and they all end up in this messy obsession that is really, really intense and I think ought to count for something. Steve spends approximately the last third of the run fixated on Tony, a fact that he admits to Reed in Avengers #43:

“All I can think of is him.” I think it’s safe to say that there are some feelings there.

(A lot of their feelings are also generally expressed in the intensity of their fights – like, check out Casualties of War or that part of Avengers v4 where they’re screaming at each other in the snow.)

And then of course we have Civil War II: The Oath, in which Hydra Steve decides to inform Tony’s comatose body that Real Steve loved him:

I mean, yes, okay, it’s Hydra Steve, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any reason to think he’s lying about the feelings he expresses. Tony is unconscious and Steve is alone so it’s not like he’s trying to impress anyone else or to mindfuck Tony, he’s just… doing a villain monologue at him. And he loves him. (I am actually kind of impressed they didn’t try to no-homo that. I would have expected something like “he loved you like a brother,” but no. Just “he loved you.”)

So there! Steve has feelings too!