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There was also the chance that Lee would swoop in, look at a page, and offer an offhand remark that would send the office scrambling. Near the end of Roy Thomas’s tenure, Lee had taken a look at Iron Man pages in which the hero’s faceplate was so flat that it didn’t look like Tony Stark’s nose would fit. “Shouldn’t he have a nose?” he asked Thomas. In the decade since his creation, Iron Man’s faceplate had *never* included a nose, but Lee was the boss. In the next issue, Stark redesigned his helmet to include a big metal triangle in the front. Months later, Iron Man pages by Mike Esposito landed on the desk of Production Manager John Verpoorten’s brand-new assistant, Bill Mantlo. “I’m looking at this book and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I must be *hallucinating*!’ ” said Mantlo. “ ‘Iron Man doesn’t have a *nose*.’ So I sat there, very innocently, with a tube of white-out, and painted out all the noses, and maybe an hour later, I hear screaming. ‘Esposito, are you out of your mind?! *What happened to his nose?*’… Mike comes in and he’s raging, ‘Goddamn it, the nose is there!! You can see the little dot of white over each nose!’ ” Mantlo went through and dutifully scraped the Wite-Out from every panel.