Last time, I wrote a lot of words about Captain Mar-Vell, a character I had read in early childhood but only really enthused about during the Jim Starlin Era. I think he caught my interest initially because it was rare to "get in on the ground floor" with Marvel characters, given the vagaries of distribution in West Central Scotland in the 70s. Today's post concerns a similar story, and again it's about a tpb I bought at the beginning of June.
I'll probably miss a similar event in Glasgow next month but the closing-down sale of the Aberdeen branch of Forbidden Panet yielded a couple of bargains. One was the second Steve Ditko DC omnibus ( I might write about both volumes in a future post). The second was the collected Machine Man.
I first came across The Living Robot, dubbed " Mr. Machine" in my one-an-only issue of the quirky 2001: a Space Odyssey Marvel comic of the mid-70s. Those stories all seem, like the earlier Eternals, to take place in "The world outside your window"- not the Marvel Universe as such, but a separate Kirbyverse,
As is common to other Kirby stories, MM is about technology, identity and individuality. While some of those themes were explored at Marvel through the Vision in the Avengers, that red-skinned synthezoid's plight seems to echo Mr. Spock: a character who repressed emotional expression and whose efficacy is threatened when they erupt. MM is a much more expressive character; in fact it's the threat to his human-like face that is the crisis point in many stories. It's the symbol of his individuality and humanity. Vizh was always a member of a group and although he was the de facto star, as evidenced by his corner box status, he wasn't the lead in every story. (cf. the Celestial Madonna saga).
Machine Man was launched over forty years ago, in 1978, alongside Devil Dinosaur. If these comics were marketed in my area, I don't recall seeing them. But where, six years before, I'd buy any DC Kirby comic, maybe after Eternals and 1976 Cap, I preferred the more mature fare of Ms. Marvel, Red Sonja and Claremont's X-Men.
The first six issues of MM are almost a graphic novel; a continuing arc. We're introduced to Col. Kragg, an obsessive army officer who is pursuing the "thinking junkpile" and psychiatrist Peter Spaulding. MM discovers Spaulding has a patient who is psychically linked to an alien being falling into a sun. MM opens a dimension door and unleashes Ten-For: not just a CB radio pun but a "Holocaust Specialist" from the Autocron Empire.
Another difference with the Vision is MM's limitless built-in gimmicks: giant tyres, skateboards, eye-lenses and extendable limbs. He had marketing potential as a toy, which reminds me of a favourite from my childhood: the Strawberry Fayre Cyborg and Android dolls and accessories.
Ten-For signals an invasion fleet while MM "cops out" like the Silver Surfer or Spider-Man, frustrated by the thankless nature of humankind. Encounters with tv executive Tracy Warner and black cab driver Barney Bates convince MM to re-enter the fray. He uses his hypnotic power to dispatch Ten-For as a "walking A-bomb" into the heart of the invasion fleet.
Issues 7-9 comprise the next arc: a mad scientist sends his robot Paratron to attack MM, in order to gain the "plaudits of the world." Meanwhile, Spaulding is captured by a criminal combine and MM has to rescue his friend from their "Holocaust Box". The Corporation send Konik the super-hitman to finish off MM when he escapes their plans to duplicate and market more living robots. The central concerns of this arc remind me of Mr. Miracle and the Scavengers of Forever People, the Collectors of Black Panther and Intergang in Jimmy Olsen. Visible alterations to the lettering make me wonder if Kirby's criminal organisation was something other than the Corporation, which had already been used an antagonist for Deadly Hands of Kung Fu characters like the White Tiger and Jack of Hearts.
And the Machine Man series ends there, after nine months, just like Devil Dinosaur. Neither series had the longevity of Eternals or Black Panther. Maybe if they had overt connections, like the Fourth World series, they might have lasted longer. But perhaps Kirby's eccentric scripting and his magpie mind were out of step with the tastes of 1978-79 Marvel readers. I think if he had given Marvel a post-apocalyptic series like Gerber's Thundarr from tv or a barbarian character like DC's Atlas, Kirby's comics work might have seen out the decade. As it was, he moved into animation work with the FF and ZZ-123, the comedy droid who became Herbie.
Machine Man's clash with the Corporation continued in the pages of the Hulk and tied up story strands from Captain America. But like Mar-Vell, MM would return to his own series under the pencil of a master stylist. More about that next time.
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