While on hiatus the Machine Man series gets a boost by the lead character being featured in the pages of the hot Marvel comic The Incredible Hulk.
Beginning in issue #234 of the comic by Roger Stern and Sal Buscema we meet X-51, the robot known as Machine Man who comes into conflict with the Hulk. Both are manipulated into fighting by the gangsters known as "The Corporation".
We get a few issues of wall-to-wall slam bang action as Jadejaws and X-51 battle it out. They seem well matched at first but as happens most of the time the relentless assault of the Hulk begins to win the day and Machine Man suffers significant damage.
When the Hulk ends the melee by bringing down the skyscraper which houses The Corporation, the battle ends for him while Machine Man must be repaired. More on that when Machine Man's comic is revived with a new team.
One thing that Marvel got right most of the time was that when a series ended abruptly due to poor sales, the stories were almost always picked up somewhere in the larger Marvel Universe and given a proper send off. (Warlock, It, Woodgod) The Hulk was a common place for this to happen with Machine Man getting the help here to transition from the Kirby years to what was to come.
More on that next week.
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Yep, thanks Rip. I’ve been looking for the issue of Incredible Hulk where an attempt is made to wrap up the It The Living Colossus series from Astonishing Tales…I don’t know this for a fact, but I thought I heard somewhere that the Hulk destroys the Colossus statue creature (which is a mistake in my opinion)…Have you tackled this Hulk/It storyline before Rip?
ReplyDeleteYep, by my memory he did indeed crush IT when they wrapped up that story line. That story might indeed come up next month when a whole host of classic Kirby monsters are on tap.
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