Machine Man - Mister Ditko!

After the departure of Jack Kirby from Marvel for the last time in the late 70's, he left two projects behind. Devil Dinosaur was cancelled and Machine Man was put on hiatus. It returned from hiatus following a high-profile guest-star appearance in The Incredible Hulk.

The series also returned with a new and talented team of creators. Steve Ditko is the other artistic pillar of the early Marvel era and along with Marv Wolfman as a scripter Ditko took on the Machine Man and made him distinctive Ditkoesque.

The first thing the team does is de-power Machine Man, taking away some of his gimmicks and presumably limiting his powers. As it turns out they largely ignore these changes going forward and as with the Kirby books, the Machine Man does pretty much what he needs to do to defeat the villain of the day such as the Binary Bug, a classic Ditko burglar type came with a then trend-setting computer motif.

In a story which can only be considered weird, X-51 gives oddball birth to a quintet of humans/gods who attempt to enlighten their "father" before ascending into the heavens.  As I said, this one is weird all the way through.

More standard is the battle Machine Man has with Khan the master of the dirigible home dubbed "Xanadu". The crime lord wants X-51's body for his own purposes to evade mortality, but things don't go as he'd planned.

In the last Wolfman scripted tale, Machine Man has to battle a man pretending to be him (he's green on this cover so it doesn't make sense here)  and working to defend the city and his own reputation.

Tom DeFalco steps in as writer with the fifteenth issue and there is a feeling of greater pace almost immediately. Machine Man matches wits with the Fantastic Four (at least Thing and Torch) while battling a woman who has undergone a terrifying transformation.  We also meet Gears Garvin, a mechanic who comes to X-51' assistance when his legs are damaged.

Gears returns in the next issue when Machine Man must battle a full-blown super-villain named Baron Brimstone, a user of magic maybe and his two henchman who form the Satan Squad. This trio has a real old-fashioned Ditko feel to them.

In the next issue we meet Madam Menace, an arms dealer who covets Machine Man's body for profit. She schemes to get hold of him and loses. Rich Buckler is handling covers on the next few issues.

She returns in the next issue as X-51 comes into conflict with three members of Alpha Flight (Sasquatch, Northstar and Aurora) who are manipulated into the fight by the forgotten Senator Brinkman. This is his swan song as his role comes out and he is disgraced.

Issue nineteen is the last one and sports a handsome Frank Miller cover. Machine Man battle a new villain named Jack O'Lantern who reminded this reader mightily of Green Goblin. This is another slam bang action issue and at the end we have Machine Man reflective about his future.

Machine Man though was now firmly ensconced into the Marvel Universe and he'd show up in sundry places for many years. The final story by Ditko appeared of all places in Marvel Comics Presents and it features art by the great man which was slightly more exotic than his late 70's style. A robot wants access to Machine Man's parts and it's a hoot.

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Machine Man - Mister Monster!

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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Machine Man - Mister Kirby!

Not unlike his stint at DC, Kirby found himself with something of a second wave in his Bronze Age stay at Marvel. He'd landed with the comics Captain America, Black Panther and Eternals, but later found that sales were against his efforts.

That meant new comics and we got two new ones from Kirby, a brand new romp called Devil Dinosaur and a spin-off from 2001: A Space Odyssey called Machine Man. Machine Man had been called "Mister Machine" in that three-issue run but the name was made more straightforward for this own magazine.

In the first two issues of the run we meet X-51, the last of the robots created in a secret government project. These robots had proven to be unstable and ultimately dangerous to their creators and so there was a relentless effort to destroy them. X-51 was saved when his "father" Dr. Abel Stack pulled his auto-destruct mechanism and sacrificed himself. Now an orphan of sorts the highly capable but somewhat naive X-51, dubbed "Machine Man" by those who chase him dodges the military who seek to end him. He is helped by a psychiatrist named Peter Spaulding in his efforts to understand his role in the world. He is pursued by Colonel Kragg, a man who has lost men and and eye to the other robots in the program.

That musing is interrupted when Spalding and Machine Man help to save an alien robot named "Ten-For". He is an "Autocron", a space-spanning race of robot beings who seek conquest and Ten-For is an advanced scout who has claimed Earth for his destructive fellow Autocrons.

The next several issues of the comics detail Machine Man's efforts to stop Ten-For's plots and despite some momentary doubts he ultimately is able to stop the threat to Earth and end the menace of Ten-For. That doesn't make his life any sweeter though.

He still must battle for his own salvation and that means facing up to the government which seeks his destruction. He confronts a Congressman named Brinkman who will become a longtime nemesis and for his own reasons Brinkman seeks to use Machine Man.

A secret organization called "The Corporation" seeks to gain control of Machine Man and fending off their plots occupies the next several issues of the comic.

Despite seeming atomic destruction Machine Man is able to survive intact and finally gains a measure of security as he is released into the custody of his friend Peter Spalding and as Jack Kirby steps away from the series it goes on hiatus with a new status quo established.

My thoughts on Machine Man are somewhat changed over the decades. When it was first appearing on the stands I was rather cool to Kirby's latest effort, finding it relatively small potatoes to the epic schemes of many of his other efforts. This one alongside Devil Dinosaur were not top of the line for me. But I've matured and I see the more subtle aspects of this story (as well as DD). I was particularly enthralled by the Ten-For saga, a truly awful villain who seems to almost be winning before he's not. It was a really interesting outing and I plugged into Machine Man's plight a bit more this time around. When he comes back, he will be very different, but I find this one works for me after all these years.

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Machine Man - Mister Machine!

Apparently when Marvel Comics put out its "complete" Machine Man collection earlier this year they were unable to reprint the first three stories starring X-51 from the pages of 2001: A Space Odyssey which debuted the resilient robotic hero. But thanks for fellow blogger and friend of the Dojo Britt Reid and his RetroBlog network, we have ready access to those three stories for ourselves.

So to read the real debut of "Mister Machine" take a look at this link and then at this link where you will find 2001: A Space Odyssey #8.

Go here and here for the complete issue of 2001: A Space Odyssey #9 and here and here to wrap it up for issue #10 of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This comic was an ideal choice for Jack Kirby as he'd been doing stories which, if they didn't inspired the original movie, plowed much of the same ground that this flick covered. Machine Man though is the anomaly,  an offshoot that seemed from the get-go to be other and its connection to the background of 2001 was tenuous. Mister Machine seemed like a try-out in the waning days of a comic which had not caught fire in the terms of sales. One thing about Mister Machine is that color, the pink-purple-magenta hue. It seems an offbeat choice, but it sure makes him distinctive.

Next week we meet "Machine Man" and enjoy the official start of his own comic magazine.

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