MYTHCOMICS: "REVENGE OF THE ROBOT REJECT" (BRAVE AND BOLD #55, 1964)

DC's title THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is known primarily as the "Batman and--" team-up feature. However, at various times the title played host to swashbuckling tales, "strange sports stories," and showcases for possible regular features. But for about two years before Batman became the feature's exclusive selling-point, the title also played host to a number of more inventive crossovers. I assume that the men behind the comic approached these crossovers in the same spirit as the Golden Age JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: a title in which the company's strong sellers could theoretically boost the weaker properties.

By the time "Revenge of the Robot Reject" appeared on stands in 1964, the Atom had enjoyed his own feature for roughly three years, edited by Julius Schwarz, and the Metal Men for two, edited by Robert Kanigher. This story, edited by George Kashdan, shows writer Bob Haney and artist Ramona Fradon-- best known for their co-creation METAMORPHO-- attempting to mimic the relevant aspects of both franchises. Haney's script delves far more into the Metal Men mythology than that of the Atom, though he finds a satisfactory premise that allows him to play the Tiny Titan off Doc Magnus's six robot heroes-- who are, for any not hip to the feature, are Gold, Iron, Mercury, Tin, Lead, and Platinum (the only female robot, and the only one who gets a nickname, that of Tina).

In the regular METAL MEN feature, Kanigher tended to soft-pedal any intimations of the robots' inventor as being their parent, even in the figurative sense that one sees in Mary Shelleys' FRANKENSTEIN and the Universal adaptations thereof. In contrast, "Reject" starts out with Magnus having his six robots visit an orphanage to entertain the kids. Tina, the only female robot in the group in 1964, was always seen expressing her undying love to her creator, and "Reject" is no exception. However, I don't think Kanigher's METAL MEN ever showed Tina waxing maternal, and in the opening scenes of "Reject," Tina is apparently so charmed by all the munchkins that she suggests that she and Magnus should marry and have kids. When her bemused creator reminds Tina that a robot can neither marry nor conceive, she cheerily responds that Magnus could just build "cute little robot replicas of you and me."

Once Magnus and his six quixotic creations return to their HQ, Tina's burst of erotic enthusiasm is still with her, and as a result she dances about, unintentionally courting thanatos so that she falls to her death into a generator. In the regular title, this isn't a problem, since the Metal Men are always getting reduced to piles of mangled scrap, only to be magically resuscitated by their inventor's peerless skills. But this time, Magnus can't restore Tina, because her atomic structure has been altered somehow. The next seven pages then read like a quickie version of "Ten Little Indians," as each of the other Metal Men also fall victim to peculiar accidents, and again, Magnus cannot revive any of his "children."

Magnus sits alone in his laboratory, emulating Dorothy Gale as he muses that he'll miss his sexy female robot most of all (not exactly in those terms, of course). Then the villains responsible for the Metal Men's decimation appear. One is the first robot Magnus ever created, Uranium, and also the "reject" of the title, since Magnus attempted to destroy him. The other villain is Uranium's own creation, a silver female robot named Agantha, who bears a nodding physical resemblance to Tina and whom Uranium designed to be his version of Magnus's "girl robot creation." (In other words, Uranium may not be Magnus's literal child, but the robot-reject's doing his darnedest to follow the scientist's example.)  Uranium announces that through his command of all elements, he was able to remotely guide the Metal Men to their respective dooms and then to alter their atomic arrangements so that Magnus couldn't bring them back. He did all this because he resents that Magnus tried to destroy him-- even though a flashback shows Uranium being callously destructive, much like the element he's made of-- and because now he wants Magnus to help him devise a world-conquering weapon. Agantha is just as vicious, though she does pay the scientist a backhanded compliment: "If it weren't for [Uranium] here, I could go for you-- now that your platinum girlfriend is gone."

Threatened with immediate death for non-compliance, Magnus helps the project to buy time. He also manages to send out a distress signal. Ray (The Atom) Palmer receives the signal in his own lab, dons his costume, and rushes over to Magnus's HQ to help. Being unobtrusive, the Atom's able to infiltrate the HQ and figure out what's been happening, and being a physics major, he assembles the remains of the Metal Men and figures out how to use his "atomic"  skills to restore their integrity-- at which point the robots reconstitute themselves.

Meanwhile, Uranium's project is finished, but he's still victim to daddy issues, unable to kill Magnus because "he is the man who gave me life." Agantha, who's become Lady Macbeth in a few pages, has no such compunctions and prepares to destroy the robot-maker.

In burst the Metal Men, and Tina, though she didn't witness Agantha flirting with Magnus, immediately calls her a "silver hussy." The two ductile damsels fight it out, with Tina winning due to her greater knowledge of the elemental sciences (is silver really more vulnerable to sound-waves than platinum? I dunno). Uranium proves a tougher nut to crack, for his creativity doesn't stop with making his own robot-doll. He reveals that he can manifest the radiation in his body into three missile-shaped mini-minions, who are named after their types of radiation, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. (The reader shouldn't need more than one guess as to why these energy-constructs look like missiles.)

Though the radiation-minions can't harm Lead, the other Metal Men get kicked around pretty good. The Atom, who's been confined to the sidelines during this high-powered scuffle, suggests that they take Mercury aside and bond his atoms to those of Lead. That way, when Mercury attacks Uranium again, the radiation-minions can't hurt him. Uranium can't understand what's happening, and keeps bombarding Mercury until the villainous metal exhausts himself and devolves to a hunk of inert radium. Magnus does express some regret for his own hubris: "It was really all my fault from the first! I made you wrong, to start with!"

The psychological myths about robots and their creators are fairly lightweight here, but Haney does a good job-- better than many of Kanigher's stories-- at putting forth the cosmological myths necessary for both of the crossover-features. Maybe all the elemental research in this toss-off tale helped inspire him to co-create the Metamorpho concept with Fradon.

NEAR MYTHS: "WHO STOLE THE U.S.A?" (METAMORPHO #3, 1965)

Not long after Metamorpho's debut in BRAVE AND BOLD, covered here, the Element Man got his own series, but it avoided the heavy angst of the first tale and emphasized zany humor up until the last few issues, where the creators made a last-ditch attempt to return to "serious stuff." Just as a hunch, I imagine that most fans of the Silver Age preferred the zany approach.

I had to give some thought to whether "U.S.A" qualified as a "near myth" or a "null myth." In some ways it seems like writer Bob Haney was guilty of "underthinking the underthought" of the story, which by the criteria of this essay would make the tale a "null-myth." On the other hand, though "U.S.A" is certainly not organized enough to be a myth-comic, there are some intriguing uses of symbolism throughout, so that my "near-myth" category becomes the default.

One amusing aspect of the story's title is that if one posed it as a question to many people today-- as opposed to the year in which the story appeared-- the answer would almost certainly be, "white Europeans." Haney and his artist-collaborator Ramona Fradon certainly did not compose a story that consciously evoked the tribulations of Native Americans, though there is a minor N.A. character in "U.S.A.," and the robot bird menacing the hero above is said to be patterned upon a Native American myth, the Thunderbird. It all feels like a soup that didn't quite come to a boil, so that some parts are tasty, others not.

The story commences when Metamorpho's prospective father-in-law Simon Stagg takes his daughter, his servant Java, and the hero to meet a young woman he Stagg intends to marry: the adult daughter of a famous promoter. Daughter Sapphire is more than a little concerned:

More on this later. The Stagg group journeys to the Grand Canyon. There, the promoter Trumbull-- who constantly calls things "colossal" and "magnificent," like a movie-maker parody-- has built a "science-center." Trumbull, not being a scientist, presumably has hired a crew of technicians, though only one or two hirelings are ever seen in the artificial city; in any case, the science-city is supposed to work on methods for defending the country. Simon Stagg woos young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Zelda-- who looks a little like Morticia Addams, and keeps a pet raven on her shoulder. In the background stands a tuxedo-clad Native American whom I'll call "O.;" short for the zany name Haney gives him ("Geronimo" spelled backwards, to see how many kids might get the joke). Trumbull mentions that O. is hanging around because he claims the Grand Canyon belongs to him, and then changes the subject. (And well he might, since the last I checked the Canyon was federally owned.)

Trumbull then unveils a discovery to the group: a meteorite containing a brand new element, which Trumbull has named "Staggium" in honor of his guest. When Metamorpho comes into the proximity of this element, he almost faints: Staggium acts on his element-body like kryptonite on Superman. The promoter leads the group away from the element-display, to another display. To the hero's misfortune, the second display contains the monstrous bird-robot from the cover. Trumbull calls it "the Thunderbird Robot," and as Metamorpho starts to collapse, the villain adds that the robot's wings contain enough "staggium" to destroy the Element Man. The hero's destruction will insure that he doesn't interfere with Trumbull's plot to "steal the U.S.A.": he wants the country to surrender to his authority, or he'll use all of his hyper-advanced technology to destroy America's missile defense system.

The rest of the story is largely a big chase-scene, as Metamorpho keeps changing shapes to escape the lethal "Laughing Boy" (as he calls the robot on the cover), while Trumbull keeps the rest of the Stagg party prisoner. Finally Metamorpho manages to destroy the robot indirectly. O. gets the drop on Trumbull and his daughter, complaining that they've stolen his ancestral lands, and this helps both Simon and Sapphire overcome the evildoers. Metamorpho gets a commendation from the back of Lyndon Johnson's head, the government takes over the science-station, and nothing further is said about O.'s claim to the land.

In my myth-comic essay of "The Origin of Metamorpho" I pointed out the resemblances between the dramatis personae of Haney's story and those of Shakespeare's play THE TEMPEST, with particular reference to the reading of Prospero as nurturing incestuous feelings for his own daughter. "U.S,A." recapitulates the same motif, only with Stagg romancing a woman who is not onlyyoung enough to be his daughter, but is also the offspring of a rich mogul, as Stagg himself is. Thus Zelda resembles Sapphire both in terms of her age and her lineage. Since Haney died in 2004, no one today can ask him if he read THE TEMPEST. But even if it could be demonstrated that he didn't know the work, his use of Stagg as "heavy father" still parallels some aspects of Prospero, except that with both Stagg and his rival Turnbull, wealth takes the place of magical power.

The specifically "white father" is also loosely implicated in the dispossession of the Native American from his ancestral lands. I don't suggest that Bob Haney consciously sought to tell a story dealing with Native American travails: I think he worked in the character of O. the Aggrieved Redskin because such images were part and parcel of his cultural mythology. Certainly he wanted a story that had enough adventurous fun as to please young readers, and so O. might simply have worked his way into the story because Haney set it in the Grand Canyon, and the Grand Canyon suggested to him the Noble Red Man. The setting might also be responsible for the use of a robot patterned after the mythic Thunderbird, who was a widespread Native American icon. The artist Fradon gives the robot a quasi-Indian image, so that on a symbolic level, Trumbull is stealing the original American's myths as well as his land. Finally, though the TEMPEST connection can't be proven, it's interesting that the Shakespeare play is associated with what little the playwright knew of New World denizens-- as shown in essays like this one.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ORIGIN OF METAMORPHO" (BRAVE AND BOLD #57, 1965)

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”-- Prospero, THE TEMPEST.

If the Drake-Premiani DOOM PATROL could be deemed DC Comics' to the success of Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR, then METAMORPHO might be the company's response to the Hulk, who regained a regular berth at Marvel comic a few months before "the Element Man" got his first tryout in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. The concept of the Hulk followed the general outline of Stevenson's "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde," but writer Bob Haney may have borrowed from an even loftier literary source.

The origin-story introduces the four central dramatis personae of the series, who remain largely unchanged for Metamorpho's short Silver Age run. They are: daredevil soldier-of-fortune Rex Mason; his sometime employer, megalomaniacal plutocrat Simon Stagg; Stagg's daughter Sapphire, who loves and is loved by Mason; Java, a prehistoric "Java Man" restored to life and educated by Stagg. Winsomely illustrated by Ramona Fradon, the origin-tale establishes that Mason, despite working for Stagg, constantly defies the older man's authority and aspires to marry his daughter. Stagg seems to have no objection to Mason as a suitor, but he doesn't countenance any sort of defiance. Java, however, comically pines after the beauteous Sapphire and hopes to unseat his handsome rival.

Stagg sends Mason and Java on a mission to a hidden Egyptian pyramid, to retrieve a legendary artifact, "the Orb of Ra." Stagg secretly instructs Java to "maroon" Mason, though given the paucity of food and water in an ancient pyramid, this sounds pretty much like a death-sentence. When Mason and Java approach the pyramid in a small private aircraft, the pyramid emanates a crimson radiance, leading Mason to comment that "it must be a rose stone." The radiance creates thermal updrafts so that pilot Mason has to make a forced landing, after which said radiation simply vanishes. The two explorers examine hieroglyphs inside the pyramid, and Mason claims that the glyphs tell the story of how a meteor fell in Egypt and was used for the wand known as the Orb of Ra. Moments later, they find the Orb itself, at which point Java severs their working relationship, knocking out Mason and leaving him in the pyramid. Java escapes with the Orb, picked up by another plan piloted by Stagg's men.

Inside the pyramid, ancient Egyptian mechanisms convey the unconscious Mason into another room, where he's exposed to the rays of the original meteor. Mason tries to save himself by swallowing a pill designed by Stagg to preserve his life, and the result of the two influences is to mutate Mason into a quadripartite being: Metamorpho, the Element Man.

Revulsed by his freakish new form, Metamorpho learns that he can transform himself into any element, be it solid metal or evanescent gas. He uses this talent to fix his plane and to journey back to Stagg's estate. He wreaks vengeance on Java by clobbering him, and then threatens Stagg. To the billionaire's good fortune, he happens to have on his person the Orb of Ra, made of the same meteor that empowered the Element Man. Metamorpho grows weak in the presence of this Egyptian kryptonite, and so he makes his peace with Stagg, on the condition that Stagg finds some way to reverse the transformation. Metamorpho tries to keep his big change secret from Sapphire, but she finds out when Java, furious at his rival's return, tries to burn the house down. Metamorpho promptly rescues his jet-set lover from the fire. Though she's initially put off by his unappetizing looks, she affirms her continuing love for him and suggests that he start using his talents as a "walking chemistry set" to help others.

Bob Haney's "loftier literary source" for this unusual scenario is in my opinion Shakespeare's TEMPEST. The borrowing was very probably unintentional. Obviously there are assorted differences between the central dramatis personae of the play and those of the comic book story. Simon Stagg is primarily concerned with his authority, while the sorcerous "heavy father" Prospero, exiled to a small island, resents any man who approaches his beautiful daughter Miranda. Sapphire Stagg is no sequestered innocent like Prospero's daughter, though Java bears a strong relationship to brutish Caliban, even to the point that both brutes have been given modern-day education by their elderly perceptors, and both lust after the daughters of their figurative "fathers." In the play, Prospero encounters Caliban on the island, while in the comic book, Rex Mason is responsible for bringing the caveman's bog-preserved body to Simon Stagg-- so that ironically Mason participates in the "birth" of his future rival. Rex Mason, whose name might be interpreted as "King of the Stoneworkers" or even just "King of Stone," seems a hybrid of two Shakespeare characters: Ferdinand, the shipwreck-survivor whose good looks bedazzle Miranda, and Prospero's fairy-like servant Ariel, whose "metamorphic" contrasts with the earthbound nature of Prospero's other servant Caliban. Haney even recasts some of the emnity between Ariel and Caliban-- which is, to be sure, not romantic in nature-- into the rivalry of Java and the Element Man.

Some changes were necessitated by the serial nature of the comic-book feature. Some critics, and at least one 1950s SF-film, have argued that Prospero's hostility to both Caliban and Ferdinand indicates his subconscious lust for his daughter, It wouldn't have been impossible for a Silver Age comic to suggest similar psychological content, however obliquely, but if the matter even crossed Haney's mind, this may the reason Stagg apparently doesn't care about anything but punishing a servant's rebelliousness. At no time during the remainder of the series does Stagg change this orientation-- though it may be of interest that in Metamorpho's very next outing, the villain is an older man who once coveted Sapphire's mother, and who kidnaps Sapphire with the express intention of making love to the daughter of the woman who spurned him.

Further, THE TEMPEST's story revolves around a "heavy father" becoming reconciled to his daughter loving another man-- thus leading to the final scene in which Prospero abjures magic and "drowns his book." In addition, the magician also releases his aerial servant Ariel from bondage. But though METAMORPHO is the Element Man's story, it also puts Simon Stagg in the catbird seat: able to control the new incarnation of Rex Mason though a sort of "magic wand," as well as with the promise of restoring Mason's humanity. For his short run Metamorpho was permanently stuck having to live not only with his beloved, but also with two scheming "relatives," a "father-in-law" and his "thing of darkness." To be sure, the remainder of the series played down the Freudian intensity in favor of loony tongue-in-cheek adventure. But the Element Man's origin-story remains one of the more remarkable products of the period.