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.

NULL-MYTHS: "VAMPIRES OF THE VOID" (ALL-STAR COMICS #26, 1945)

For this week's mythcomic, I selected the second of two "Bug-Eyed Bandit" stories scripted for the Silver Age ATOM comic by Gardner Fox. In the essay I stated that I didn't rate the first "Bug-Eyed" story to be a mythcomic, but I suppose that had I examined it in depth I would have rated it a "near myth."

Over twenty years previous, Fox scripted "Vampires of the Void," in which the Justice Society contended with "metal men" from space. Apparently these aliens were not robots but had evolved as entities with a penchant for nourishing themselves by eating solid metals. Each of the segments of the story sends an individual Justice Society hero up against a small cadre of metal men, all intent upon eating up whatever metals they find. None of the heroes can beat the aliens in one-on-one confrontations, but in each segment, a given group of aliens become obsessed with consuming just one metallic element, be it copper, gold, silver, etc. Once the aliens have filled themselves with Earth-metals-- Fox calls the process "imbibition"-- the heroes are able to defeat each separate group of metal men by exploiting some weakness inherent in the Earth-metal.

For instance, Hawkman fights robots who have "imbibed" silver, so he charges them with electricity, so that he can short-circuit them.

Doctor Mid-Nite, perhaps as a contrast to his status as a healing physician, gives his group of opponents "lead poisoning." 

And the Atom exposes a bunch of iron-eating metalloids to oxygen, causing them to rust themselves to death.

Now, I mentioned in this week's ATOM-analysis that I didn't consider the first "Bug-Eyed Bandit" story by Fox to incarnate a cosmological myth even though the author inserted a bunch of factoids about insect life at the beginning. In "Void," Fox has at least spread out his factoids, so that they're are a functioning part of the story.

But do they function as cosmological myths? I would still that they still do not, more because of presentation than content. Every single episode in the story is practically a duplicate of every other, except for the supposed humor of the "Johnny Thunder" segment. Thus none of the "epistemological patterns" possible for a juvenile superhero story about metallic elements really develop. I would also say that this story fails in terms of "underthinking the underthought."

In contrast, I did validate Robert Kanigher's 1967 "Plastic Perils" METAL MEN story as a mythcomic. Despite all of the indications that Kanigher was far from serious in his attitude toward the story, he did a little more than simply research the properties of a bunch of plastics. He gave a little thought as to how to exploit those properties in terms of their potential in a fantasy-combat situation, and so each of the heroes' encounters with this or that form of plastic carried a quality of active, rather than passive, imagination. 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE METAL WOMEN BLUES" (METAL MEN #32, 1968)

The DC feature METAL MEN provides a variety of good examples of my current metaphor for literary complication as seen in this essay.

The original creators of the franchise, writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Ross Andru, didn't work on this particular issue, though they had collaborated on most if not all issues up until issue #29. The next two issues were written by Otto Binder and penciled by Gil Kane, and on #32, Binder's story was illustrated by Mike Sekowsky. Since Sekowsky became editor on the feature with #33, replacing long-time writer-editor Kanigher, it seems very likely that Kanigher was being edged off the title, even though he collaborated with Sekowsky for a time. However, clearly before Sekowsky became the new boss, Binder was instructed to follow the storytelling example of the almost-old boss. Back in the day, I could hardly tell the difference between the Binder stories and the preceding Kanigher tales, though now I can see that Binder's plotting was much tighter, despite his emulation of Kanigher's writing-practices.

"The Metal Women Blues" begins typically enough. Tin is being fawned over by his girlfriend Nameless, the only robot in the group not created by Doc Magnus, and the second of two female group-members, the other being Tina, the platinum doll infatuated with her creator. The other male robots-- Gold, Lead, Iron, and Mercury-- petition Magnus to creates mates for all of them. Magnus initially refuses, until Tina points out that if he creates a mate for her, she might become less enamored with Magnus. (Admittedly this is something Kanigher's lovelorn platinum robot would never say, but possibly she's merely trying to help her male comrades.)

In no time, five new robots join the group, known collectively as "the Metal Women" even though they have one male member-- which is just good payback for the years in which the Metal Men sported not one but two female members. However, though the four lady automatons are attracted to their opposite numbers, Platinum Man has no desire for Tina, preferring to keep their association formal-- which puts Magnus back behind the romantic eight-ball.

Just like in a Kanigher story, the two groups are immediately called into action against an alien threat: a giant automated machine. And it's at this point that the girl robots evince something less than shrinking-violet behavior.

"I know I made a mistake," says Magnus, "when I didn't incorporate 'timidity' in the metal women's responsometers. But I didn't want them to be too 'tame' for the Metal Men." However, not only are the lady-bots fairly aggressive, they're actually good at the business of being mechanical superheroes, which causes the males to label them "female glory-hogs." (To be sure, Nameless is unchanged, though for a time she sides with the other "girls," and Lead Girl isn't a glory-hog, just so dumb she makes Lead look swift of wit.)

However, the beings who sent the automated destroyer are observing the contumely, and they decide to take advantage of the situation. The villains are a group of nearly identical 'female robot Amazons," who are all haggish-looking and who are given no raison d'etre at all, just as many of Kanigher's menaces came from no place and had no rationale for their existence. (Maybe some robot-maker made them all look like his shrewish wife, a la I, MUDD?) The Amazon Queen, realizing that the males' vanity has been wounded, sends a "cute girl-robot" to lure the metal guys into a trap. (The cute but unnamed robot-girl even goes armed with "Chan-oil #5 perfume.")

In no time, the trap closes on the guys, who are reluctant to fight "weak women.' The Amazons promptly kick the Metal males' asses and get their broken bodies out of sight, except for Platinum Man, who gets his weight boosted so much that he sinks beneath the earth.

The girls do follow, but they catch sight of Platinum Man in his hole, and he briefs the lady-bots on the strategies the Amazons used against the Metal Males. Thus the Metal Women defeat the Amazons tout suite.

However, since the feature's status quo had to be maintained, the Metal Women then try to rescue Platinum Man, just as a flood of magma flows up into the hole he made. And so the Metal Men return to their normal lineup. Magnus offers to build more inamorata but the guys all decline-- though as a final joke, Mercury gets caught trying to keep the cute girl-robot for himself (being an inferior creation, she simply falls apart in the wake of her creators' destruction).

"Metal Women Blues"-- which is titled "Robot Amazon Blues" on the cover-- is as cornball as anything Kanigher wrote. However, it does maintain a good level of symbolic complexity as well. It begins by showing the guys, who just want women to fawn over them, having their lives complicated by female crusaders generally as competent as they are. While the Metal Women are just "sisters doing it for themselves," though, the Robot Amazons are thoroughly negative incarnations of negative female aggression-- made even less appealing by the fact that they're all ugly.

Binder's most interesting symbolic touch isn't, strictly speaking, necessary for the story's plot, and it illustrates how even a juvenile story sometimes has deeper layers. While the Amazon Queen is busy working on the cutesy robot, the former observes that the unnamed femme metale is made of an alloy of all the metals being lured-- mercury, lead, tin, iron, and gold-- which brings up the loony but amusing idea that in this universe, intelligent robots "stick with their own kind."

MYTHCOMICS: METAL MEN #21: "THE METAL MEN VS. THE PLASTIC PERILS" (1966)

In this essay I noted that DC writer-editor Robert Kanigher tended to toss off super-science concepts with little or no consistency, in contrast to contemporaries like John Broome and Gardner Fox. That said, Kanigher wasn't incapable of emulating some aspects of the "science-nerd" comics-schtick, so that he did sometimes produce moderately complex cosmological myths. METAL MEN, which was his own creation, sometimes benefited from a bit more creativity than, say, WONDER WOMAN, which was almost certainly nothing but a job to him.

The Metal Men concept, for those who may not know, concerned a team of robots, whom genius "Doc" Magnus invented for the purpose of their fighting crime. Each of the original six robots was supposedly constructed of just one metal-- respectively, Lead, Gold, Iron, Mercury, Gold, and Tin-- although at one point Kanigher introduced a second Tin robot into the mix, about whom the less said, the better. All of the robots, instead of being obedient automatons as their creator desired, had human personalities, albeit rather one-note ones. Gold was a "noble" leader, Iron was a tough guy, Lead was slow-witted, Tin was bashful, Mercury was conceited, and Platinum-- the only one to merit a human-like nickname, "Tina"-- was eternally in love with her own creator: a situation that Kanigher never tired of comparing to the Pygmalion/Galatea myth. The stories sometimes incorporated scientific or pseudo-scientific trivia into the stories, though Kanigher never let science stop him from spinning wild yarns about giant centaurs or balloon men.

This 1966 story, "The Metal men vs. the Plastic Perils" is one of the few times Kanigher stuck fairly close to a given myth-theme. In this case it was the basic idea of opposing the hero's power against something with opposing characteristics. Thus, when the heroes meet the "Plastic Perils"-- a bunch of mindless plastic androids who do the bidding of criminal scientist Professor Bravo-- the android-maker boasts that, "The age of metals has passed! You haven't a chance against plastics!"

Some plastics can multiply under pressure, says Bravo, which sounds like pretty dubious pseudo-science, even for a kid's comic. But at least there's some indication that Kanigher might have done a little research, as when he traps Tin and his female partner in a plexiglass prison, a.k.a. methacrylate:

Not surprisingly, after Bravo taunts the robot-heroes for most of the comic about their lack of scientific knowledge, they get some book-larnin' and decide that their strength as metals is that they can resist heat a lot better than plastics can. They melt the plastic perils and give Bravo a butt-scalding for good measure.

In addition to the cosmological myths in the forefront, there's a minor metaphysical one that Kanigher had used in many comics prior to this one. He liked to pretend that the Metal Men were real characters who just happened to see their adventures published in comic books, so in #21 the writer even has the heroes read fan mail, telling them to fight fewer robot-menaces. Kanigher has fun with the Metal Men being self-conscious about being "in a rut," to the extent that they visit other cities looking for human crooks, only to see other DC crusaders going their crimefighting thing: Flash, Batman, and Wonder Woman (all character whom Kanigher had scripted). In addition to subverting fans' demands with this story, Kanigher also subverts-- though not with much wit-- the idea of the mad scientist, as the plastic-making professor claims, "I'm not even a real professor! I gave myself the name out of a book! I learned everything I know out of science books!" Not unlike a writer, rushing to brush up on his basic science-factoids...

IRONY OF IRONIES

It's a two-part irony this time:

(1) DC Comics was launched principally by two men, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, who had a well-documented history in producing sexy pulps ("the kind men like," as some old slogan put it). Getting into kids' comics was their way of becoming respectable, and throughout the Golden Age the company usually advocated a squeaky-clean approach to juvenile pulp entertainment.  Aside from the Marston WONDER WOMAN, most DC features allowed only for minimal sex appeal, though one can see artists "letting themselves go" to some extent with certain characters-- Catwoman in BATMAN, Hawkgirl in HAWKMAN, and a handful of others. Yet Frederic Wertham persuaded many middle-Americans that all comics-- with DC books getting many of the citations-- were crammed with salaciousness.

(2) In contrast to comics, which retained a bad reputation even after the institution of the Comics Code, television quickly became known as a "safe harbor" for middle America. That's not to say that various individual programs didn't get criticized for sexy stuff-- though I've the impression that violence was the more frequent target-- but the major TV stations successfully "sold" themselves as purveyors of respectable entertainment. Yet in 1966, the BATMAN teleseries brought about a sea-change in DC's BATMAN feature-- and it did so by playing up the very salacious qualities that were almost invisible at DC Comics during its Golden Age.

For its first twenty-something years, the Catwoman was pretty much the only "femme fatale" in the Batman features that ran in BATMAN, DETECTIVE COMICS, and WORLD'S FINEST.  There were a smattering of one-shot molls or "damsels in distress," and a handful of recurring leading ladies, of whom 1948's Vicki Vale remains the most famous. Given what I've seen of DC's editorial tendencies during the Golden Age, I hypothesize that the editors only kept Catwoman as a recurring villainess (1) because she had appeared in the first few years of the Batman feature, before the editorial routines became set in stone, and (2) because the editors thought she was popular with readers, probably as a result of enthusiastic fans writing the DC offices (though I don't think any Golden Age DC Comics maintained a letters page). Only with the advent of the Silver Age-- which I date as beginning in 1954, with the Comics Code's advent-- did the Batman feature accumulate a few more crucial female presences in Batwoman and Bat-Girl. It's been alleged-- though never decisively proven-- that both characters were introduced to defuse Wertham's accusations that the Batman feature presented a "homosexual wish dream." In any case, both characters disappeared in 1963, with the feature was revamped in tune with Julie Schwartz's "New Look." In addition, Catwoman made no appearances in any DC comic from 1954 to 1965, finally showing up in a 1966 issue of LOIS LANE.

However, even though the BATMAN comic wasn't overflowing with femininity when William Dozier decided to launch his Bat-series,  Dozier clearly meant to pump up the pulchritude from the first episode, with Jill St. John getting special billing as the Riddler's gang-moll. There's also a scene in which a gaggle of young girls are seen screeching over their sighting of Robin, as if he were a superheroic version of a Beatle.  [Correction: this scene was in the third episode.] Later in the series' first season, Catwoman, exiled from kids' comics by conservative DC, made her triumphant return in a medium aimed firmly at a general, middle-class audience, and arguably became as popular with the show's fans as the main heroes. This, according to interviews with DC artist/editor Carmine Infantino, led DC to create two new female figures for the Bat-mythos, for possible use on the teleseries: Poison Ivy and the 1967 Batgirl-- though only one of the two made an appearance on the BATMAN show.

I lived through that period, and while I imagine some Wertham-like figures may have critiqued the BATMAN teleseries, I don't remember anyone being torqued at the series' mild salaciousness. But the 1960s was a very different decade from the 1950s. It's possible that Frederic Wertham's screed may have owed its success largely to a "perfect storm" of contingent factors that only came together in the fifties-- the government investigations of organized crime, postwar malaise, fear of rising juvenile delinquency. 

A third irony: though Wertham would never have credited it, he and DC's editors were close to being on the same page. The good doctor looked askance at almost every sexy and/or violent image he saw in comics, all a-twitter that it might cause some poor child to lose his innocence. DC's publishers, in contrast, had made their early fortunes in part from selling sex to whoever could pay for it-- in theory, usually older customers-- and then decided, once they struck juvenile-pulp gold, that they would play it safe for the majority of the 1940s and 1950s. WONDER WOMAN was one of the few features where they gave its creator some leeway in the depiction of sexuality, possibly because their contract with Marston gave him some limited control of the franchise: other Golden Age female-centric features, such as BLACK CANARY, LIBERTY BELLE and MERRY, GIRL OF A 1000 GIMMICKS, aren't much sexier than ROBOTMAN or THE STAR-SPANGLED KID. 

A fourth irony: the Comics Code effectively exiled the genres that had garnered the most public acrimony: i.e., horror and crime, which tended to surpass many though not all adventure-related genres-- superheroes, westerns-- in terms of sexy and visceral imagery.  But the Comics Code apparently had a stultifying effect on comics-sales: according to Amy Nyberg's SEAL OF APPROVAL, DC Comics returned to a heavy emphasis on superheroes specifically because none of their other genres were selling very impressively. Yet though the Batman franchise remained fairly conservative in its use of sex-appeal-- as was generally the case with the other "big two," Superman and Wonder Woman-- one can see some loosening-up in the newer features.

For instance, here's a shot of Dream Girl from ADVENTURE COMICS #317 (Feb 1964), doing a "Marilyn Monroe" turn on superhero sexiness:

A year or so prior to the LEGION comic, DC debuted the Metal Men in SHOWCASE #37, and in the succeeding series creators Kanigher, Andru and Esposito rarely if ever failed to emphasize the romantic travails of the Platinum robot who plays Galatea to her Pygmalion-creator.

So some liberalization was bound to take place, if only for purely economic motives. But as far as transforming the BATMAN series so that it would eventually spawn a number of "Bat-babe" features-- three different Batgirls, a new Batwoman, a couple of Huntresses and a many-times-revised Catwoman-- the credit would seem to belong to William Dozier more than to Carmine Infantino and Julie Schwartz, much less those little old sex-mag makers, Donenfeld and Liebowitz.