Machine Man #12
Where Walk The Gods!
December 1979
Script: Marv Wolfman
Art: Steve Ditko
Letters: Irv Watanabe
Colours: Bob Sharen
It is funny how quickly these comics start to become significant on a personal level. Last time, we looked back at Marvel Two In One #58, a comic I had never read before, but had been reading about for decades as it played a pivotal role in the early career of Quasar, one of my favourite Marvel characters.
And this Machine Man story is one I had actually read before, when it was reprinted as a backup strip in the pages of the UK Transformers title.
Beginning life as a character in the Marvel adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey of all places, Machine Man was created by Jack Kirby but here appears written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Steve Ditko.
As a "living robot", Machine Man often brought a philosophical outlook to the superhero business, exploring questions of identity, morality, power and ethics. Here, the renegade android is driven to reject his always-conditional humanity by the relentlessness of inhumane behaviour he sees in his nightly fight against crime.
Rather than roll with the punches and come out fighting for a cause, Machine Man finds himself judging humanity as a whole, and concludes that we are not worth saving. This is heady stuff, and Ditko's stark artwork lends the unfolding melodrama a suitably freaky tinge. More man here than machine, our hero is suffering an existential crisis, one that leads him very close to becoming a villain.
His logic is chilling, and prescient, as he talks about how humanity is destroying their own world, "that which could be a paradise!" eventually deciding that "This world would be better off without men corrupting it!"
This is the inner monologue of a great villain, but Wolfman gives these lines to the hero of this series. Machine Man is a classic science fiction motif, a twisted mirror, showing us humanity from the perspective of one who is perceptually and rationally very similar to us, and yet not one of us.
You never see Batman go through this.
Fortunately for humanity, Machine Man's screams of frustration, releasing waves of energy from his body, have unexpected, and frankly inexplicable, effects. Rather than simply being electrocuted by this, the humans struck by this force are transformed into flame-haired floating superhumans, a higher form of human life with a strong set of moral values.
It is hard to imagine anyone other than Ditko bringing life to this particular band. These could be Speedball's predecessors. It is never really explained if their bodies have become these yellow forms, or if they all spontaneously decided to make matching yellow suits, but never mind that, this is an allegory and these dudes are dressed to deliver an ethical dressing down to their "father".
In a nice touch, their dialogue is lettered in lower case, which gives them a unique strangeness in the all-caps Marvel Universe. They even seem to end most of their sentences with full stops (periods) rather than exclamation marks! Zounds!
And as always in such cases, it is a simple human child who saves the world, and more importantly for story purposes, Machine Man's theoretical soul.
This is a classic of its kind. The hero comes close to abandoning his calling and turning to darkness, all but surrendering to his own fury and even contemplating genocide. And as the tale is told in almost incessant machine monologue, we follow him down that path. We hear from a higher power, a sudden and unexpected god-like force that now imposes its will upon reality, but while these strange creatures can stop Machine Man, it takes a human boy to illustrate why he is so wrong.
It is pat and more than a little corny. Steve Ditko is a legend of the medium, but rarely is his off-beat style so well fitted to a story. The creation of the super-beings is handled poorly, and the story lacks a villain, except for the dark side of Machine Man himself. And the character himself is a refugee from an unrelated IP who seems out of place in the Marvel Universe of the period. As readers, we understand that however this ends, it is not going to be with the living robot wiping out the human race. The Avengers would get involved, for one thing. It really should not work. Any of it.
But it sort of does.
Where Walk The Gods!
December 1979
Script: Marv Wolfman
Art: Steve Ditko
Letters: Irv Watanabe
Colours: Bob Sharen
It is funny how quickly these comics start to become significant on a personal level. Last time, we looked back at Marvel Two In One #58, a comic I had never read before, but had been reading about for decades as it played a pivotal role in the early career of Quasar, one of my favourite Marvel characters.
And this Machine Man story is one I had actually read before, when it was reprinted as a backup strip in the pages of the UK Transformers title.
Beginning life as a character in the Marvel adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey of all places, Machine Man was created by Jack Kirby but here appears written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Steve Ditko.
As a "living robot", Machine Man often brought a philosophical outlook to the superhero business, exploring questions of identity, morality, power and ethics. Here, the renegade android is driven to reject his always-conditional humanity by the relentlessness of inhumane behaviour he sees in his nightly fight against crime.
His logic is chilling, and prescient, as he talks about how humanity is destroying their own world, "that which could be a paradise!" eventually deciding that "This world would be better off without men corrupting it!"
This is the inner monologue of a great villain, but Wolfman gives these lines to the hero of this series. Machine Man is a classic science fiction motif, a twisted mirror, showing us humanity from the perspective of one who is perceptually and rationally very similar to us, and yet not one of us.
You never see Batman go through this.
Fortunately for humanity, Machine Man's screams of frustration, releasing waves of energy from his body, have unexpected, and frankly inexplicable, effects. Rather than simply being electrocuted by this, the humans struck by this force are transformed into flame-haired floating superhumans, a higher form of human life with a strong set of moral values.
And as always in such cases, it is a simple human child who saves the world, and more importantly for story purposes, Machine Man's theoretical soul.
Comments
Post a Comment