Metal Men 1-10

I got the hankering to read a bunch of Metal Men issues in a row, and rather than try to cover the plots and such I thought it might be more interesting to talk about overall impressions from the run.

First, there is more continuity in this series of Metal Men issues than I remembered.  The stories don't always end with cliffhangers, but they often have unresolved problems that are covered in the following issue.  For example, in #2, Tina invents a robot Doc, who turns out to be evil.  She ties him and a plutonium robot who's about to explode to a rocket headed for the moon.  It blows up in flight, "killing" all three.  In the next issue:

So they go to the moon but they can't recover enough of Tina to revive here.  So he creates a new platinum robot, but this time Doc has "fixed" her responsometer:

Doc soon discovers the problem with perfect responsometers; they don't think for themselves:

His last command was to catch him, but she fails to bring him back to the surface, and he only survives because the other Metal Men save him. So he scraps the new platinum robot and they return to the moon and eventually find enough of Tina to revive her, gushing her love for Doc and all.

At the end of that story, Tin is lost in space, having turned himself into a can to capture a giant amoeba from the moon that came back with Tina.  So the next several issues involve the Metal Men rescuing Tin, first from space and then from the clutches of a mad robot queen on another world.

There is certainly plenty of bickering going on within the group; it is obvious that Robert Kanigher, who both wrote and edited the series was picking up on Stan Lee's efforts with the Fantastic Four.  Mercury's always riding Tin and Tina and Doc is constantly frustrated at her amorous advances towards him.

So that's two elements of the Marvel magic that are featured in the Metal Men.  What are the differences?

1. The pressure is never racheted up progressively.  Instead, there is a threat, then a resolution, then another threat and a resolution.  I've talked a bit about George M. Cohan's famous description of a three-act play: "In Act I, you get the hero up a tree.  In Act II, you throw stones at him.  In Act III, you get him down from the tree."  Kanigher always made sure to get the hero down from the tree before throwing stones at him.

2. The villains are, to put it mildly, ludicrous.  Here's the robot queen from #4 and #5:

and here's the villain from #8 and #9:

They're not really menacing, just kind of clownish.  And it does stretch credulity a bit that the Metal Men keep finding these other planets where there are robot rulers and attacking amusement rides.

The one really interesting set of villains is the Gas Gang, who appear in #6 and again in #10:

 Although there's really no particularly logical reason why chloroform, for example, would affect robots, who presumably don't breathe.

The series is not without its share of amusing moments.  For example, when one of Doc's model girlfriends mocks Tina:

The romantic tension between Doc and Tina is well-handled.  As readers we all wanted Doc to recognize Tina as his true love; however, realistically Doc has a very good point:

The educational aspect is frequently mentioned in the letters to the editor, but this mostly consists of mentioning the melting/boiling points of the various metals and Mercury's frequent observation that he's the only metal that's liquid at room temperature. Overall, I found the run entertaining and while silly at times it's not tiresome. I was not a fan of Andru and Esposito's art as a youngster, but I confess that it's grown on me over the years.

Metal Men

Commander Benson has a post up on the "New" Metal Men, the era in the late 1960s where the MM became more of a secret agent group than a collection of robots with amazing powers. As CB notes, DC made an oddball decision to change what had been a pretty successful series, and to eliminate the basic premise for the series.

This development, and the notion of giving the Metal Men human appearances, destroyed the most inviting aspect of the series. One of its strengths had always been that, in action, the Metal Men provided remarkable visuals for the reader---Gold stretching into lengths of micrometre-thin wire; Mercury turning into globs of fluid; Iron and Lead changing into massive walls or constructions. Even at repose, they had been striking in terms of colour---gold, red, blue, grey, silver, white.

Indeed. Although I covered the initial Metal Men Showcase tryout issue earlier, I thought it might be interesting to take a longer look at the team.

As mentioned in CB's post, one of the interesting facets of the Metal Men was the way the stories contained a relatively painless introduction to chemistry. It was a rare issue that didn't contain something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

And editor Robert Kanigher often used educational fillers:

Another interesting thing about the series was that the robots were all given different personalities. This was blamed on Doc Magnus' (the creator) "faulty responsometers". Mercury was a hot-tempered martinet, while Gold was noble and intelligent. Lead and Iron were lunkhead strongmen. Tin was perhaps the most interesting character, with his oddball combination of timidity and courage, as I discussed years ago. The final member of the initial team was Tina, a platinum beauty who was madly in love with her inventor:

Mmmmm, machine oil!

I classify the series as "superhero" in nature, mainly because the robots do things that shouldn't ordinarily be possible. For example, while we accept that platinum could be stretched out into an extremely fine wire, is it reasonable that a platinum robot could do so? There are presumably gears and pulleys inside that would be damaged, right? In addition, Iron and Lead are often shown making themselves much bigger than normal; how exactly do they add that mass to their forms?

As mentioned above the series was pretty successful. Here are the circulation figures for 1964:

1965:

And 1966:

Metal Men was moving 396,000 copies an issue! But in the next two years, sales just plain collapsed, probably due to Batmania and the superhero craze that accompanied it. Sales were down to 240,000 per issue in 1967 and 207,000 in 1968, putting the series dangerously close to the 200,000 mark where DC in that era typically cancelled titles.

I agree with CB that the change was a mistake. The problem with dramatic shakeups is that they are almost certain to annoy a large percentage of your existing audience, with no guarantee that it will capture new readers.

Showcase #37: Heavy Metal

Metal Men was an interesting and entertaining feature during the 1960s, with some interesting characters and some relatively painless lessons in chemistry. The story here starts back in the dinosaur era, with a radioactive storm wiping out the giant lizards (not actually how things happened, of course). One creature managed to resist the devastation and survived until it was trapped in a glacier. But now the glacier has melted and the creature (shown on the cover) is freed. As you can see, it looks like a giant manta ray, but it flies instead of swimming.

It first attacks a lighthouse, with rays from its eyes. Then it heads to the big city:

The building shown is the Chrysler Building in New York City:

As an aside, my aunt and uncle lived in New York City around this time and I went in to visit them for a few days. I remember walking with my uncle to visit the United Nations and him pointing out to me that we were right in front of the Chrysler Building. I looked up and got dizzy, the building was so amazingly tall. At the time it was the second tallest building in the world, after the Empire State Building.

The military decides that it needs help and calls on Doc Magnus, a genius inventor, who's perfecting something new:

He decides to create a team of such robots, each with its own element and individual personality:

As you can see, the chemistry lessons started early.

Tin was always my favorite character in the group because of his heart, as I discussed here. He was nervous and frightened and yet he always managed to overcome his fear to display great heroism.

The newly formed band of Metal Men are to face the flying manta ray. But there's one argument to be settled. Doc doesn't want Tina (the platinum robot female) to go along. She convinces him:

They come upon the creature and we see how the combination of elements can be used to best advantage. Iron uses his strength to form Lead into a giant ball and:

But the creature bats the giant ball back at the team. They regroup and the monster comes after them:

Wow, that's a powerful scene! Doc has Gold lasso the creature, while Iron holds onto him with great determination:

And he doesn't let go; he and Gold are pulled into the air by the manta ray. They're eventually dropped into the ocean where:

Two of the problems we all deal with in reading these comics today is that we're not kids anymore, and that we've become somewhat inured to the idea of characters being killed off and later resurrected. But in 1962, when this was published, those would be startling sequences for youngsters.

Dr Will next thinks of using Mercury to coat the monster and cut off its air supply. But it turns out that it doesn't need to breathe, surviving on radioactivity. Platinum binds it, and then Lead covers it, and the creature dies, taking with it the last of the Metal Men. Are they all dead? The story ends here:

Not to ruin the drama, but the Metal Men were robots, so of course Will could bring them back from the "dead". While this was a cool concept it did hamper the drama a bit.

Overall, this was a solid and interesting story, with two very strong characters (Tina and Tin). I am not a fan of DC's monster of the month club, but the heroes in this story overcome the less-intriguing antagonist.