For some reason Marvel got robot-happy in early 1969.
The robot doesn’t show in this Gene Colan cover, but he’s in the story. Kree warrior Captain Marvel discovers Walter Lawson — the dead scientist whose identity he’s assumed while investigating Earth’s space program — had a lucrative side racket selling tech to the underworld. Including the most unstoppable, invincible robot the world has ever seen. Well, until we get to #12 and we get an even more unstoppable robot, the Manslayer (cover by John Romita).
Arnold Drake’s script has the robot controlled from Cuba by someone in (as my friend Ross puts it) a Mystery Mastermind chair, high enough that we can’t see anything but his hands as they work the controls and fine-tune his all-seeing monitor screens. My immediate assumption was that Lawson had faked his death and gone from building robots for supervillains to building them for the Commies. Nope. In the same month’s Avengers —
— it turns out Black Widow, captured by the villain in Cuba, got dragged back to NYC by Egghead, now in partnership with Puppet Master and the Mad Thinker. Presumably they were the ones behind Manslayer, though the giant robot they deploy this issue is much less impressive — Hawkeye, transformed into the second Goliath (a creative decision by Roy Thomas I never liked) is able to put it down. As there’s no reference to the Cuba plotline other than ‘tasha being imprisoned, I wonder if there wasn’t some missed communication between Drake and Thomas.
Over in Daredevil, Starr Saxon — later the second Mr. Fear, then Machinesmith — unleashes an unstoppable killer android (no colorful name, though) to kill Daredevil in an underworld hit. Saxon has somehow gotten DD’s body scent digitized so the android hunts down Matt (masks can’t hide a man’s scent!). Parts two and three of this arc mark the second appearance of Barry Windsor Smith at Marvel (after X-Men #53); fortunately Gene Colan (who did the cover above) returned, as Smith is nowhere near as good as he’d become soon. Roy Thomas takes over scripting from Stan Lee and sticks around. I presume that’s why Foggy and Karen — who’d written Matt off as a jerk at the end of Lee’s run — are completely over the breakup all of a sudden.
Last, we have Fantastic Four #85 (cover by Kirby, natch), the second installment in a multi-part Lee/Kirby arc. The FF have gone inside Latveria to destroy the ultimate robot army Doom’s developing for conquering his neighbors; while Doom is, of course, a robot master from way back, the story is clear this new model is the most unstoppable, most invincible — well, you know. Surprisingly none of the robots are called doombots yet, making me wonder when that term became a thing.
Annoyingly, right after an arc in which Maximus neutralized the FF’s powers through hypnosis, Doom is doing the same thing (though it works better here because Doom’s a better foe). This also makes Doom much more totalitarian a monarch: where past glimpses of Latveria showed Doom as “benevolent if you don’t cross him,” here everyone has to keep smiling and showing how happy they are or there will be hell to pay.
Of course the heroes won in all those stories which is why we’re still cracking jokes about welcoming our robot overlords.
