Review of a Test, By Johnathan

I've been sitting on this one for a while, for no particular reason. No idea where I first got it from but I recently saw it again while reading Metal Men No. 19, from April 1966, so I'll say there. This was one of DC's ways of acknowledging the social upheavals of the Sixties:

That's right, DC beats Cosmopolitan by at least a decade for so with this. People could test their Brotherhood Quotient long before being able to do so with their Drama Quotient (D.Q.) or Commitment Quotient (C.Q.).* Yes, every funnybook reader in the Americas could stop reading about Superboy for a minute and figure out whether they were racists or not.

I've chopped the page that this originally appeared on up so that we can examine them individually. Let's begin, shall we?

*Actual tests that have appeared in Cosmo, says my minimal research.

I almost wish that this weren't Part A of the test, because it's a doozy. Aside from the awesome rating system - which another time I might have written an entire review of (though I must say: Mr. So-So looks a bit more like Mr. Quietly Terrified) - these categories are reasonably insane. I understand that the point of the test is to get the kids to thinking about the ways that they look at other folk, but some of the juxtapositions are sort of mind-blowing.

"Kids! How do you feel about spiders? Hate 'em, huh? Well, do you hate Jews more or less than that? Uh-huh. What about Cabbage? More or less repulsive than Negroes?" (Was that still considered an okay term? Let's see... Wikipedia says yes.) I can just imagine the brainstorming session: "Okay guys, we need a list of things that people might not like - whatcha got?" "Cabbage." "Gypsies." "That damn music those long-hairs play at all hours." "Catholics." "Hey!" "Uh... Baptists, too."

On to Part B:

I believe that all men are created equal... except for the fact that Caucasians have a much greater density. Thus, in any given gathering of disembodied heads a cluster of craniums will form around the very whitest - typically a blonde - and more racially diverse heads will orbit the resultant Orb of Paleness.

Part C:

I do! But does one-on-one basketball played in what appears to be a basketless circle of asphalt actually qualify as a sport? If so, does it require a referee? Both teams appear to think the answer is no, but we'll let the council decide once they finish discussing the budget and emerge from town hall.

Part D:

"We stand out front and point at him, if that's what you mean."

I don't know, maybe it's because I live in Halifax, but that looks like a swarming gearing up to take place. If I moved to a new neighborhood and a crowd of wildly different-sized kids started lurking outside? I'd be creeped out. If this was a picture of about a second earlier I bet the poor red-headed kid would be in the process of being pushed out the door by his mother. Kid looks sickly, too - probably won't last that long.

How'd we score?

"Chee, Billy, maybe it was wrong to firebomb alla them houses. I guess we got some thinkin' to do about our attitude twords our fellow man, huh?"

Ah, but seriously. This thing's pretty easy to poke fun at in our supremely enlightened, racism-free (I almost typed that without laughing) times, but consider that it was produced at a time when things were still nowhere near even the flawed equality that we have today, most likely by a middle-aged white guy or group of white guys and probably with the best of intentions rather than as a cynical marketing ploy. I mean, it's not like they were sprinkling positive ethnically diverse characters all over the place but at least they tried. I'll throw 'em a JOHN APPROVED.

Review of Some Robots, Part 2, By Johnathan

Boy oh boy do I have big news! Remember how last time around I showed you the first appearance of Silver and Copper as made-up extra Metal Men? How they were just kind of standing on a beach, all generic and miscoloured? Well evidently they realized that they hadn't made too good an impression the first time around because Silver and Copper are back! They both made repeat appearances in the "Metal Facts & Fancies" section of Metal Men comics and kicked a fair bit more ass in their second times at bat.

Here's Silver:

Beating the hell out of some germs! I like the diseases-as-gangsters motif, though it'd be even better if they had, like, cilia on their faces or gross snotty-looking speech balloons or something. Silver herself ain't bad, though I'm not sure I like the granny panties that she has riveted on there. What I do like is that the requisite Metal Men headpiece is a nurse's hat - very thematically appropriate. (On a side note: I had one Metal Men comic when I was kid and I had no idea what was up with Tina. Like, I thought that she was Silver, because Tina = short for Platinum isn't the first assumption an eight-year-old makes. Plus, I thought she might've been Jewish, because whoever was drawing her made her little hat look a lot like a yamukle).

Anyway, Silver's still JOHN APPROVED

Copper came back too, and guess who she's dating?

Tin! Tin's got a girl he didn't even build! And what a girl! Copper's a stone fox, fictional robot-wise. She's got a crazy miniskirt with sleeves on, a neat headband-influenced hairdo - i think I see a dimple, even. This robo-lady's definitely JOHN APP- hold on...

What's this?

Huh. A smelter-wedding. Haven't been to one of those in years. Good to see the old traditions kept alive. Anyway, as I was saying, Copper's JOHN APPROV- huh.

Oh, gross. That's just wrong. No wonder Doc Magnus doesn't want to marry Tina. Bronze is apparently going to be the Metal Man that comes out of storage once a year to scare children on Hallowe'en. I blame the Comics Code Authority - they were probably all like "You can't melt a boy-robot and a girl-robot together and get a functioning individual, it'll challenge children's sexuality. Next thing you know two kids'll be crawling into a furnace so they can melt together. You're gonna have to make this thing look like an abomination, sorry."

Pre-melting Copper is JOHN APPROVED. Bronze is NOT APPROVED.

Last one!

Now supposedly this panel is about Copper and Silver, but I just see Copper, who has apparently gotten over the divorce from Tin by forming a rock band and switching genders again. That's the kind of emotional resiliency that gets one metal (Copper) into the upcoming Metal Men comic while other metals (Silver) just sit and tarnish gently.

Though I'm not sure what a metal Beatles-analog has to do with heat conductivity, I do enjoy seeing that old classic "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" being played. You don't hear it much any more but it was one of the top songs of the Sixties in the DC Universe, along with "Baby, Baby, Baby" and "Yeah Baby Yeah." The crowd of swooning metal gals is a nice touch, too . Say! maybe they're fainting because of the heat! That's where it all comes together!

The Copper Beatles are JOHN APPROVED.

Review of Some Robots, Part 1, By Johnathan

Ah, the Metal Men. They, in all of their vaguely-educational glory, are my latest semi-obsession.

Assuming that someone who's not a comic book nerd is reading this, a quick description of the Metal Men and what they stood for:

The Metal Men were a group of robots created by Dr. Will Magnus. Thanks to a bit of technology called a "responsometer" they were astonishingly human-like, with genuine personalities and everything. As the name suggests, they're all made out of a different metal, and they're obsessed with that metal. Seriously, check it out:

That's their first appearance but really, they talk like that all the time. Every second sentence is about melting points or ductility or something like that. Luckily they're entertaining as hell, so it doesn't get old. Metal Men fans note: the third sentence out of Mercury's mouth is the "liquid at room temperature" bit.

The Metal Men are cool on a lot of levels: first, they've got real personalities - they're not just a bunch of clones of every other super-team of the 1960s. Tin's inferiority complex and Mercury's arrogance were especially unusual for heroes of the time. Plus, Tina the Platinum robot was in love with Doc Magnus, which led to sufficient dramatic tension to fuel a battleship.

But enough about the Metal Men! Entertaining as they are, they're not the focus of this series of reviews. Rather, I'm going to write about the other elemental robots who appear in the series, because there are a lot of them. They creep in around the edges, whether as antagonists or as bit characters in the little "Metal Facts" sections that appeared in every issue.

The very first of these characters came as a pair:

Aw, look at them. So generic. Not only did Copper and Silver have some lousy character design problems, they evidently had the wrong names - I'm pretty sure that that's what the Romans are so surprised about. Still, there's one thing that this panel did well: set precedent. It said "why show the kids boring lumps of metal when you can anthropomophise? And robotiform?"

For that reason, Copper and Sillver are JOHN APPROVED.

This one's interesting. It's from a page about gold and features three Metal Men-as-knights in the centre, flanked by a couple of Generic Metal Dudes (GMDs). I gotta say, when I started writing this review I thought it'd be easy to figure out who these guys were supposed to be, but after ransacking half of the Alchemy sites on the internet I don't have much. GMD on the left might be Antimony and GMD on the right might be Arsenic, but probably not. Darned artists forty years ago... didn't they realize that someone would obsess about that sort of thing someday? Plus, Gold is looking kind of fat.

NOT APPROVED