I'm far from done, but for a while now I've been keeping track of the various alien races mentioned in the comic books I read. Why? Because stuff like this looks interesting when you put it all together.
EDIT: I didn't like the original post, so I redid it as a graphic! You should probably click to expand.
I've been ever so nostalgic since reading Doom Patrol this week, as the Metal Men are now all set to have a scrap with another group of robots - robots with their own sassy theme, yet! This is the classic Metal Men plot, along with anti-robot racism and forbidden robot/human love. In honour of the return of one of my very favourite things, I'm going to revisit the old days and offer up another review of the various crazy elemental robots that used to pop up from time to time in the old Metal Men series.
BISMUTH
I am left with a lot of questions after viewing this panel. Questions like: Is this a robot made of bismuth or a fountain shaped like a robot made of bismuth? If it is a robot, is this his day job or some sort of terrible punishment? Where does the water pipe come in? Is bismuth really that water soluble?
Further, how do robots feel about drinking water that another robot has just vomited out? Why would a robot child eat apples in the first place? Do green apples really give you gut pain? Did someone build a robot child and thus doom him to an eternity of condescension, or does this panel imply some sort of robot/robot sexual reproduction? If robots can have babies on their own, is humanity doomed?
I fear that I will never know these things. NOT APPROVED.
MAGNESIUM
Further muddying the waters vis-a-vis the mysteries of robot reproduction are robotic temptresses like Magnesium here. Are all of the good metal men robo-taken or robo-gay, or is this evidence that love knows no boundaries or barriers, even across species positions on the Rockwell Hardness Scale.
One thing is certain, however. Based on my observations of various military-type friends, family members, etc I will without hesitation state that flares in the shape of attractive, coquettish dames would raise the rate of maritime rescue an immeasurable amount. JOHN APPROVED.
STEEL
Taking a break from the mysteries of robosexuality, here's poor Steel. One panel of fame was more than most elements get, and alloys seldom even get that much, but Steel managed to screw it up. Perhaps thinking that there were already plenty of grey robots running around, Steel showed up the entirely wrong dang colour. Even his freakishly long arms couldn't save him from being blacklisted after that. It's okay, though. I'm pretty sure that Steel was the result of Doc Magnus wanting some alone time one rainy weekend - just whip up a quick robot and have the Metal Men run a series of "experiments" on it with some of your spare tools and voila! time to watch Braveheart without getting interrupted during the good parts.
Steel, of course, was melted down soon after.
NOT APPROVED.
ZIRCONIUM
Is Zirconium the only robot that I've ever seen wear a t-shirt? yes he is.
More importantly: how lucky is he that this panel was printed back when zirconium was still actually used in flashes?Although my limited research indicates that zirconium is used in all kinds of cool places like nuclear reactors and spacecraft and so forth, I'm pretty sure that the poor guy would be having his face rubbed in the chintzy fake diamond aspect of his heritage if it were to come up today.
Sorry man: NOT APPROVED.
NICKEL
See, now that's more like it. A robot's love for a robot, and no risk of squashing a poor hu-mon in the throes of passion (or, say, bursting into white-hot flame).
I wonder if metals that don't alloy well are discouraged from dating by their peers. Is it kind of like a zodiac thing for them or do they approach it scientifically ("Oh, gross. Your children will be all crumbly and brittle.")? Either way, I hope someone is out there fighting the power.
As for Nickel herself, well, I could never say no to a robot in a miniskirt. JOHN APPROVED.
And that's pretty much it for my stock of images from "Metal Facts and Fancies". I'll leave you with a few left over pictures of various Metal Men finding love, metal or otherwise. Next time I do this: crazy Metal Men villains!
Lead has a Mer-fan
Mercury: Evidently needs to get out of the kitchen. What I'm saying is, he can't take the heat.
Mercury again: What a lech.
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
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