MACHINE MANIAC #1

For the past few years, I’ve been on a secret mission. Secret because I find it impossible to understand and explain my reasons for doing this, and a mission because I find it impossible to stop. I want to find the source of the first - the earliest - robots in the history of fiction. I don’t have advanced research skills. Not an English degree, I majored in communications. If I’m lucky and persistent, you’ll hear about my mission again.

But for my first new essay in a considerable while I’d like to write about a robot that wasn’t the first, nor the best, but one that has reflected in himself many of the tropes that robots have inhabited throughout fiction in the past centuries. Over his 47-year history, Marvel’s Machine Man has embodied a multitude of the archetypes we often associate with robots and artificially created humans, and his role in comics changes throughout the decades as robots and machines are perceived and portrayed differently.

But Aaron Stack, Machine Man is a bit of an unfairly difficult character for me to try to explain the origins of. I don’t believe it’s relevant that he first appears in Jack Kirby’s 1977 ten-issue series inspired by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, despite the fact that A Space Odyssey (1968) features one of the most famous robots (or perhaps we consider him just a computer?) of all time. I do, however, believe it’s relevant that Machine Man is a fairly clear and straightforward pastiche of Otto Binder’s robot: Adam Link.

The first seven issues of Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are a series of loosely related vignettes inspired by the film, featuring an evolving cast of new characters. Issue #8 begins with the violent end of a United States military project to create humanoid robots for space exploration. These machines (that Kirby sometimes calls “Human-Computers”) rampage wildly out of control at an unnamed military research complex, attacking whoever they can find. Neither flames nor bullets can begin to contain even one of these “thinking computers”: the existential crisis, the confusion and terror of simply existing, progressively drives each of them to uncontrollable violence. The decision is made by the brass to scorch earth, setting off detonators in the heads of each robot which destroys not only them but the research facility around them. Fifty of the machines are obliterated, but one remains still at the home of researcher Dr. Abel Stack: X-51, the Machine Man.

Aaron had been “raised” by Abel in an attempt to stave off the same mania that had consumed all the other versions of the X-series robot. He believed that giving Aaron a human identity - a sense of belonging, a home, context for the things he sees and interacts with in the world - would help him develop mentally with some sense of stability. Abel wanted to give Aaron the ability to understand his reason for existence, though he also seemed to have aspirations for Aaron beyond military operations.

Abel’s love for Aaron, his inimitable creation, culminates in his death when he attempts to remove the fail-safe bomb inside Aaron that destroyed all the other machines in the project. From this point onwards, Aaron’s continued presence in comics carries a question with it: Was Abel Stack’s experiment in creating artificial life successful? Or is the Machine Man essentially the same as his robot “brothers” who never experienced human love and understanding, monsters who wreak havoc on the world, tortured by existential terror?

I mentioned Otto Binder’s Adam Link earlier because his origin is more or less the same. First published in a 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, “I, Robot” is told from the perspective of a robot named Adam Link who is accused of killing his creator. Adam, like Aaron, is created and raised alone by a singular scientist but is forced to strike up alone when his “father” dies in an accident. It is not surprising then that Aaron and Adam go on to venture into many of the same action-adventure scenarios (Otto Binder also went on to create many early Superman stories).

Adam’s stories began in 1939 and were initially adapted to comic format in a 1955 issue of Weird Science-Fantasy. Aaron debuts in a Marvel book in 1977, reviving the trope of the robot who is in essence a human, but one who is constantly forced to prove his humanity.

Adam and by extension Aaron, from the beginning, are somewhat unique in comparison to other characters in the ‘manufactured men’ archetype. From Frankenstein’s monster to Astro Boy, these artificial sons are created out of grief and mania: ending up rejected by their creators, they reinforce the idea that for any number of reasons, a being that is not birthed naturally into the world is no substitute for a natural human child. Adam is compared to Frankenstein’s monster repeatedly, as the reaction from outsiders upon seeing him for the first time is generally one of terror. These two robots differ from others in that their creators do not reject them, though they are not able to stay with them, and their creators' deaths are what send each robot out into the wider world.

Adam Link was written around the same time as Asimov’s earliest robot stories. In a delightful discovery for me and my research into robot history, Asimov even admits that Binder’s Adam Link was a strong inspiration for his own robot stories:

Asimov likes to claim a considerable chunk of credit for the massive surge in popularity that robots and computer-like thinking machines had around the 1940s in comics and pulp magazines. In general, Asimov’s stories around this were largely mystery-style stories centred around the famous Three Laws of Robotics. The robots in his stories did not go on their own adventures, that was still reserved for the men.

Link is a classic misunderstood solo adventure hero, and that’s the material from which Machine Man is formed. But unlike Adam, Aaron is allowed to step into the greater Marvel canon and the realm of superheroes. He is the protagonist of the final three issues of 2001: A Space Odyssey which then spins off into a solo title in 1978, again written, drawn, and edited by Jack Kirby. It’s only speculation, and I’m not going to gather sources to back this up, but it feels safe to say that this is because superhero comics in 1978 simply were hot. Science fiction comic anthologies that feel very much like the pulps of the 50s? Maybe not as hot.

So that’s the premise: that a sentient mind, not unlike that of a human, in the body of a remarkably powerful machine presents an irreconcilable dilemma for society. Kirby makes himself a robot - heavily inspired by an older classic - and likes him so much he him keeps around. What Kirby goes on to do with Machine Man in the context of Superheroism is the subject of my next essay in this series.

Thank you to my internet friends Jennie and Liv for helping me think properly and lending me their beautiful knowledge.