MACHINE MAN #2

Was I lucky? Was I persistent? Part two of MACHINE MANIAC comes, and it’s only been two* short months. After Abel’s death, Aaron is positioned in the offence, and it’s a position he remains in for the rest of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the first few arcs that Kirby pens of his solo, Machine Man (1978). He faces an irreconcilable danger in both the military, who consider him a failed project and seek to destroy him, and from the public who are overwhelmingly afraid of Aaron, a terrifying unknown.

A major difference that sets Aaron aside from other robots in similar media is his strong emotional reactions. He’s not unlike the quippy brawlers like The Thing or Spider-Man that came in the decade before him, with a severity usually reserved not for standard superhero fights but for the deeply personal one-on-one fights that come at the climax of a story. Other robots introduced by Marvel like The Vision and Jocasta are far more subdued, holding within them an internal ferociousness that surfaces only occasionally, where Aaron’s confusion and naivety quickly turn to an emboldened anger within his first story. But the idea that Aaron is unlike other robots is most obvious in the extradiegetic text: he is described as a “robot with a soul”.

Undoubtedly the reader (his and mine) probably already knows what it is that makes Kirby special, though we all might describe it differently. Kirby’s thick, heavy lines of ink sparingly coupled with hatching make Machine Man’s world a surreal one. Perhaps most wouldn’t describe Kirby’s work in comics as dream-like, but this is what my dreams look like. Dark shadows cast by unseen sources of light are placed both behind and in front of characters - shadows in a brightly-lit, high-contrast world. Background objects like cars and bookshelves are often rendered with the same thick lines as people and foreground objects. Dimensionality is drawn from motion, from movement, characters gesturing and emoting.

Aaron himself is a brightly colour-blocked man of the future with few edges, and he moves in stark contrast to the sharp angles and heavy pools of shadow that comprise the rest of the world that Kirby creates for him. It’s difficult to describe him as soft, for he is extremely solid, but he is rounded and tapered in a way that sets him at odds visually with the square-shouldered starched military men and the scientists in their long, blocky gowns. Even straight lines on his skin-tight costume are rounded and curved around (mechanical) muscles.

All of this - his position as a solo hero, his behaviour, the way he’s illustrated - serve to humanize him. The reader is given strong insight into Aaron’s world and psyche. There’s a reversal - the humans depicted feel slightly alien. They have strange desires and opinions. But in the midst of his confusion and unfamiliarity, Aaron continues to repeatedly state his ultimate goal to the reader: to be normal, to be normal, to be normal.

Though it is (perhaps deliberately) never explicitly stated in the original few issues, it’s obvious what Aaron was created to do. He’s a war machine, and he’s designed to kill. But given the ability to think and make decisions for themselves, the X-series war machines are out of the control of the military and thus useless. The mechanical soldier exists in perpetual paradox: the perfect soldier is one that accepts all orders without thinking. But thinking is required in order to carry out the orders in the context of the real world. The achievement of a perfect balance between independent thought and unthinking action marks the end of warfare as we know it: the ability for a nation to wage warfare without sacrificing their own citizens. This concept is explored in a litany of pop culture that emerges right after Machine Man does, especially films: from Terminator to Robocop and even Short Circuit.

Machine Man has the capacity and the intelligence to be the perfect soldier. But it’s Aaron’s experiences of having Abel as his father, and the identity as an individual that he forms, that makes it possible for him to be more than a killing machine. This is the main, original premise of the Machine Man comic series. That’s the main premise of the movies I just mentioned, in fact: that the power of love can subdue and then re-educate sapient but otherwise heartless machines. Humans rescue machines from their own ignorance and reveal to them the beauty and good of the world. But recently it feels to me that there’s a crucial element to these stories that generally goes uncommented on: Why can’t the power of love rescue any of the humans in these stories?

Machines are not needed to wage warfare, and never have been. It is, and probably always will be, easier and cheaper to procure humans and convince them to kill. Sometimes I think that unmanned killer robots are not so much a trope of dystopian futures but of utopian ones. It’s a fantasy to believe that autonomous machines deployed to decimate a population will be crueler or more evil than humans naturally are. This makes them similar to apocalypse stories in a way - the idea of building a society from “the ground up” is a childish distraction from the very real work of having to build a society from the one we already have. Killer robots are a distraction from killer humans who do the same shit, but for cheap.

I don’t consider this a flaw of Machine Man or other stories about robots becoming more ‘human’. They’re metaphors, not literal, not guidance on how to actually create “ethical” machines in our world. The robot is a metaphor for an othered person. If the United States soldiers in Machine Man all refused to hunt him down, we would have no antagonist, and no story. But at this moment in time the disbelief struggles to be suspended. I wish that the opposite of war was love.

*It’s been five months.