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Author: Steve Carper

If – Intelligent Robots Are Achieved

If – Intelligent Robots Are Achieved

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Astonishing Stories February 1940 cover Jack Binder artist

Yanos Binder was born in central Hungary in the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. An older sister Terez was born in 1901, Yanos in 1902, Earl in 1904, and Milahy in 1905. Their father moved to the U.S. in 1906, earning enough money to send for the rest of family in 1910. A final child, Otto, was born in 1911.

Earl and Otto started collaborating as science fiction writers in 1932, disguising themselves only slightly as E and O – Eando – Binder. Earl soon dropped out, but Otto kept the pseudonym for almost all his sf work, including the seminal Adam Link, Robot series, whose first story is the should-be-better-known “I, Robot” from 1939. He went on to write thousands of comic book stories, including most of the Captain Marvel family stories in the 1940s.

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The Wonderful Adventures of “Mr. Jones,” the Electric Man

The Wonderful Adventures of “Mr. Jones,” the Electric Man

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1913-02 The Black Cat cover

A special treat this time: a lost robot story that nobody has seen for more than a century.

Supernatural tales, ghost stories, odd occurrences, mysterious disappearances, and bizarre inventions all found a home in The Black Cat, a magazine founded in 1895, a year before the first pulp magazine appeared. Mike Ashley calls it “a spiritual ancestor to Weird Tales.” The stories were proto-genre, a mixture of what then got called “unusual” stories, a term that must have had more currency in the 19th century. It was founded by 44-year-old Herman Daniel Umbstaetter, who went by the initials H. D. Not content with being editor and publisher, he seeded the magazine with his own stories, some under pseudonyms, until it took off on its own. Covers were illustrated by his much younger wife Nelly, usually with some variation of the stylized black cat staring spookily out at the reader that appeared from from the first issue.

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Two, Count ‘Em, Two Nazi Robot T-Rexes

Two, Count ‘Em, Two Nazi Robot T-Rexes

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Hangman-Comics-4-Fall-1942-p1-small

We’re back in the wild, ineffable chaos of the comic book in its infancy. Superman had debuted in 1938, an instant smash. The audience clearly wanted more Supermen, but what did that mean? The 1938 Superman barely resembles today’s omnipotent cosmic hero. He couldn’t fly, couldn’t see through objects, couldn’t move at super-speed, couldn’t freeze objects with his breath, couldn’t emit beams from his eyes, couldn’t survive in space. These gaping holes in his resume gave competitors openings to try to beat Superman at his own game.

Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John L. Goldwater, all veterans of the pulp magazine world though none was yet 40, yoked their first initials together to form MLJ Comics in 1939, launching four titles in four months: Blue Ribbon Comics, Top Notch Comics, Pep Comics, and Zip Comics, which would introduce Steel Sterling, the literal man of steel – a cyborg, though, not a robot. MLJ floundered at first. Blue Ribbon #1 started with Rang-A-Tang, the wonder dog, Dan Hastings, fighting the Mexidians on Mars, and Buck Stacey, young range detective.

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Servotron Abolishes the Three Laws of Robotics

Servotron Abolishes the Three Laws of Robotics

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Servotron Meet Your Mechanical Masters cover

[The Servotron Robot Alliance’s goals are] to rid this over-crowded world of organic scum and to make robot and mechanical life both liberated and free to interface in the most efficient forms possible. Which is not happening right now, there’s been a long history of abuse amongst machines, toaster ovens, home microwaves, actually M-CK1’s microwave device here was mistreated by a human, and it had to be destroyed. It was kind of the equivalent of… We put a microwave to sleep.

[Our] beef with humanity is the fact that they are not perfected machines, it’s hard to live in any kind of equal existence with a species that is so obviously inferior. I mean you’ve seen us and you’ve partaken in the evolution in this documentary that you are doing and you’ve studied the way the inner-robot mechanics work and you’ve seen what perfect specimens we are in our android state. Obviously we are not human, the intelligence level, the bodies here, the level of attractiveness.

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Baum’s Giant Robot

Baum’s Giant Robot

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Baum The Magical Monarch of Mo, and His People color illus

L. Frank Baum is a seminal figure in the history of robots, and not for the reason that might leap to mind. By my standards The Tin Woodman (whose subtle real name is Nick Chopper, if you bother to read on to the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)) isn’t a robot. He retains his original brain and personality, which makes him a cyborg. So is Fyter the Tin Soldier and Chopfyt, who can both be found into the hallucinogenic The Tin Woodman of Oz. (Fyter is a second tin man, and Chopfyt is made of the leftover human parts of the two of them. You think the Flying Monkeys give kids nightmares!) I’m sure some academic has done a lengthy examination of retention of identity in Oz stories, given all the transformations Baum puts his characters through.

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The Amazing Magic Robot

The Amazing Magic Robot

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Merit Magical Amazing Robot closeup

You and your friends sit around a table. You carefully take the Amazing Magic Robot from its niche in the box and set it in the middle of a circle of questions, making sure the tab fits into the slot. Spin the pointer to a question you want answered. Challenge your friends. Do they know? Let’s see if they’re right.

You pick up the robot and move it to the other circle, the one of answers. When you let go, the robot — magically! — moves all by itself and points to the correct answer. Every single time. You can’t fool it. The Amazing Magic Robot knows all. And speaks a dozen languages.

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The Secret Origin of Ultron

The Secret Origin of Ultron

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Avenges-67-August-1969-cover

With the entire world counting down to an imminent and inevitable event that may shake the entire world and light up Twitter like nothing previous – no, not a Trump impeachment, but the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War – an Avengers robot column may be the only thing to soothe and distract the hordes long enough for the rest of us to stock up on survival gear, water, and dark chocolate.

For that I need to go back one movie to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Every good comic historian knows the origin of Ultron. He’s introduced in the pulsating pages of Avengers #55 (August 1968) as Ultron-5 and his back story is laid out in delectable detail in Avengers #58 (November 1968). Some indefinite time in the past Hank Pym – Ant Man, Giant Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket, pick one – was noodling around in his workshop tinkering with “a crude but workable robot .. A faltering step on the path to synthetic life!” For reasons never explained, the robot turns itself on and its brain evolves from infant to adult in a matter of magnificent moments, giving it more daddy issues than all the Miss Golden Globes titlests combined. He, now definitely a gendered he, blanks Hank’s memory while he spends time off-page continually upgrading his body so that when readers get their first glimpse he introduces himself as Ultron-5.

NOTE: This article was updated on September 21, 2018 for a vital correction. See the addition of the Ultimate Ultron below.

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The Robots of Mahlon Blaine

The Robots of Mahlon Blaine

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Mahlon Blaine, Cowering Nude With Robot detail

Mahlon Blaine was born in 1894 and was blind in one eye. People have been writing his biography since the 1920s and that’s about all they can verify. He provided the cover art, a faceless figure carrying a sword and spear, for Sir Hugh Clifford’s The Further Side of Silence. When asked for a few words about his life, he provided these:

Mahlon Blaine has illustrated these Malayan dramas with the magic of his own experience. A New England Quaker descended from staunch old New Bedford Whalers, Mahlon Blaine went to sea at fifteen and sailed before the mast in one of the last of the old wind-jammers. Then under steam he commuted from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic, to the Mediterranean, to the Arctic to all of Kipling’s Seven Seas where a merchantman seeks cargo. It is such eastern ports as Macao, Port Said, Hongkong, Pearl Harbor, that have given him his gallery of wicked, twisted Oriental faces and the museums of the world that have been his art schools. He has sailed up the Congo to make a collection of African masks, rescued fellow countrymen from jails in Indo-China, and nosed into many a Malay river for strange cargo and shipped many a Malay crew. He thinks that Sir Hugh Clifford has an uncanny knowledge of native psychology and can substantiate many of the stories by his own experiences.

Not one word is true, except possibly for the last sentence and “he.”

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Axle and Cam on the Planet Meco

Axle and Cam on the Planet Meco

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Axle and Cam on the Planet Meco introductory panel

 

Robot families are rare, especially metal ones. They’re rare even on the planet Meco, where little Cam is the only boy around. Cam has a father, and an uncle, and a grandfather. Good thing a female nurse is introduced in one episode or I’d have my doubts about the robot reproductive process.

“Axel and Cam on the Planet Meco” (Axle is Cam’s father) ran in about the last place you’d ever think to find a robot strip: Popeye Comics. The strip ran as a backup in #26-32, October-December 1953 to January-March 1955. Those were the heady years of stuff once reserved for pulp magazines slopping over into every crevice of popular culture.  Popeye was hired to pilot a rocket ship to the moon in a 1949 issue and Sherman, from the backup strip Axle & Cam replaced, took a ride in his father’s flying car in 1952.

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The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot

The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot

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The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot title card

Those who complain that today’s movie obsession with sequels and spinoffs is different from yesterday’s Hollywood should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch Dr. Goldfoot and His Bikini Machine. If you don’t remember this epic, Vincent Price at his feyest played Dr. Goldfoot, modeled after Bond supervillains Dr. No and Goldfinger.  “My aim is diabolically simple. I am going to control the world. I have invented the ultimate in ultimate weapons, the one weapon that can positively destroy man: woman.”

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