the autumn of my killer robot

He came to us on a brisk October afternoon in 1951. His arrival was heralded by the hum of servo motors and the intoxicating scents of ozone and machine oil.

His name was Timmy Tinkle, he was a robot, and he needed a job.

He was created in the laboratory of Professor Derook, but wanted to leave his surrogate father's shadow and blaze his own path.

Mr. Morris found Timmy a position in the WHIZ-TV warehouse, and he soon proved himself to be a motivated and tireless worker. Many were the days we labored shoulder to mechanical shoulder in the cramped, dusty space, and a bond developed between boy reporter and mechanical man.

Such was the strength of our mutual affection that I failed to see the obvious warning signs -- the failure to properly sign off on shipping manifests, the vicious beating and hospitalization of the night watchman, the way in which the office safe was torn out of the wall and its contents emptied.

I didn't want to believe it. I worked with Timmy. He was my friend. We were closer than brothers. How could such a sweet, gentle construct be a brutal robo-criminal?

In my grief and confusion, I confronted him, wishing more than anything that it was just a silly misunderstanding.

His reaction was terrifying to behold.

I was forced to defend myself, and perhaps the shock of betrayal made me strike back with more force than necessary.

Afterwards, I kneeled over Timmy's inert body and gazed down in disbelief at the shattered remains of my once-close friend.

I prepared to squash his cybernetic corpse into a ball for easy transport to the scrapyard, but my blearly eyes noticed something unusual embedded in Timmy's inner workings.

It was a remote control device planted by Derook. Having managed to create a fully functioning humanoid robot and a complex artificial intelligence unit with vacuum tube era technology, Derook had decided the best way to monetize his discoveries was to use Timmy as a Trojan Robot in order to steal the petty cash box from a minor market broadcast studio.

With Derook in police custody, the refurbished Timmy returned to his job at WHIZ-TV, and put his killer robot ways behind him.

Well, for the most part...

Moloko - Are 'Friends' Electric? (from Random: A Tribute to Gary Numan, 1997) - The sleazy side of future shock.

The Gymslips - Robot Man (from a 1983 single; collected on Rockin' with the Renees: The Punk Collection, 2000) - Not to be confused with the Scorpions track (covered by The Expoxies on Stop the Future) with the same name, this is an infectious piece of punky retro-pop by a quartet of hard-partying British lasses.

(panels taken from Captain Marvel Adventures #125 and #136.)

Friday Night Fights: Caveman versus Machine

Neolithic warrior-turned-immortal monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone has a long way to go and a short time to get there, and of the many talents he has picked up over the course of 10,000 years...

(from The Rampaging Hulk #3, June 1977; by John Warner, Sal Buscema, and Rudy Nebres)
..."patience in dealing with killer robots" is not one of them.

The Strangeways - Wasting Time (from a 1979 single) - Further proving my hypothesis that well-crafted power pop is the true music of the celestial spheres.

(Eternal and invincible.)

produce a crazy science fiction creation

Roughly twenty years before Hank Pym got it into his head to dabble in the field of killer atomic robotology, Dr. Charles Langley decided to try his hand at creating a megalomaniacal cybernetic successor to the weak and pathetic human race. The creation of killer robots is an evergreen growth industry in the whimsically improbable world of comics. It’s right up there alongside weather control machines, hypno-ray satellites, and researching ways to destroy killer robots. And who, at some point in their lives, hasn’t considered combining the environmentally-friendly power of a nuclear reactor with the ruthless inhuman efficiency of an artificial intelligence?

Let’s face it, when you’re presenting your work at the 72nd Annual Metropolis Convention of Vaguely Unspecified Science, announcing that you’ve created an ambulatory nuclear furnace with genocidal tendencies has a certain dramatic flair that you just don’t get with some minor breakthrough in stem cell research.

Per the accepted conventions for this sort of business, the quite Devo-ish Langley succeeds in his efforts while inadvertently blowing up his suburban laboratory. (Note to aspiring killer robot makers, be sure that your homeowner’s insurance covers accidental nuclear explosions. You’ll thank yourselves later.) While Langley relaxes beneath a pile of smoldering rubble, his creation decides to check out what’s happening in town.

Now while Mr. Atom, as Langley’s robot has dubbed himself, has gotten off to a promising start on the path of killer robot-dom (what with his creator’s Promethean hubris and all), at this point in his career he isn’t “evil” so much as suffering from a cybernetic form of Asperger’s syndrome. Lacking the capacity to understand basic human interaction, he misinterprets the townspeople’s social cues (in form of having a safe dropped on top of him and getting blindsided by a CoastLiner) as being affirmations of his own perceived superiority.

His inflated sense of self-worth leads him to the United Nations building, where he makes a case for what he sees as his righteous stewardship of the world to the assembled delegates. It goes about as well as you’d think, and ends in a manner tragically familiar to anyone knowledgeable in the pathology of school shootings.

It’s the John Bolton years, minus the bad hairdo, all over again.

While the Danes scramble to come up with an interim replacement delegate, Captain Marvel (aka "The Big Red Cheese") arrives on the scene, having been alerted by the injured Langley about the “really cool” abomination the scientist has "accidentally" let loose on the world. Marvel and Mr. Atom duke it out, but the robot’s atomic power proves to be an equal match for the strength of Hercules and stamina of Atlas. Finally, on the grounds outside of the UN, the two titans dig down deep and give it their all in a brilliantly executed sequence that manages to accomplish more in four panels than Dan Jurgens did in the entire "Death of Superman" arc.

Being down is not the same as being out when one is an indestructible robot, and from the comfort of his cell, Mr. Atom delivers a final rant (presumably accompanied by a mix CD of his favorite Deftones, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein tracks).

All kidding aside, this story, “Captain Marvel Meets Mr, Atom,” from Captain Marvel Adventures #78 (November 1947) is one of my favorite comic stories ever. It’s a fascinating glimpse of early Atomic Age pop culture (also see Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light) that hit the newsstands only two years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The story’s underlying message that the atomic beast would slip its lead and turn on the world came at a time before the first Soviet bomb test, when the United States held a monopoly on atomic weapons. That kind of introspection would soon retreat under the panic-mode thinking of the Red Scare and the formalization of Cold War societal postures.

Looking beyond the story’s popcult significance, I also love the design aesthetic of Mr. Atom. Sleek, streamlined, and metallic, he was populuxe before populuxe existed. I was disappointed that the character was redesigned in the 1990’s with a faux retro look more indicative of current attitudes about the early post war era than of the era itself. At least the Justice League Unlimited version stuck close to the classic design.

I Am Robot and Proud – Learn From Mistakes (from Grace Days, 2003) – Mr. Atom never learned from his. He later tried to assist the Comet Men in their conquest of earth, then got blasted into the future where he and his efforts toward world domination went up in an atomic fireball. Poor sap. Maybe he needed a dose of soothing electronica, such as this track, in his life.

The Scorpions – Robot Man (from In Trance, 1975) – This is how they rocked it in 1970’s Hannover, people. The Epoxies did a superlative cover of this song on 2005’s Stop the Future.

Helen Love – Atomic Beat Boy (from Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Musik, 2000) – Indie pop, Ramones fetishism, and techno collide, and the results sound like something from a bemani game. It might be a bit too bubblegum for some folks, but I like it fine...in small doses.

The Blood – Megalomania (from False Gestures for a Devious Public, 1983) – This is the sort of ferocious mix of punk and metal one would expect from a band fronted by a “Cardinal Jesus Hate.”