I remember reading Metal Men Comics in the early 1960’s. The Metal Men consisted of 6 members, each having personality traits related to the metal from which they were created.
Platinum - The only woman of the group. She was adorable, attractive, sensual, glamorous - the “platinum blonde” type. In the “Letters Column” of the comic, she was always everybody’s favorite. (Yeah, me too).
Mercury - The hothead of the group, with a mercurial disposition. He’d always brag about himself and belittle the others. In the “Letters Column”, he was the one everyone hated. About 1 letter per month suggeted killing him off and replacing him with copper, silver, etc. OR just plain kill him.
Gold - Unofficial leader of the group. Always was noble, etc.
Tin - The 97 pound weakling of the group but he’d always try. Tin, not being the strongest metal in the world certainly was well-represented in his personality.
Iron - The strongman of the group. Not a bully, just always got the job done.
Lead - Sort of the group’s strongman, but Lead being rather dense, they made him kind of slow let’s say.
Oh and they all were created by Doctor Will Magnus.
Okay, I’ve rambled on enough. Anyone have memories to share about this comic. (IMHO Metal Men would make a great movie.)
And then, as a grownup, I totally forgot about them. Until one day, when I was rooting around on the internet, looking for lesson plan material and activities for my classroom…
DC Direct makes a collectible set of Metal Men PVC figurines. It seems to have the whole team, including Dr. Magnus. If you’re a fan, this might be a cool thing to own.
Didn’t someone retcon the origins of the Metal Men so that, instead of being robots, they were actually human intelligences transferred into robot bodies twho thought they were robots? Something like that.
(Not really a MM reader, but remember reading a blurb about this in Comics Buyers Guide a while ago…)
Yeah, he made her himself out of a do-it-yourself build-a-robot kit. Looked just like him, except she had a Nefertiti-style headpiece. Didn’t she sacrifice herself to save all the rest of them?
I don’t think the nameless Tin gal ever got named, Ike. I remember the comic having contests for readers to submit names (The most popular submission was Tina, how ‘bout that?) but I think she got squashed when they turned into the “hunted Metal Men” when ol’ Doc Magnus went nuts or something.
It was about that time that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and girls and the National Lampoon, and sort stopped reading comics.
Just kidding. The only post-Crisis appearances of theirs I’ve seen were in Action comics, when it was effectively a team-up issue of Superman and the second banana of the month. In one of those stories, a Lexcorp scientist explains the Metal Men aren’t really metallic at all, but made up of some goofy polymer that only mimics some of the properties of a certain metal. Thus, the robot Tin is a weakling, even though tin itself is actually one of the stronger metals.
Oddly, even in the early stories, the stories would throw out a lot of factoids (I still remember that tin boils at 2260 degrees) but still be inaccurate on some basics. For example, Will Magnus at one point carries Tina cradled in his arms sleeping-beauty style. Of course, if she really was made of real Platinum, she’d weigh well over a ton.
That was one of those dumb John Byrne tries to be “scientifical” ideas that got ignored the minute he left the book. IIRC Byrne’s reasoning went like “Garsh…if Gold wuz rilly made of gold, peepul would try to steal him an’ melt him down an’ sell him. So they’re all made of plastic that behaves exactly like the metal it mimics. Um. Except when it doesn’t.” :rolleyes:
Put this in the category of just bad ideas that Mopee (who wasn’t Byrne’s fault) and “Superman’s powers are all psychic, ‘cause psychic is scientifical an’ yellow-solar radiation isn’t.” (which WAS Byrne’s fault) or “Superboy discovers that Jor-El and Laura are (and always have been) alive, but in suspended animation, permanantly frozen in the death agonies of green-kryptonite poisoning” (which wasn’t Byrne’s fault) or “Spider-Man got his powers from a huge nuclear explosion that killed thousands of people when it went off in downtown Manhattan. He was the only survivor, but no-one kept an eye on him after that.” (Which WAS Byrne’s fault).
As a kid I had collected every metal men comic, but unfortunately puberty hit and I gave them all away!!
Each MM had a circuit in them called a reponsimeter, that reacted differently according to the matrix into which it was implanted.
In one comic, Doc Magnus creates a new improved set of MM using different metals. Copper instead of gold, palladium instead of platinum(or was it silver), osmium/lead, cobalt/iron, gallium/mercury, and zinc/tin.
The two groups battle twice, with the original MM losing the first as we learn what metallic properties the new group possesses that the old group has a disavantage with.
They win the second battle because they start using the metallic properties in which they excel.
For instance, gold electrocutes copper, lead causes osmium to fall because of its weight and to not be able to get up, iron is not as hard as cobalt but is less brittle so cobalt cracks under repeated hammering. I ferget about mercury, tin and platinum.
My first and only good look at the Metal Men came from those pocket sized DC Digests that used to come out monthly… those were a great way for kids to sample comics they culdn’t otherwise afford. I wonder why DC ever abandoned the format?
Magnus did that sort of thing a few times, including Metal Men#6 (1964) in which Magnus gets turned into a robot himself, goes nuts, and creates the “Gas Gang” (Oxygen, Helium, Choroform, Carbon Monoxide and Carbon Dioxide) who end up battling the MM.
While it’s true that that retcon was Byrne’s, I recall his reasoning being somewhat more rational - that if someone were to try to lift a large, wide object such as a boat, it would break apart. So he invented this “semi-telekinetic” sort of thing which complements his ordinaty super-strength.
Mercury, oddly enough, was red instead of silver-colored - like an alcohol thermometer, instead of a mercury one - presumable to differentiate his color from platinum.
And I recall that the explanation of how he could hold together, even though mercury was liquid at room temperature, was because he was encased in some kind of plastic shell.
I’m pretty sure that Byrne made all of Supe’s powers psychic; He wasn’t invulnerable, he had a psychic force field. He didn’t fly, he lifted himself with TK. The heat vision was pyrokesis, etc…
And the problem (and it may just be a philosophical one) with the whole making super-powers more “rational” thing is that deep down, they’re not. I don’t care how Spider-Man sticks to a wall (there’ve been at least three explainations, none of which make sense*), just that the powers are consistant. Ditto with Superman. He flies. I don’t need techno-babble to explain 'em.
And the problem with techo-babble is that it messes with other things: Ok. Let’s say that Superman is psychic and that’s how he lifts the battleship without it snapping in half. How do the Luthor Goons in the Iron Man-like costumes do it? The costumes certainly don’t grant psychic ablities. What about, say…The Thing? She Hulk? Ultra-Boy? They can’t ALL be psychic.
I find that for me, technobabble is a distraction. There was a Marvel Universe issue that said that Cyclops’ eyeballs were portals to another dimension where light has mass. Without getting into all the obvious silliness of the idea (how does he see, if that’s the case?) why is that necessary to know? How does it advance a storyline (other than one of a very specific sort) to know that? Given how short an individual comic is anyway…
IMO, I can live without the technobabble: JMS in an interview about Babylon 5, somewhere answered the question “What makes the Stargates work?” with the (IMO) great response “They work by sheer force of plot” (paraphrased). I agree with the sentiment. Spider-Man sticks to walls because he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Flash is fast because he taps into the Speed Force. Superman lifts heavy stuff up because of “yellow solar radiation”. For me, it doesn’t need to go beyond that.
Fenris
*He exudes glue (through his costume?), he’s psychic (um. Not so much. There’s been stuff he couldn’t stick to), he’s got tiny little hooks that come out of his fingertips and hook onto walls (through his costume? Without shredding his costume?)