Doc Will Magnus built six robots out of six metals and gave each one a soul shaped by its element. Mercury runs hot and volatile. Gold is noble to a fault. Iron is the loyal strongman, Lead the gentle slow one, Tin the anxious underdog who tries hardest of all, and Platinum — "Tina" — is so convinced she's human that she falls in love with her creator. It is, on its surface, a children's adventure comic from 1963. Underneath, it is one of the sweetest and oddest meditations on personhood the medium ever produced.
Metal Men #1 is where the experiment earned its own title. "Now! In Their Own Spectacular Book!" the cover promises, beneath a Ross Andru and Mike Esposito tableau of robots battling a rain of missile-men. Robert Kanigher wrote them with a tenderness the genre rarely allowed — heroes who die and are rebuilt and grieve the gap between, machines more humane than most of the humans around them.
This copy grades CGC 9.2 with Off-White to White pages — a genuinely high grade for the issue, the colors bright and the cover sharp. The Metal Men first appeared two issues earlier in Showcase #37, also offered here; together they tell the complete origin of DC's strangest, most feeling robot heroes.
Doc Will Magnus built six robots out of six metals and gave each one a soul shaped by its element. Mercury runs hot and volatile. Gold is noble to a fault. Iron is the loyal strongman, Lead the gentle slow one, Tin the anxious underdog who tries hardest of all, and Platinum — "Tina" — is so convinced she's human that she falls in love with her creator. It is, on its surface, a children's adventure comic from 1963. Underneath, it is one of the sweetest and oddest meditations on personhood the medium ever produced.
Metal Men #1 is where the experiment earned its own title. "Now! In Their Own Spectacular Book!" the cover promises, beneath a Ross Andru and Mike Esposito tableau of robots battling a rain of missile-men. Robert Kanigher wrote them with a tenderness the genre rarely allowed — heroes who die and are rebuilt and grieve the gap between, machines more humane than most of the humans around them.
This copy grades CGC 9.2 with Off-White to White pages — a genuinely high grade for the issue, the colors bright and the cover sharp. The Metal Men first appeared two issues earlier in Showcase #37, also offered here; together they tell the complete origin of DC's strangest, most feeling robot heroes.
