Machine Man

Book: Machine Man, The Living Robot

Issue No.: 1

Published: January 24, 1978

Title: “Machine Man”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

Machine Man, the book, is about Machine Man, the character (AKA X-51, AKA Aaron Stack), a sentient computer in humanoid form. The book was written, drawn, and edited by Marvel founding father Jack “King” Kirby during Kirby’s second go-round at Marvel — he left Marvel for a few years prior to 1978 to go work at DC Comics, where he created DC baddie Darkseid and the rest of the New Gods.

Machine Man has a classic sci-fi theme — is a sentient robot “alive”? Should it have the same rights as a human?

Since this is the first issue of Machine Man, there’s no fan mail as of yet. So Kirby uses the fan-mail page (“Machine Mail”) to deliver a brief essay where he makes the book’s subtext into text. Kirby predicts that one day, “… we’ll be faced with the hottest social question of our time: will he (Machine Man) be accepted as Man or Machine?”

This classic theme is probably more timely than ever, as many of us are currently interacting with primitive artificial intelligence (A.I.) on a regular basis. And A.I. experts are already asking what the moral and legal implications might be if A.I. ever gains sentience.

The first issue of Machine Man sets up plenty of other drama on top of the inherent drama of a robot who wants to be accepted as “human” — mainly that the other robots built with Machine Man (his brothers and sisters, as it were) all went crazy and were destroyed. So now the U.S. military has orders to destroy Machine Man as well. This issue ends with him barely escaping an encounter with the military.

Next time — I’ll take a look at a non-canon What If Daredevil story!