Daredevil Villains #20: Starr Saxon
We’re skipping Daredevil #48, which is another Stilt-Man story. And with that, we’ve reached the end of Stan Lee’s run as writer.
DAREDEVIL #49-55
(January to August 1969)
Writer: Stan Lee (#49-50, 53), Roy Thomas (#51-55)
Pencillers: Gene Colan (#49, #53-55), Barry Smith (#50-52)
Inker: George Klein (#49, #51, #53-54), Johnny Craig (#50, #52), Syd Shores (#55)
Letterer: Artie Simek (#49, #51, #53-55), Herb Cooper (#50), Sam Rosen (#52)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee
You only have to look at those credits to see that this is a bit chaotic. Perhaps Stan Lee was keen to stick around until issue #50 because it was a nice round number. But instead of ending his run with a grand finale, Lee hands the book over to Roy Thomas in mid storyline. And the story just keeps going, in the book’s longest arc to date. In practice it’s really six issues rather than seven – issue #53 is a fill-in with a token framing sequence to continue the plot – but that’s still far longer than any continuous arc so far, and far longer than anything we’ll get in the rest of Roy Thomas’ run. The Masked Marauder hung around for the better part of a year, but that was as a recurring villain. This is one continuing arc.
Unusually for Daredevil villains of this period, Starr Saxon sticks around – kind of. He goes on to become Machinesmith, with his mind downloaded into a robot body. Machinesmith certainly sticks around, albeit as a D-lister. But beyond the interest in robotics, Machinesmith has little in common with this original version of Starr Saxon, an unconventional villain with no dual identity who is briefly positioned as Daredevil’s arch-nemesis. Despite that, he only makes the cover of one of these issues. That’s him above, on the bottom right.
Issue #49 opens with Matt being attacked in his home. The attacker is a robot hiding in Matt’s wardrobe. He’s a very 1960s robot. He has a “plastic” body, because plastic is still impressive. He also has a big display on his chest with a number on it to show his power levels, and he says things like “Must – adjust – my – speed – circuits!” The robot defeats Matt handily, and is about to cart him off to “the – master” when Willie Lincoln happens to come by. It turns out that the robot can’t improvise. It interprets Willie as terrible threat, and runs away.
A flashback then reveals that the robot has been sent to kill Daredevil by criminal scientist Starr Saxon. Saxon, in turn, has been hired by Biggie Benson, the crimelord that Daredevil sent to jail in issue #47. When we first see Saxon, he’s a sinister looking fellow in a purple suit. He has a very Kirbytech laboratory, with rather Frankenstein overtones. He couldn’t care less about Benson’s agenda, and he would happily have just picked a target at random to test his robot, but if somebody’s willing to pay him to test it on Daredevil, then that’s just lovely.
But how did the robot find its way into Matt’s wardrobe? Ah. Well. I know it’s the Silver Age, but you might still want to brace yourself for this one. Saxon, you see, has built a “scentolator”. This device allows his robot to track Daredevil by scent, simply by putting a “specially-treated photograph” of the hero into the robot’s “built-in aromascope”. I suppose that’s more inventive than “the robot waited for Daredevil to swing by and then followed him home”, but… a robot that can work out what people smell like from their photographs? Really?
Naturally, Saxon sends the robot back for another go. So Daredevil fights it again, and that fight continues into issue #50. At this point, Barry Windsor-Smith takes over on art for three issues. This is early BWS, when he was emulating Jack Kirby. The robot even starts doing Kirby Krackle. When Daredevil manages to damage it, and it decides to head home. “I – cannot – remember – my mission! I – must – return – for – new instructions!” And so Daredevil simply follows the thing back to Saxon’s base. This is what happens when you buy into the hype of AI instead of realising that you’ve invented a really useful scentolator.
Anyway, Saxon assumes the robot is doing fine, and is making plans to hire it out as a hitman throughout the underworld. He’ll get money, and lots of criminals will die, which is a “public service”. Unfortunately, Saxon has already been working on the “specially treated photographs” of other victims. So when the robot shows up with Daredevil in tow, Saxon is so panicked that he accidentally puts the wrong photo into the aromascope. Wouldn’t you just know it, the laws of irony dictate that it’s Biggy Benson’s photo, and so the robot dutifully plods off to prison to kill Benson, with Daredevil in hot pursuit. Stan Lee’s run on the book ends as Daredevil makes it to Benson’s cell, only for Benson to clock him over the head and knock him out moments before the robot arrives to kill him. More irony!
The real focus of Stan’s last two issues is the robot; Saxon is just a bit part criminal scientist. But Roy Thomas has other ideas. He’s much more interested in Saxon himself, and proceeds to push the new villain to the moon. That largely comes at the expense of Daredevil himself, who comes across as hopelessly weak and incompetent.
In issue #51, the prison staff take on the robot with one of Iron Man’s old gadgets – it wouldn’t be a Roy Thomas book without a random continuity reference Finally, the robot kills Biggie, declares its mission complete, and keels over dead. Well, permanently deactivated, I suppose, but you get the idea. Daredevil contributes precisely nothing to any of this, and spends most of it unconscious in the corner.
Meanwhile, Starr Saxon is very angry. He had all these big plans involving his lovely robot and now Daredevil has gone and broken it. Now he wants revenge on Daredevil himself. His first plan is to kill Daredevil by blowing up the robot, but Daredevil stops that. So Saxon moves on to plan B: he retraces the robot’s steps to find Matt’s apartment, and immediately figures out that Matt is Daredevil. By this point, Saxon is starting to get a bit more rounded. He wants to use his new information to kill Daredevil, but at the same time he quite admires the way Daredevil has pulled off his “blind lawyer” schtick for so long. It’s not so much that he’s impressed; he just enjoys what he sees as a joke by Matt at everyone else’s expense.
Saxon is still wearing his purple suit but it looks rather less formal at this point. There are moments when his monologues get more theatrical. Supposedly Windsor-Smith was trying to present Saxon as gay; if so, he’s relatively subtle about it, and it doesn’t figure into the script at all. But Windsor-Smith’s version of Saxon does have something of a David Bowie vibe to him. He feels modern, for the time. There’s a cusp-of-the-70s feel to Starr Saxon, especially now that that the clunky robot is out of the picture.
Meanwhile, Matt has yet again decided to give up being Daredevil and propose to Karen. But he’s feeling ill and his powers are failing. This is because of radiation poisoning from the robot, which wasn’t actually part of Saxon’s plan. Matt goes for dinner with Karen, only to panic and flee when Starr shows up. Starr persuades Karen to come with him, and bring Matt’s abandoned cane. Then he takes Karen back to Matt’s apartment and ties her up, assuming that Daredevil will show up to rescue her. Unfortunately, while Daredevil does show up, so does the Black Panther, who is here to give Daredevil the antidote. Saxon is defeated, the police show up… and then Saxon simply makes veiled threats to reveal Daredevil’s secret identity unless Daredevil lets him go. And Daredevil just agrees, while Black Panther looks at him as if he’s mad.
It certainly makes Saxon look strong – Daredevil is genuinely afraid of this guy. Saxon is getting away with stuff, in a way that villains at this point rarely did. But Daredevil is weak and dithering, even allowing for the fact that he’s ill. He does give chase, and catches up to Saxon on a rooftop, where Saxon argues that he has “no shred of proof that I’ve committed any crime.” Um… what? There are about six witnesses in this issue to him kidnapping Karen. And he’s just run away from the police. But Daredevil does accept the slightly saner argument that if he arrests Saxon then Saxon will reveal his secret identity – and there’s no point throwing that away if he doesn’t have the proof to convict Saxon for something significant. So once again, Saxon gets the upper hand, and even gives a departing speech in which he proudly declares that this is his story and he is the hero.
Issue #53’s fill-in story is a retelling of issue #1 – literally, with new art by Gene Colan fitted to Stan Lee’s original script. This random reminiscence prompts Daredevil to come up with a radical solution to his problem. He fakes Matt Murdock’s death in a plane crash, so that Saxon won’t be able to blackmail him! If he doesn’t have a dual identity any more, then Saxon won’t be able to expose him! It’s stretching a point to say that this makes any sense but, I suppose, Saxon doesn’t actually have any proof that Daredevil is Matt Murdock; you can make a case that his leverage lies in the fact that he knows they’re the same person. So it’s probably just on the right line of being totally ridiculous.
Of course, Karen is absolutely distraught, and will remain that way for several issues. Daredevil returns to New York and asks Karen for his stick back. But as far as Karen’s concerned, this stick is the only thing she has left of her beloved, and she quite reasonably declines to hand it over to a random vigilante. So Daredevil just breaks into her room at night and steals it. Matt Murdock is an awful, awful human being.
At this point the story seemingly diverts to bring back Mr Fear, fresh out of jail, who challenges Daredevil to a fight. When Daredevil accepts, Fear somehow strikes terror into him with a mere gesture, and Daredevil flies into a humiliating panic in front of a crowd of onlookers. Much of issue #55 then consists of Daredevil running around New York being a bit pathetic. But eventually he figures out what’s going on, catches up to Mr Fear, and fights him on a flying platform. Fear is unmasked as a disguised Starr Saxon, and falls from the platform to his death.
That happens three panels from the end of issue #55. The book ends with Daredevil gabbling out essential exposition: “When Saxon briefly possessed Matt’s cane he rigged the club with these specially timed fear-gas pellets, which his flying disk triggered during our first battle! It was his warped revenge on me for ‘killing’ Matt Murdock to escape his blackmail threats!” This really is a stretch. It means that Saxon had already murdered the original Mr Fear and stolen his gear at some point prior to issue #49 (before he had any interest in taking revenge on Daredevil), and then concealed the fear pellets in Daredevil’s cane somewhere between issues #51-52, just in case he happened to feel like setting them off two issues later in “revenge” for something that Matt hadn’t actually done yet. There’s a certain logic to the idea that, with his blackmail scheme thwarted, Saxon sets out to destroy Daredevil’s reputation so that his Daredevil identity becomes unviable as well. But the story really does go off the rails in that final act.
The insanely abrupt ending doesn’t help. Supposedly, this was a recurring problem with Gene Colan: given a Silver Age Marve-style plot, which was basically just a plot synopsis, he simply started drawing the opening scenes without figuring out how much space he needed to save for the rest of the story, and he consistently got it wrong. Whether or not that’s the real reason, it’s certainly true that a lot of Gene Colan Daredevil issues have remarkably languid pacing at the start – issue #49 opens with four straight pages of Matt simply wandering around his apartment – and quite a few of them have extremely rushed endings. In issue #55, it borders on ridiculous, with the book’s major villain of 1969 being summarily despatched in just a few panels. At least Colan made the Mr Fear costume look good.
Saxon is an incredibly strong villain in his first appearance, but it comes at the expense of making the lead character look like a fool. Roy Thomas didn’t get the balance right. But his basic approach to Saxon was promising for an arch villain. He comes into the book and blows up the status quo entirely. Obviously, most of it gets reversed, but it takes another three issues, and there’s still a major status quo change that comes out of it. More of that next time, though.
Reading these issues, you can imagine a world where Starr Saxon became this book’s Norman Osborn, or where he toyed with Matt’s dual identity as a long-term storyline, taking much longer to show his hand. But Roy Thomas went in so hard on the idea, and boxed himself into such a corner, that he wound up killing Starr off in order to resolve the problem. Saxon had something, but Thomas burns through him very quickly.
I don’t now how well Saxon would have stuck even if he hadn’t gotten used up so quickly. Thomas gives him a personality, but not much more. He doesn’t really have an origin or any trace of a life outside of being a sardonically amused, theatrically evil mastermind. He sort of comes out of nowhere and just does all this stuff.
Some of this can be blamed on Stan Lee’s abrupt handoff of the book, but Thomas never pauses the rest of the arc long enough to build anything into the villain besides attitude. It’s just a series of increasingly contrived escalations.
Curiously, Saxon is the second of Daredevil’s “out of nowhere” mad scientist villains who get brought back in a racially different form later on, after the Exterminator is retconned as the later villain Death-Stalker.
But the Machinesmith reveal from Captain America #247-9 just doesn’t fit with any of Saxon’s prior or later appearances. Roger Stern’s plot mostly uses the oddball “Machinesmith” robot-maker from some odd issues of Marvel Two-In-One to tie up a bunch of “he was a robot” reveals from earlier comics.
There is a nice bit in that arc with Saxon wanting to die because he’s involuntarily leading a miserable pseudo-existence as a brain pattern in a computer. But that goes away when Mark Gruenwald revives him as a recurring Captain America villain, but rather offhandedly gives Saxon back his Silver Age personality….and his lack of clear motivations.
That inconsistency — arguably there from all the way back in his Lee and Thomas appearances, has stuck to the character, reducing him to minor-league status. Once in a while he’s played a machine supremacist, but most of his actions don’t really fit with that.
I think the last major use of Starr/Machinesmith was as an amoral minor-leaguer working with Scott Lang in some Nick Spencer Ant-Man stories. He was fun there, but not particularly impressive, and not treated like a guy who’d spent years working with the Red Skull or trying to kill all of humanity in a nuclear war.
Saxon-as-Machinesmith also creates a bunch of continuity problems, since Gruenwald gives him an origin that doesn’t line up with some of the old stories Stern’s plot connects to Saxon. Saxon can’t have become a roboticist as a youth finding a late-1960s-era Doctor Doom robot if he’s also meant to be behind the weird Magneto robot from the Demi-Men plot in Uncanny X-Men v.1 #49-52.
So it seems Saxon started as he meant to go on.
Of dear. “Racially different” above should be “radically different.
I make plenty of typos, but that one…ugh.
The abrupt ending might not have been Gene Colan’s fault. Roy Thomas did the same thing with the original Destiny in Sub-Mariner 7. Destiny was built up as Namor’s archenemy- the man who killed his mother and his grandmother and forced him to spend years as an amnesiac.And then suddenly after seemingly killing Namor by throwing him to his death, he commits suicide by leaping to his death. And then Namor shows up alive and explains that Destiny’s mind snapped because he couldn’t believe Namor survived the fall. (Because Namor being a child of two worlds who can survive underwater, ages slowly and can fly with tiny wings on his ankles is totally plausible but Namor surviving a fall is just crazy.) And that issue was drawn by John Buscema, not Gene Colan. It seems like Roy Thomas had a thing for abrupt, anticlimactic, nonsensical endings to potentially good recurring villains.
Machinesmith first turned up in Marvel Two-In-One 47-48, and there was no indication that he was Saxon in that story- the twist at the end of the story was that he was a robot but there was no clear explanation in the story.Although those issues were written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Chic Stone, Machinesmith was designed by Roger Stern and Mark Gruenwald. A year later, Machinesmith appears in Roger Stern’s Captain America run with John Byrne in issues 247-249, where Machinesmith is revealed to be Saxon. Machinesmith is used to explain some continuity issues- it’s explained that he was behind Baron Strucker’s seeming reappearance after his death (it was a robot) and he was behind the Manipulator robot that appeared a couple of times. Then he seemingly tricks Cap into killing him.
Fast forward eight and a half years. Mark Gurenwald is writing Captain America. The Red Skull has just returned from the dead after four years and Gruenwald is trying to build him up as a villain again. Gruenwald decided it was a be a good idea to give the Skull two agents- one who could fight Cap hand-to hand on equal terms and another who was a robotics expert. For the hand-to-hand fighter, Gruenwald created Crossbones but for the robotics expert, Gruenwald decided to bring back Machinesmith.
Gruenwald gave Machinesmith an origin for the first time in Captain America 368. Starr Saxon was a boy who became obsessed with robotics after finding one of Doom’s robots. When Saxon’s mother thought his obsession with robots unhealthy, he killed her. The Tinkerer learned of him and took him under his wing.
Gruenwald also tries to rationalize Saxon’s becoming Mr. Fear in that issue:”Tussling with [Daredevil] was heady–intoxicating–I had to do it again. I assumed the guise of Deedee’s old enemy, Mister Fear and with the Tinkerer’s help rigged up some pretty offensive weaponry.”
Gruenwald also made it pretty clear that Machinesmith was gay, like Smith claimed. And since Gruenwald, Machinesmith has been a recurring villain in the Marvel Universe.
Saxon taking over the Mr. Fear identity started the trend of multiple villains taking on the Mr. Fear identity.
This is one of the most Daredevil storylines of all time. I will note that “making the lead character look like a fool” will become the secret sauce to a great Kingpin story, down the line.
Greatest hits:
– DD gets shot, always a classic
– Matt says his catchphrase for the first time (issue 51, page 14)
– Born Again-style delirium and collapsing in an alley
– Everyone easily works out that Matt is DD. Even Karen seems to, though it’s walked back.
– Matt engages in his favourite pastime (faking his own death)
– Matt can use his radar sense to fly a plane
– Villain who knows Matt is DD conveniently falls to death
– Matt generally behaves as the jerk of his own story
Thomas seems to be setting up a reveal in these issues that DD has a healing factor, between the gunshot and the cut on his hand. That plot is dropped by later writers, but the idea still rears it head now and then, e.g. Matt’s recovery from his beating during Inferno, under Nocenti. You could also put Waid’s Latveria storyline into that bucket, if you were minded to resurrect the plot.
Machinesmith’s main role in the X-Universe has to do with Lorna’s introduction. In Avengers 53, Magneto seemingly dies. In X-Men 49-52, which introduce Lorna, Magneto shows up claiming to be Lorna’s father. Iceman researches her parents and concludes that it’s a lie. In X-Men 58. this Magneto is revealed to be a robot and Larry Trask concludes that Magneto “had an android doing his dirty work”. But when Magneto returns, in X-Men 62-63, Magneto talks like he’s been in the Savage Land since his “death” in Avengers 53 and the X-Men are surprised that he’s alive. Claremont confirms in Uncanny X-Men 112 that Magneto has no clue who created the Magneto robot. We see a Magneto robot in Machinesmith’s lab in Captain America 247-249. Then the various Official Handbooks to the Marvel Universe confirm that Machinesmith created the Magneto robot that claimed to be Lorna’s father.
Where this got confusing is Morrison’s X-Men run. He had a mentally unbalanced Lorna claim to be Magneto’s daughter. Chuck Austen decided to confirm that Lorna WAS Magneto’s daughter. Of course, this raises the question- if Machinesmith was behind the Magneto robot, how would he know that Magneto was Lorna’s father when Lorna herself was unaware of this?
“the prison staff take on the robot with one of Iron Man’s old gadgets”
That’s a Stunulator, which the Avengers later use as security for some of their headquarters.
“I think the last major use of Starr/Machinesmith was as an amoral minor-leaguer working with Scott Lang in some Nick Spencer Ant-Man stories. He was fun there, but not particularly impressive, and not treated like a guy who’d spent years working with the Red Skull or trying to kill all of humanity in a nuclear war.”
He was also helping Tony against Arno in Slott’s and Gage’s Iron Man 2020 series which was published in ,um, 2020.
But yes, one of Nick Spencer’s biggest weaknesses as a writer is writing characters who are usually portrayed as intelligent and effective as bumbling losers. He did it to Scott Lang, who helped the Wasp defeat the Absorbing Man and Titania, defeated Doctor Doom and has been asked by the Fantastic Four to fill in when REED RICHARDS is unavailable but came across as a bumbling loser under Spencer’s pen.
@Omar- the problem with Gruenwald’s origin for Machinesmith has nothing to do with Stern’s retcons. Daredevil 49 has a cover date of February 1969. The Killer Robots first appear in Fantastic Four 84, which has a cover date of March 1969. They’re treated like new additions to Doom’s arsenal. The robot is Machinesmith’s origin flashback in Captain America 368 is drawn like a Killer Robot. There’s no way that Fantastic Four 84 can take place months or years before Daredevil 49. The most likely explanation is that the robot Machinesmith found was one of Doom’s earlier robots and just looked like a Killer Robot.
There would still be another problem with the origin story as Starr Saxon must, at the very least, be in his early 20s in this DD story.
So, if Saxon was only fourteen years old when he came upon a Doom robot, that would have been (at least) seven years before this DD story. Publication wise this would have considered realistic, as this would have placed Saxon’s origin as having occurred in 1962, after Doom’s earliest FF appearances.
However, with the sliding timescale, seven years could not have passed between FF #5 and Daredevil #49.
@Michael: Regarding the chronology problems with Machinesmith’s debut, I was thinking of the Handbook reveal — and Stern’s implication — that Machinesmith was behind the fake Magneto who ran the Demi-Men/Mesmero/Lorna Dane scheme.
That story, which began in the October 1968 Uncanny issue, predates both Saxon’s introduction and the first Killer Robots appearance in Fantastic Four.
It can be fudged, but it makes Saxon’s portrayal in his debut storyline as a guy who’s just now perfecting his robots and trying to connect to a relatively minor crime boss seem odd. Maybe he was recapitalizing after sinking a ton of money and resources into the Demi-Men plot?
It’s especially odd given that Gruenwald was co-writing and editing the Handbook that brought in the Demi-Men retcon.
My understanding is that Roy Thomas and Neal Adams deliberately ignored the Demi-Men plot because they thought it was a poor use of Magneto. If only someone had done the same to Amazing Adventures v.1 #9-10.
Regarding the Stunulator, Roy is referencing his own stories. It was introduced when Stark demonstrates it as a prison security device in Avengers Annual #1.
Regarding Lorna Dane, it’s particularly funny that two characters eventually revealed — with much fanfare — as Magneto’s kids have been retconned out of that status.
Meanwhile, the one character definitively said to not be Magneto’s kid has been retconned into a blood relation, and has stuck despite starting out as a clumsy attempt to villainize Lorna and remove her as Havok’s love interest in service of a reviled plot from a reviled run . But then, it’s also taken a long time to partially address the Azazel stuff.
Has it ever been confirmed on-panel that Machinesmith made the Magneto robot from the Drake/Steranko arc?
And if it has, were we ever told why he did that, and/or how or why the Magneto robot hooked up with Mesmero and did all that sh*t that it did over the course of X-Men 49-52?
I personally have never considered it canon in my own head that Machinesmith had anything to do with that Magneto robot, cause it’s completely nonsensical and adds nothing to the story.
I like Machinesmith as a campy gay villain who just like… does robot stuff. I guess you can always argue that the AI which now makes up his consciousness is distinctly different from his earlier flesh incarnation to explain away changes and distance himself from the Red Skull sympathizer or whatever.
Or they can always claim that there’s multiple copies floating around, a la Ultron versions.
Jason-During the Stern/Byrne Cap story, it is shown that Machinesmith has a robot Magneto. In the OHotMU’s Mesmero entry, it is first established that it was Machinesmith who built the robot Magneto. As far as I’m aware, Official Handbook information is considered canon and this isn’t the only continuity reveal made by one of the Handbooks.
I do agree that it is a poor reveal and still leaves many questions. I think the final standing on the mystery was that Machinesmith was hired by some unknown party to be involved in the scheme. So, someone who knew that Polaris really was Magneto’s daughter must have been behind the events.
“Jason-During the Stern/Byrne Cap story, it is shown that Machinesmith has a robot Magneto. In the OHotMU’s Mesmero entry, it is first established that it was Machinesmith who built the robot Magneto. As far as I’m aware, Official Handbook information is considered canon and this isn’t the only continuity reveal made by one of the Handbooks.”
So Machinesmith had a Magneto robot, and that’s the explanation?
I’m sure OHOTMU is indeed considered canon, but it seems like stuff from the Handbooks gets contradicted all the time, if the writers of the actual comics decide to do something different.
If the only on-panel evidence of the Machinesmith connection to the “Demi-Men” arc is a Magneto robot in a few panels of a random issue of Captain America, then it’s bonkers that this is considered an ironclad point of X-Men continuity.
The maker of the Magneto-bot did *not* have to know thay Lorna was M’s daughter. They just had to think that it was a plausible story. Which it certainly was.
@Omar- The retcons to make Lorna Magneto’s kid flew in the face of continuity. First, in Austen’s run, Lorna said the source who told her she wasn’t Magneto’s daughter was untrustworthy, which is why she decided to investigate for herself. It was BOBBY who told her she wasn’t Magneto’s daughter. Then, PAD established that it was LORNA who killed her own parents, not Magneto.The problem is that X-Men 52 established that Lorna was only weeks old when her parents died.
The writers seem to realize that making Wanda not related to Magneto was a mistake, hence the idea in recent years that Magneto is Wanda’s “chosen father”. This makes no sense since Wanda spent over a decade with Django Maximoff.
Of course, making Pietro a non mutant despite decades of appearing on mutant detectors was just a bad idea, So much of Pietro’s characterization was based around being a mutant, it would be like making T’Challa a Nigerian prince.
@Jason- it’s not just a few panels- Cap spent the bulk of Captain America 368 fighting a Magneto robot created by Machinesmith. Still…
The evidence is very sparse and non-binding, but there is a bit more.
1. The second Sentinels storyline (#57-59) has a couple of panels revealing that Mesmero’s ally was a Magneto robot instead of the real thing. Mesmero was taken by complete surprise and the Sentinels destroyed that robot. Larry Trask assumed the true Magneto to be behind it all, but apparently that was just a mistaken assumption.
2. Right after that, Magneto turns up in the Savage Land in an unrelated story (#60-61 IIRC), having apparently fled there after Avengers #53 and confirming that he was not Mesmero’s ally.
3. Uncanny X-Men #112 (the second story of Magneto vs. the New X-Men) had Magneto stating that he had never met Mesmero previously and all but saying outright that he had no idea of why anyone would make such a robot double of his.
4. Captain America #247-249 show a second Magneto Robot with parts missing among Machinesmith’s creations. It must be a different robot, because the Sentinels destroyed the first one back in Uncanny X-Men #57-59.
The educated guess would be that Roy Thomas simply did not want to use the Magneto status quo that he inherited from Arnold Drake. I agree that there are lots of unanswered questions left.
Starting with the intent behind the Magneto robot. Who wanted it built and why? We don’t really know even now. It might conceivably just be an early prototype by Star Saxxon, but the explanation is incomplete at best. There is also a weird claim by the Magneto robot in the Arnold Drake story that he can somehow read Lorna Dane’s thoughts.
the timing is also tricky. The Demi-Men storyline in X-Men ends right the month before the first appearance of Starr Saxon in Daredevil. Are we expected to accept that he built a robot that can emulate both human behavior, magnetic powers _and_ mind-reading just to shortly after create an apparently far inferior (definitely less autonomous) robot to fight DD?
It doesn’t really square, but it is what we have as of now.
The simplest fix IMO would be to just overrule the Official Handbook and reveal that Starr Saxon had nothing to do with the Magneto robot that Mesmero met. It could instead be an early prototype of Steven Lang’s “X-Sentinels”, built according to the designs of either Bolivar Trask or Steven Lang. Or it could be a creation of the Stranger in a moment of extravagance. Or Doctor Doom and the Prime Mover, who had created very impressive lifelike robots of the Yellow Claw and related characters some months prior, could have created that Magneto robot for some combination of amusement and misdirection of potential enemies.
“@Jason- it’s not just a few panels- Cap spent the bulk of Captain America 368 fighting a Magneto robot created by Machinesmith. Still…”
*** Fair enough, but was there dialogue saying that Machinesmith built the robot that we saw in the Arnold Drake arc? That’s the part I don’t understand. I realize Stern and Byrne’s intent was to “explain” who made the Magneto robot (with an explanation that makes no sense, great job, guys!), but was it ever *explicit* in the text of an actual Marvel comic-book, or was it only implied?
“The simplest fix IMO would be to just overrule the Official Handbook and reveal that Starr Saxon had nothing to do with the Magneto robot that Mesmero met. It could instead be an early prototype of Steven Lang’s “X-Sentinels”, built according to the designs of either Bolivar Trask or Steven Lang. ”
***That’s a much better idea. I like it.
Or it could just be something Magneto made himself. I feel like a writer could easily explain the why of it … and Magneto being the maker of the robot is what Roy Thomas says in the original story.
Either of those ideas keeps it in the X-family … as opposed to plucking Starr Saxon from out of the blue and implying that he had a habit of making Magneto robots.
I remember reading something about Chris Claremont planning to reveal that Steven Lang was behind the Magneto robot and the Demi-Men (with his Eric the Red/Polaris plot), which I think would work much better. There could even be something added about Starr Saxon apprenticing with Lang before this DD story (and after he worked with the Tinkerer). If Lang was working for the US government and the Inner Circle, it could have been a way for Saxon to save funds for his plans to branch out on his own after learning everything he could from Lang. So, the robot from DD #49 would be his first attempt at making his own robot. He then fakes his own death and uses the time in between to perfect his skills by remaking a Magneto robot as he helped Lang build the original.
I admit. I built the Magneto robot.
But Lorna’s ACTUAL father is
Zaladane
The Ka-Zar villain.
Polaris is actually the third Summers sibling. Poor Havok.
I have a soft spot for the ridiculous Scarlet Witch family tree as it currently stands. Ultron is Wiccan’s grandfather. Sure. Moondragon is related to Cable through marriage/defacto marriages. Wonder Man is related to Black Bolt. The alien warrior Mar-Vell is related to the surviving relatives of that dog whos brain Vision scanned to make Sparky, based on the Simon Williams precedent. Kree and pet dogs, people! This rabbit hole has no bottom!
Ahem. I got so tied up I forgot my original point. Wanda being Magneto’s daughter and Polaris’ sister, even though she’s not, that’s NOTHING!
I think he main reason the Demi-Men retcon from the Handbooks has stood is that the original arc is just not a very good story.
It’s not as if the arc leaves Magneto in any worse shape than most of his Silver Age appearances.
Yes, he’s a megalomaniac lying to and manipulating mutants, and, yes, he’s built a machine that can bring out latent mutant powers.
But Magneto as portrayed as a self-serving, abusive, manipulative megalomaniac from early on. And his last Kirby-and-Lee era appearance had already introduced the idea of Magneto genetically engineering his own mutants, which he’ll continue doing in the Savage Land Mutates story and beyond. It’s his most consistent M.O. right up until Claremont gets ahold of him.
And plenty of other elements from the arc — Polaris most visible among them — have stuck around in one form or another. Even the concept of “latent mutants” seems to have lasted.
IO thin the real problem is that Arnold Drake seems to have had a very different idea about mutants than anyone else.
There’s a bunch of weird nonsense about the Demi-Men all being linked, and having the ability to pool their powers. And the characters keep going on about “mutant energy” and about how there’s good” and “evil” mutant energy, and Lorna feels “evil vibrations” from Magneto and Mesmero, but not from the X-Men. When the story’s version of Magneto blows up his evil headquarters, Jean goes on about how she can tell it’s mined because “mental vibrations remain in the room.”
Drake keeps going with this stuff in the Blastaar one-off that follows — Cyclops goes on about how Blastaar’s “basic energy was hate” — and in the Living Pharaoh story that introduces Alex Summers has plenty of characters going on about :”waves” and “vibrations.”
Coupled with the nameless, faceless nature of the Demi-=Men, all of this really genericizes mutant powers. So I think the idea was to dump Drake’s bland notion of mutants as having some kind of shared pool of good and evil vibes that emanate from them.
My new headcanon is that Machinesmith had a crush on Magneto and built a Magneto robot for… personal reasons.
Then a bad guy came by, saw the Magneto robot and assumed it was for villainy, and Machinesmith was too embarassed to admit the truth.
In the middle issue of Barry Smith’s three (#51), when DD is feeling sick and hallucinating he does some imitation Steranko, with zipatone, massive distortion (as if his art wasn’t distorted enough back then – he was still drawing people as if their skulls were shaped like lightbulbs), and a full-page panel in black and white. It’s effective in a way, but a bit stomach-turning.
Also, in #52 at the climactic scene Starr Saxon is suddenly comparing his actions to tropes from old movies and name-checking Lon Chaney and Errol Flynn. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish Mort Weisinger had been there to throw Roy Thomas’ script on the floor and jump up and down on it.
“I think he main reason the Demi-Men retcon from the Handbooks has stood is that the original arc is just not a very good story.”
***The retcon that that Magneto was a robot is from that Thomas/Adams Sentinels story. That’s not really the thing that the Handbooks made canon. The Drake Demi-Men story was already safely retconned as being the result of Mr. Magneto Robot. Thomas even provided the explanation: “Magneto had a robot doing his dirty work.” (Or words to that effect.)
It’s the whole “Starr Saxon made the robot” thing that was added later and which makes no sense. NO SENSE WHATSOEV —
“Machinesmith had a crush on Magneto and built a Magneto robot for… personal reasons. Then a bad guy came by, saw the Magneto robot and assumed it was for villainy, and Machinesmith was too embarassed to admit the truth.”
— I stand corrected. 🙂
@Jason: The Handbook retcon is also about making the Demi-men into robots, too. And that, I think, has to do with a desire to ditch Drake’s bizarre take on mutants from the arc, as well as write out a bunch of faceless, nameless mutants who otherwise inexplicably vanish between issues.
As Michael notes above, it may also have been an effort to factor in Claremont’s Magneto story from Uncanny X-Men #112, wherein Magneto claims he doesn’t know Mesmero, though the dialogue doesn’t have Magneto claim *or* disclaim responsibility for the robot.
Come to think of it, the only person who ever does claim Magneto built the robot is Larry Trask in Uncanny X-Men v.1 #58, who throws it out there when he, too, is surprised to see that it’s not the real Magneto. And it’s not as if he’d have any way of knowing.
It’s bonkers how many skills Magneto has. He has his super-powers, sure, but he also: fashioned a telepathy-proof helmet, built the Nanny robot, created the Savage land mutates, created Mutant alpha, built a base in a volcano, built Asteroid M and put it into Earth’s orbit… why isn’t he considered a super-genius on a near-Dr. Doom level? Creating a Magneto robot and forgetting about it because it was one of his lesser projects is totally in character.
As for rushed endings, Gene Colan wasn’t the best at pacing a story on his own. One of the reasons Tomb of Dracula was so good was that Marv Wolfman wrote dense. multi-page plots. That freed Colan up to provide gorgeous artwork without having to worry about where to put story beats. Even Kirby had trouble pacing his stories, it’s a drawback of writing Marvel Method.
Didn’t Magneto also help build the original Cerebro? Or is that just in the movies?
Honestly, his talents were wasted when he lived with the X-Men. If he can just make mutants out of nothing, he should have helped Hank with his genetics research during the Decimation era.
Also, the cover above is nearly nonsensical. I’ll give you Matt’s lumpy leg, but are they all in a video game? Falling out of a tower? Jogging down the side of a tower? I miss the temporary logo and the use of a background color.
I have these issues in a longbox somewhere in my family home.
Regarding the cover, without checking the timing, it looks like Colan trying his hand at a Steranko pastiche to me.
@Omar- the dialgoue implies that Magneto wasn’t using the Magneto robot like a Doombot, though:
Scott:This makes no sense. Why zap Mesmero? You and he used to be allies.
Magneto: He and I? My dear Cyclops, I don’t even know the man. The “Magneto” this fool served– the one who claimed to be the father of Lorna Dane– was a robot.
In context, Magneto is clearly saying that Mesmero was never his ally, not that he used a robot to manipulate Mesmero.
@Mike Loughlin, Thom H- The Mad Scientist aspect of Magneto has been downplayed since Inferno, when Sinister became the X-Men’s major Mad Scientist foe.
In the comics, though, it was Moira who helped Xavier build Cerebro, not Magneto.
Thor built a robot once. Pym built the most powerful robot in the universe by accident. It’s just one of those things that isn’t very hard to do in the Marvel universe.
The older I get, the gladder I am to no longer really care about continuity. In my 20s and 30s, I would’ve (and did!) had passionate opinions about whether Lorna was Magneto’s daughter, and how that can be reconciled with the blood tests Bobby supposedly ran showing she isn’t, and blah blah blah. And now I’m just like… enh. She probably isn’t but they both think she is, fine, who cares. My head canon is all that matters anyway.
I blame the continued passage of time, because it’s a lot easier to try to reconcile 30 years of stories than 60; and also DC’s New 52 and Rebirth, because once you’re like, “Yeah, eff it, no past stories really matter, even when we restore the past universe it’s pretty different,” then it’s impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. (This is probably a more extreme version of how older fans felt after CoIE.)
I figured out that I wasn’t a continuity guy so much as I was attached to certain ideas about the characters.
Like I enjoyed Scarlet Witch being Magneto’s bio daughter despite how squicky that made some stories.
I enjoyed the idea that
Polaris mistakenly thought Magneto was her dad until I watched THE GIFTED.
@Drew: absolutely agree. I like making up no-prize explanations when I feel like it, but I can’t be bothered to care if super-hero comic book continuity doesn’t add up. There’s no possible way it can!
Silver Age X-Men continuity is one of the least canonical in all of Marvel. If you like Silver Age X-Men, great! Enjoy! I don’t, with the exception of the better Kirby issues, Steranko’s art on his 2 or 3 issues, and the Neal Adams run. Few of the good issues make logical sense, however, and I’m more than willing to just roll with it.
@Michael: now that you remind me of that, Magneto’s words in #112 don’t make a lot of sense either.
He never met Mesmero, but he is also aware that a Magneto robot did and claimed to be Lorna Dane’s father. How did he learn that, and from whom? Are we to assume that Mesmero himself told Magneto of the whole incident off-panel just before the X-Men caught up to the two of them, and then Magneto decided to knock Mesmero unconscious for no good reason?
I feel that Claremont built the scene to suggest that Magneto knew more than what he said, but wasn’t about to simply tell it all to the X-Men right then and there.
Problem is, he still hasn’t told any.
@Mike Loughlin: He is. The Savage Land issue with his base said it would have made Reed Richards or Tony Stark proud, and his genius is cited in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
@neutrino: I’m glad they noted Magneto’s intelligence in OHOTMU, but it doesn’t come up in stories very often. Reed, Doom, Banner, Stark, T’Challa, Pym, Beast, Amadeus Cho, and a few others are used as the standards by which human genius is measured in the Marvel Universe. With Magneto, it’s rarely mentioned. He has enough going on otherwise, I guess. It would be cool to see him look at one of Sinister’s chimeras and say, “not bad, but still no Mutant Alpha. It your creation can’t turn you into a baby, you aren’t bringing your A game.”
@Mike Loughlin: I think Claremont slowly marginalizes Magneto’s scientific genius over the course of his long-term reform story. Magneto’s skills with genetics and devices seems to get less and less play after Uncanny X-Men #150.
When he gets re-villainized in the 1990s, he also gets written as extraordinarily powerful, and that further diminishes the sense that he’d need gadgets.
Plus, when his characterization changes, the idea that he’d be interested in engineering mutates or artificial mutates doesn’t fit with his revised motivations and attitudes.
Indeed, that’s the first bit of his scientific aptitude that stops being discussed in Magneto stories, and it falls to the side almost as soon as Claremont begins working with him. That seems like a very deliberate change on Claremont’s part, given that Magneto’s last few appearances pre-Claremont had been squarely focused on Magneto making his own mutates.
Speaking of OHOTMU retcons, wasn’t Magneto eventually identified as one of the folks who was surreptitiously provided advanced genetic engineering knowledge by Melstrom and his father Phaeder?
I’m also in the camp of a being a reformed continuity nerd. I mean, I had a whole zine in the 90s devoted to cataloging the references in Starman.
But whether it’s old age or the companies disregard for continuity and rebooting their history, I’m now solidly in the Hypertime “it all counts” camp.
Omar-Yes, it was revealed that Phaeder provided advanced knowledge of genetics to Magneto as well as High Evolutionary, Arnim Zola, the Jackal, Doctor Hydro, and The Enclave (the “Beehive”).
That’s like Gaiman tying all the plant people in the DCU together in the Black Orchid mini: Woodrue, Holland, Isley and the guy who made thr Black Orchids.
@Mark Coale: Gruenwald loved to do that kind of thing. When he did the Nth Command storyline in Marvel Two-in-One with Ralph Macchio, they pulled together three or four very minor scientist characters from old stories who created dimension-hopping stuff as the brains behind the Nth projector technology.
It was also Gruenwald and Macchio who consolidated Immortus, the Space Phantom, and ultra-minor Fantastic Four baddie Tempus into inhabitants of the same trans-time dimension of Limbo back in Thor v.1 #281-2.
Over at DC Comics, Marv Wolfman’s idea for H.I.V.E. in the New Teen Titans series was apparently that they were an organization of all the early Silver Age one-shot mad scientists who were displaced (in publishing terms) by more colorful costumed villains.
It’s why the long-forgotten Green Lantern villain the Puppeteer and one-shot Batman villain Brains Beldon are shown as potential recruits, and why the HIVE Mistress namedrops an ultra-obscure scientist baddie — Professor Turgo — from a 1950s Wonder Woman story when the organization is destroyed in issues #45 through 47.
But Wolfman didn’t do much more than that, so the central conceit he was going for has been largely ignored.
Continuity can be fun when used well to point out nice bits of synchronicity or to create clever syntheses from existing details and elements.
The plant elemental mythology at DC and a lot of what Al Ewing does at Marvel are among the best examples of this.
And sometimes dredging up something long-forgotten and trying to make it work again can lead to something good. Just look at Deadshot and at least half of the existing minor characters who found their way into James Robinson’s Starman.
But sometimes it’s just there to be there; the last years of Gruenwald’s Captain America devolved into stories that presented crowds of obscurities doing nothing especially distinctive or interesting.
“The Superia Stratagem”…They’re all female supervillains.
Jeph Loeb attempting to connect all of Marvel’s canid clade without realizing exactly what animals were canidae.
Wolverine-mustelid
Sabretooth-felid
That wasn’t hard to retcon away as an obvious lie.
I tell you what, it’s weird reading about DC continuity when most of what you know comes from Teen Titans Go.
@Si:” I tell you what, it’s weird reading about DC continuity when most of what you know comes from Teen Titans Go.”
Oh God- “this Dr. Light guy is pretty funny. I wonder what he’s like in the comics?”
Maybe Magneto’s genius will be re-emphasized in From the Ashes.
“ @Si:” I tell you what, it’s weird reading about DC continuity when most of what you know comes from Teen Titans Go.”
Oh God- “this Dr. Light guy is pretty funny. I wonder what he’s like in the comics?””
“Man, based on this, I’ll bet the Teen Titans comics are HILARIOUS! Not like Young Justice, that comic’s probably pretty dour if it’s anything like the show.”
“@Jason: The Handbook retcon is also about making the Demi-men into robots, too. And that, I think, has to do with a desire to ditch Drake’s bizarre take on mutants from the arc, as well as write out a bunch of faceless, nameless mutants who otherwise inexplicably vanish between issues.”
*** Ah, got it. I see what you mean now.
“He never met Mesmero, but he is also aware that a Magneto robot did and claimed to be Lorna Dane’s father. How did he learn that, and from whom?”
***Yeah, that never made much sense. But it’s funny that Stern and Byrne decided that the best answer to it all was … BECAUSE STARR SAXON YOU GUYS COME ON IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING and then I guess readers just kind of went okay yeah, I guess it does.