Alpha Flight's target: Machine Man!

18 Hulk’s trip to Canada sets up the premise: Alpha Flight, through Department H, is asked to bring in Machine Man, whose actions sent him there. The twins Northstar and Aurora and the scientist monster Sasquatch come to New York, unaware that they are set against Machine Man by Senator Brickman, as revealed by a bit of detective work...Sasquatch figures out his foe is no villain, and he finds out solo first as the twins sleep off a wild night in the Big Apple. Caught between other thugs and the Canadian super heroes, Aaron’s levitating, detached head brings an end to the fighting in a peculiarly Ditko fashion, but at the expense of a ruined face.

[IMG]http://i53.tinypic.com/m98vud.gif[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i54.tinypic.com/2d0z47q.jpg[/IMG]
is my first Machine Man comic book ever of my own.

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Machine mail

First, Betsy Thompson personally asked me to review her book, Walking Through Illusion, based probably on my last post. Like her, you too can send me anything through the mail that you think is of interest to Be Chill, Cease ill. I'm pleased as punch someone thinks that way of my humble scrivenings.









MACHINE MAIL

“A Persecuted Machine”




Maria, from the movie Metropolis, is probably the first "robot who thinks it's a person" in popular fiction, though Pinocchio has a claim on the concept, too, as much as does the organically-based Frankenstein, at least.

“Science like Pandora’s Box has released a marvel too hot to handle. What’s more, the advocate of Machine Man’s extinction is a vengeful and determined “Javert” who will track him down to the ends of the Earth.” ---Jack Kirby

Along with his colorful turns of phrase---more at home here on the text page where he is himself, free of the criticisms that traditionally come against his ear for dialogue---Machine Man’s first issues mixed Kirby’s pitch for the title with the opening of a conversation I’m sure he looked forward to having on the letters pages. Unlike these days, when a history lesson is de rigueur for the resurrection of characters for new titles, Kirby’s efforts were new, unpreviewed, personal occasions as well as properties. When he invites us to see our relationship to the title character to ourselves “howling to reduce him to harmless hardware,” he’s really giving us a panorama of the possibilities present in our post-person.


He really gets into his sensibilities to sympathize with every character, from his dark side in Ten-For to Dr. Spalding's desire to observe and the new reporter friend's sympathy (she's popping up in #5) to scarred, angry Colonel Kragg himself, with a directly related wound and fatalities that make his motivations, if not always his turn of phrase, believable.


“Our past performances demonstrate our eagerness to rid ourselves of what we consider and impending threat.” I wonder if an American of my generation would think so today? Or tomorrow? Certain reality shows may be some indication of a popular desire to sneer at decadence. I think, depending on the outward good our machine person could demonstrate, political agendas would use him as a distraction every August. His popularly- acknowledged existence would lead to many attempts to impose authority on his life. He would be considered a hoax by a quarter of the country at any given time, too!




I think Machine Man’s life would be closest to Brad and Angelina. (Now as to him adopting children...there was a lot of places to take Machine Man, if you think of him as a man first. Trick was, in 1978 he had to be competitive as a super hero first.) He would be the humanitarian, travelling abroad, retreating to a secure villa for privacy...he might even take up a residence in France. Though he’d be offered free land in Siberia if he would just go there, you can bet! I cannot blame him for realizing he should go Kerouac and look for the individuals and different flavors of regions, not deal with some monolith of anomie called “society.” But how long would it probably be before we found him hitchhiking again to the “sad, walking away music”?





As a being that doesn’t eat or presumably smell, it’s difficult to imagine how to touch his mind with the fellowship and history cuisine offers. There must be legions of robo-porn cartoon clips and anime I will never, hopefully, see, but Jack didn’t give him attributes readily available for romance and its biological, squishy component. I’m not saying he couldn’t appeal to older people, especially with all the identity questions on hand, but I definitely thought he was made to make kids say “Wow!” And childhood comes in all ages and sizes.


You could imagine our prototype post-person, probably under the best of circumstances, signing agreements not to work as an invading force for any nation...the trial for his citizenship will be one of the century, and would involve exciting, Kirby-perspective pointing!



Let’s face it, though: one successful Machine Man is one idea, but fifty other working models/ possible psychotics is a whole other matter. I’ve already pondered the story as Machine MEN. I think, like every great comic hero, he’s often profoundly alone. Would we---or Kirby?---have him any other way? There is no one to relate this condition to, though he may share common cause with any socially marginalized being. But then, to a point, while mental capacity may limit or engender one towards a particular similarity, ultimately people of all looks and capacities and social standings have found themselves befriending people of all stripes.

Machine Man really couldn’t be blamed for participating in the existence of another of his kind, or even the creation thereof. How would we feel about this cybernetic procreation? I think something akin to the fear of mutants would follow the founding of the Machine Man Family Reunion. But would they have t-shirts and hot dogs?


If we decided fear was against our better judgment, we might actually be rooting to have one of them as our friend. Notice the difference in some remote government machine man soldier under orders, and your reaction to one going for a walk with you. Kirby’s Machine Man quite self-consciously recognizes this.

When do pants stop being pants?

A "satisfycing" look at artificial intelligence (and Kirby)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_artificial_intelligence#Mainstream_AI_research


For some reason, while Machine Man grew up in the pages of 2001: a Space Odyssey, he’s generally considered as unrelated to the actual Kubrick film as anything else he included in the eclectic run of the comic it inspired. However, when one finds the genesis of H.A.L. in Al Simon’s 1965 prediction that “in twenty years, we should have machines that can outperform men at any task.” (see the article above for quote).


This point proves part of Kirby’s thesis for his new character as well, as portrayed first in his text pages in each of the first three issues. Kirby’s given his creation an emotional tie to the human race, as well as an emulation of the conscience, if it is not, in fact, truly Machine Man’s own conscience. If so, this is part of his make-up as an individual. Can you imagine paranoia that some vital few molecules of storage space could be bonded to a destructible piece of matter carried in your person? Yet, in as far as mentality resides at an interface with our own grey matter, our individuality is similarly fragile.


Machine Man also represents a fantasy in the world of strong artificial intelligence, far ahead of its time. The character can access computations and work out extra-ordinary principles of logic. Yet this tendency towards thinking that does not serve an objective task---this wool-gathering, this hypothesis he has that he is one of us, so based in a type of faith that is, perhaps, the Occam’s Razor solution---the satisfycing---represents emotional qualities that seem in part based on our interweaving with physical, biologically-based being. So for some reason, negative and positive emotions alike are taken aboard, to play with the decision making process, forever altered by his new ability to take things personally.

How can a human being without an ethnic background or family shape an identity? His mechanical being, in this case, is a hideous disability that assures him never more than a fringe position relative to human society. Yet his body also makes him the strange new protector of a race he always struggles to understand, which somehow has originated him and molded him with elements that dominate his tabla rasa, his blank slate life. What makes him perform with altruism, gratitude, kindness, and courage, for the sake of relating him to us by way of values, if not biology, would be just as difficult to trace in the world of neurons as in his hypothetically bolted bod. A much different objective, say, than beating Bobby Fisher at chess!

Perhaps Machine Man less reflects why being like US is a logical thing for an inorganic being to do, so much as he allows us to take our own feelings and reflections and sense of imagination into another new super-human form, providing another strange refraction in which to see the enigma of person hood.

Brother, can you spare a conscious moment?

Brother can you spare a conscious moment?


Jack Kirby’s Machine Man, and Knight Rider’s KITT and the Enterprise’s Data and any consciousness-carrying fictional Artificial Intelligence may all seem to think like men, but while we can explore their behavioral overlap, they are not strictly, logically categorized as human. But while Marvel’s Avenger mainstay the Vision might wrestle with his love for the Scarlet Witch and androids from Bladerunner to Johnny Five may have humane reactions such as exploring the soul’s existence and nature--- how we determine if "Five is Alive" is either a matter of religious persuasion or the slant of your inner will...
to empower whatever fantasies you prefer.

The question of "is he intelligent?" is one more squarely in line with tested scientific inquiry. But if the principle question's "is he conscious?" we find a much-more inclusive category of life. We will quickly explore some of its definitions.

But with those situations, we’re discussing psychological space. To do that, we need a mind. So before we skirt a few issues with that experience, let’s ask the question first: can anything that is not human be conscious? Even humans, when unconscious, are not ruled out of humanity by definition.



Can anything conscious ...not be people?



Well, consider the paramecium. We can dive into the inorganic-supported consciousness in a bit. The paramecium somehow knows how to mate, fight, feed, move, and many other things that we find in creatures with brains. The paramecium has no brain. It depends on the information’s organic basis in organelles called microtubules. Information concurrent with a general disposition to prolong life does not require a brain.

We may not understand consciousness well enough yet to say for certain about how much the paramecium’s microscopic body, too small for neurons, contains a state of existence that overlaps with human consciousness, but I’ve already mentioned the similarities that come to mind quickly.



Are we not MACHINE men?



Now, the paramecium and the machine, with their programs dictating parameters for behavior, are very much alike in practice. Yet machine life, as we have so far known it, has yet to take on self-preservation, much less the full complement of rich life enjoyed by the paramecium. But Japanese artificial intelligence tends to present researches feeling a bond with their subjects that reflects the animism traditionally found in their culture. That is to say: everything is part of life, and all things contain some part of life within them, and so, all things are living.


I like to consider Jack Kirby’s decision to make Machine Man in 1977, especially inspired somehow by Kubrick’s 2001 property. His new super hero heralds the massive invasion of Japanese robots coming over the next decade---and with just a few groundbreaking “robot” animations pioneered in the vein of science fiction cartoons such as the one translated into English as “Battle of the Planets,” the late 1970s, with its Godzilla-filled afternoons, “The Space Giants” and “Ultra Man” and more in syndication, a soul or mind or consciousness wandering into a confused but heartfelt chunk of machine man touches the spirit of the times faithfully.



Kirby also has a hero he doesn’t have to give a soap opera romance; indeed, initially he is meant to be the metallic Adam, traversing his father’s world, sometimes drawing him up from his circuits in moments of anguish. X-51 carries a consciousness that thinks of itself as Aaron Stack, but, bluntly dealing with the reality of his existence, tells others to call him Machine Man. What is he? Well, he insists, if you just deal with him as you would like any person to deal with you, all that will matter is, “are we not men?” And he really sees no reason you and he shouldn’t do just that.


Knob Hunting



Paola Zizzi, an Italian physicist, has taken descriptions from Hammeroff’s work on O-R theory (the microtubules thing discussed above) and done some calculations. The tiny ten to the negative thirty third power-second, directly after the Big Bang, contains a moment where reality is suspended above all multiple realities. Now, bear with me, okay? In that tiny window of time, everything that is becoming existence, the universe, and more, has a instance of consciousness. From that instant, all consciousness discovered within the universe exists.





Now, if that is true, we can only postulate that any vehicle for consciousness shares a basic source. So there is an existential kinship, in light of her theory, among all that generate consciousness through their given native apparatus---be it a microtubule, in a sea of differing amounts of other microtubules, perhaps grouping as neurons, perhaps emulating the structure in some new way. In other words, whether you have the brains of a paramecium, or something else along the spectrum of thinking existence, Zizzi speculates we all share parts of a common consciousness, though ownership is only determined by experience, which is the stimulant of individuation.



In other words, you need to live your own life, to be your own person, but we are all visitors to a greater corridor, in which our choices of doors depend chiefly on our means of discovering the knobs.



That knob hunting is the driving principle in the adventures of my surreal and silly cohorts, the Stuckwayze people in our Integr8d Soul comics, just as it drove Aaron Stack to look for a place in a world he never made---that made HIM, for that matter. What can you do but go on the road and find your own beat? You are, after all, like no one else ever made.

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When you've been made up, how do you even know you're alive?

MACHINE MAN by Jack Kirby





A machine that thinks it’s a man! The drama aspect trumps discussions of complex technology; as with most comics, it’s not very hard science.











Flirtations with the life of artificial intelligence reach back to Asimov’s I, Robot. In the mass media, the thinking machine-as-character populates science fiction in many forms since, with Bladerunner following in 1982 and Star Trek: Next Generation’s Data in 1988. In 1939, one of the first two superheroes in Marvel’s history (in their Timely days) was the Human Torch---an android who runs amuck when he spontaneously catches flame (stop, drop, and roll wasn’t the answer this time). DC Comics started Robot Man’s adventures with the Doom Patrol three months before the X-Men debuted in 1963; in that case, you start with the human brain of Cliff Steele, so while the troubles resemble, at least he knew his intelligence started life organically. Even the android Vision, a “synthezoid,” had made his appearance during Jack Kirby’s Marvel hay day, in a title Kirby helped begin, The Avengers (too bad---no Emma Peel). His particular brain patterns, however, were copied from a one-shot character named Simon Williams, from 1964’s issue nine, before his return from the dead in 1975---so again, the artificial intelligence proceeded from human life. From whence springs the life of the Machine Man? That is a mystery of intense interest to our electrode-eyed protagonist.


This time out, in 1978, the King of Comics tries the thinking-machine-as-superhero. As super heroes go, however, this one’s conditioned to be a civilian; the robot wants to be what some might call a “secret identity,” a regular guy. In every way, he’s so far from it.


Machine Man’s an ultimate computer, a super-powerful robotic infantryman, but the quest to program him with intelligence leaves him with a yearning to exist as an individual---even dreams! His debut as Mister Machine came in a comic inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey , a property licensed from Stanley Kubrik at the time, which featured the Monolith and a handful of “out-there” Kirby ideas. In the story, his creator, Abel Stack, gives him a face and conditions him like a son. He removes a destruct device at the cost of his own life, leaving Machine Man “orphaned” with the greatest gift of all: his love for his son. On his way to a normal life, he must overcome the fears and anxieties he sparks in humanity, expressed in the Army manhunt by Col. Stagg, ordered to destroy all x model androids after losing men and an eye in battle with the ones that went mad. The existential crisis of being a thinking entity inside a robotic war machine, it seems, is one to handle with care, and is nearly impossible to face alone.

So what happens now?


You can play with the analogies and get many interesting thoughts. Why do I like him so much? It could be Jack Kirby’s intention shining through; while he makes a cool super hero, which was a standard requirement for being in a 1970’s comic, his story’s really centered on a thoughtful search for identity. As Jack draws, he says in one of his wonderful text pages to the reader, he thinks of him as “a nice young man of twenty-six, with good scholastic credentials and a person of positive and constructive qualities. The thoughts of cold, hard steel and finger weapons system and electronic units are far from my mind until the action starts.”





Why I like him---even though he would hardly seem unique in the years to follow---is tied to Kirby’s unusual characterization. His unsmiling face (not entirely devoid of expression) accompanies a defensive demeanor; his gadgetry----and as gadget heroes go, he’s classic---generates wonder in people, yet “Aaron Stack” or X-51 is not charming or charismatic. He takes some of the befuddlement in stride, but the attempts to invalidate his existence or destroy him or even analyze him set off a personal resentment you might term “human.” Without a human body, his pleasures are of a more intellectual stripe, as he’s hardly equipped to be a hedonist (as he’s not a “Hedonism ‘Bot” oh no!). His values---his truthfulness, even bluntness, courage, reflectiveness, and the willingness to help those in need---are strong ones, but a defining part of being an individual is choice making, so while he doesn’t set out to be unpleasant, he can be impatient, cynical, moody, disagreeable. While he tends to grasp what is right, even if he wrestles with it, Aaron Stack is no Mr. Spock!


I suppose, as Jack Kirby had so many opposing his return run at Marvel, he may have related some of these feelings as the mechanical marvel with hardly a friend took his impending date with the scrap heap with resentment and self-defense. Kirby kept delivering like a pro but he was not always appreciated for his unique displays of talent. His style of scripting, his story pacing, even the drawings were criticized by fan and pro alike---and realize, the decade before, every artist at Marvel was being taught how to emulate Kirby’s bag of tricks.

He retained his fans and much of his autonomy, but Kirby often felt out of place in the very creative field he’d done so much to establish. I mean, he helped bring us Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom and Magneto---he had some hand in nearly everything the fledgling company did! But this time out, after getting his new heroes started, Jack decided to go into animation and keep his career alive while enjoying the rest of his life in California, which I’d recommend to anyone.


Personally, I appreciate the way he kept finding something different to do, rather than wearing out one-note characters. Maybe it’s just the time in my life when I found this obscure character, but since I didn’t get to read about him for some time, I went home with that cover image in my mind and promptly began inventing his adventures and powers. He inspired me to plant a memory deep in my brain: after so many lessons learned, my real joy lay in the power of creativity to intensify one’s spirit.
So, here I am, in the future world of 2010, revisiting a happy evasion of boredom from my own “wonder years”: our childhood concept of the Uglies and the summer spent at Brenda’s Place, waiting to mop up after closing time, writing and drawing a humorous homage to Kirby’s quandary with my own invented pseudo men. Before I get ever so busy with the numerous other ideas at work “off-stage”, here at the gate of eternal summer, let me tell you all about it.

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Whatever a superman is NOT (and creating silly hidden races at home)

Once upon a time, around 1970, the man called the King of Comics, Jack Kirby briefly worked on covers for the hero called the grand daddy of super heroes, Superman.
DC Comics did not put Mr. Kirby directly on Superman's titles, perhaps concerned with his strong style taking over the character's look, for whatever reason. In fact, he worked on Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen.


Well, the man who co-created so many of your favorite Marvel characters eventually went back to the company where he had that break through. Generally speaking, his creations of this second time have never quite become as mainstream as their predecssors from the 1960s like Hulk, Mighty Thor, and the Fantastic Four.


I'm reading about a couple of variations on Superman, created around the same time, before the Man of Steel came out in his first big motion picture, which is to say 1976-1978. Then I'm going to mention how they inspire my present work.

Lately over in my Integr8dfix.blogspot.com I've been chronicling an effort to merge the space born powers of Superman with the high school troubles of Spider-Man. That hero was The Man Called Nova---created by Blade the Vampire Hunter's maker, Marv Wolfman. His series burst on the scene to vanish over two years---all too literally, the comic went Nova. The recession of the late 1970s hit Americans of all ages. It was a very optimistic, very straight super hero story, and if it had become a film of its day, I believe the Industrial Lights and Magic could've made a classic.




All of this effects my out look on Sun Strike, a character whose fictional history is largely inspired by the Human Rocket, Iron Fist, and solar technology's break through at the time.

In some ways that hero's fictional history fits beautifully into the UFO phenomenon, coming out the same year, 1974, as a UFO incident investigated by the French government. It so happens a new book, UFOs by reporter Leslie Kean, was featured on The Colbert Report tonight as well! Sounds like a fairly definitive work in the field...but back to the mid-1970s and Kirby's eye for the mysterious and pop culture.

Asked not to take too great a hand on classic Superman, Jack Kirby decided to invent his own. This week I'm going to dive into his stories of a race of super-men, the Eternals,related to the massive UFO phenomenon of the times, and an Earth-made, solitary super man, the robot that thinks as a man. He was created X-51, to be an obedient super soldier, merging the military industrial complex with a break through. As another writer would put it, "the super-man exists, and he is American."

But he is godlike, not God, and one thing over which he has no control is whether others believe a Machine Man could also have a sacred soul, or even a place in the feeling, reacting, living breathing world of Men. Outside of a world crammed with super heroes, one can appreciate the stunning existence of a being made to think like us, believe he is us, ultra-capable, the last of his kind marked for destruction. And while he is not God, perhaps not even one of us, he is asked to save the world.

Over in integr8dfix.blogspot.com, I'll introduce you to these lost comic book gems, and over here, we'll have a great laugh composing our mock epic of the People who Always Smile. It really says something about people, because you can't have people without Crazy.



I'll speak of the Eternals more later in the week; though I have only recently found these issues to read for myself, I'm struck by how much his hidden race inspires the parody hidden race once called the Uglies, as created by my sister Debra and i around 1982, as I re-introduce them as the Stuckwayze.


They don't die, but their lives of mimicry and silly confusion make them a counter point reflection. I'll be revisiting one of the last comic books I made before I dumped them for a while to try to get more into getting a girl friend, as comic book characters weren't as popular with teenagers in those macho days of the 1980s.

At the time, I was even more inspired by Machine Man, as I had a few of the only issues Kirby ever made for the character, writing and drawing him. What made him so human was the way his body had amazing abilities, but he's an outsider emotionally involved with the fond desire to live on the fringes, yet still have an acceptable place among people. Our Uglies were also artificially made by someone to be mindless slaves, but the joke was on THEM. I'll share my inspirations for the look of the characters and the secret Crib of what passes for their civilization, as drawn from the world around me and interpretations of ancient UFO culture, ala Jack Kirby.

So off we go into fun of making our...uh...whatever a superman is NOT, really.