Yes, it's true. I have a revelation to make because the man who's been bringing this blog to you for all these long, painful years is in fact no man at all!
He's a robot!
Or at least he would be if Stan Lee were in charge.
That's right. My post of two days ago - with its mention of the Fantastic Four's foe Gabriel - reminded me of Stan Lee's habitual love of revealing that villains were in fact cunningly disguised robots. Why, in the 1960s, you could barely move for unstoppable Marvel villains who, at the tale's climax, were revealed to be no more than nuts and bolts.
I covered one of them recently in my review of The Incredible Hulk #127, which told the tragic tale of Mogol. But the regular reader may not be surprised to discover my favourite such villain was the hypno-robo-Neanderthal that was Iron Man's foe Gargantus.
How could you not love him? Not only was he a Neanderthal, not only did he have hypno-powers but, at the denouement, he flew apart when confronted by a handful of magnets. Never again would his alien creators dare attack Earth now they knew mankind had at its disposal the deadly power of magnetism.
Well, that's my heart-warming anecdote done with but what about you? Just off the top of my head, I can think of a whole bunch of robots in disguise that turned up in the early days of The Avengers, X-Men, The Hulk and a load of others, so what Marvel villains do you recall that turned out to be robots? And which ones were your favourites?
Posts
