Written by Jim Shooter
Penciled by Stephen ThompsonIf you hunt and kill a man, it’s murder, but what if it’s a robot with advanced artificial intelligence? To Magnus, that’s murder, too. The Metal Mob’s Capo Andronicus runs a “safari” racket patronized by the idle rich, who pay to track sentient Q-ROBs deep in the lawless Goph Lands. Tonight’s prey: Q-ROB Steelhammer. Even though Steelhammer is a blood-soaked human killer, Magnus cannot allow him to be hunted like an animal. Interfering with the hunt makes Magnus prey as well…dangerous game, indeed. Magnus confronts the Boss of all Bosses, Timur, in a battle for the ages!
Karate-chopping robots in the year 4000 A.D. is apparently good for exactly four issues in the current market. This is all we get for now — so is what we got any good? More after the jump.
And so Magnus: Robot Fighter, after managing just four issues in the space of almost exactly a year, goes “on hiatus.” The Gold Key Heroes line from Dark Horse has sputtered and struggled — even setting aside the enormous delays accompanying most of the books for whatever reason, it’s faced with a no-win scenario. On the one hand, it can’t count on the unnaturally loyal Valiant fanbase it may have been banking upon — Jim Shooter’s Valiant days are now twenty years behind us. Those fans have either moved on entirely, or will never be pleased by any revival of the franchises (as Eric Idle noted in the recent Monty Python documentary thing, when people say they want the Beatles back together, they don’t want a bunch of old men swaying on stage and singing the same old stuff — they just want to be young again). And on the other hand, well, this just isn’t a great time to relaunch a bunch of old Gold Key properties, especially if you manage four issues in twelve months.
Yet if there was ever a time for a property like Magnus: Robot Fighter to flourish, it’s now. Delivered with a bit more of a self-aware wink, it could be the sort of critical darling that… well, still probably wouldn’t sell very well, but it’d stand a chance of seizing an entirely new cult audience. Historically, Magnus: Robot Fighter is about a superman in a robot-controlled future where humans are kept lazy and docile because the robot overlords don’t trust them to do anything. Rebelling against this is Magnus, a man in a fishscale party dress (as was the fashion at the time) who was raised by a kindly old robot and taught how to murder other robots with steel-splitting karate chops. Magnus then roamed around the city spanning the entirety of North America, beating the crap out of corrupt a-hole robots. How is that not a viral Internet sensation in the current comics-community client?
Still, no use crying over spilt milk, or robot hydraulic fluid, or whatever. What we have are four issues of Magnus by probably the closest thing he has to a definitive author beyond his creator (Russ Manning), tweaked from the last iteration but recognizable enough. Shooter is as divisive a creator as could possibly exist, but he has a lot going for him, including an iron grip on the fundamentals of storytelling. The zeitgeist seems more skewed toward peaks and valleys, grand cosmic hypercompression and naturalistic Tarkovsky-paced decompression. Where he once slotted right into the pack, Shooter’s now sort of an anomaly, powering through his stories at a controlled, deliberate pace that’s neither particularly speedy nor all that leisurely. It’d be easy to dismiss him as a relic if he didn’t have the endurance of the model on his side. A lot of the current generation of writers (but by no means all of them) require a leap of faith on the part of the readers, at least initially; there’s an active sense of risk vs. reward, whereas with Shooter, his style is so dependable and his career so long-lived that we pretty much know what we’re going to get. I like that about him; others might not, but they can write their own columns.
On the first three issues, that quality of Shooter’s was well-matched by Bill Reinhold’s art. Reinhold’s drawings were not especially flashy, but the storytelling was always clear and the basics were covered: strange luxury, pretty women, and robots just featureless enough for us to not sit back and think too hard about how Magnus is essentially an AI serial killer. It’s been three months since #3, on which Reinhold grabbed an art assist from Mike Manley; it’s been six months since #2, the last one he drew fully. The ringer on #4 is Stephen Thompson, and based on this, perhaps he should have been called in from the start. While largely keeping to the same unfussy panel layouts as Reinhold, Thompson still manages to invest the story with more personality and, most importantly of all, more power. One of the reasons Russ Manning’s old Magnus stories still hold up is the way Manning composed his panels, using a minimum of distraction to convey swift, sometimes even ferocious action. Thompson is on the same edge here, but with more of a modern feel, coming off like a pupil of Carlos Pacheco (but with a better-matched inker than Pacheco usually gets these days).
What of the end product, though? Shooter and Thompson wrap up a story that’s ultimately not anything special — at least, not special enough to wait nearly a year to see its conclusion. Magnus has gone up against a human mob (a novel concept in this future world!) by fighting his way through their underground human-vs.-robot fight club, and now seeks to put them out of commission for good. It goes predictably enough, even the twists, but most importantly, it just doesn’t exploit the central concept of the series as much as it could and should. Pitting Magnus: Robot Fighter against a group of humans… well, it’s right there in the title, isn’t it? The political climate in America is so divisive right now that I almost wish the book had exploited that more — only in sci-fi can groups get away with being called “birthers” with a straight face.
So. Magnus: Robot Fighter, like the other Gold Key Heroes, now goes to fight robots in places we aren’t privy to, until the next time he emerges. All we can do now is play a game of coulda-woulda-shoulda with the four issues we got, compare them against the more successful and enduring runs that came before, and wonder if the lessons will be learned for the next go-round. Magnus: Robot Fighter is a hero for our times — we’ve only just now caught up to him, so it’s a shame that while we’re moving forward, he seems to have started lagging behind.
Final Verdict: 7.0 / Buy the TPB, because getting into the monthly series now is a bit foolish, isn’t it?
