BURIED TREASURE | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Mar10

BURIED TREASURE: The Bronze Age Lives of MACHINE MAN

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 10, 2026

BURIED TREASURE: The Bronze Age Lives of MACHINE MAN

From Kirby to Windsor-Smith… By PETER STONE In the mid-1970s, seven or eight years after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marvel Comics acquired the rights to the Stanley Kubrick epic. Jack Kirby adapted it in 1976 but didn’t want to follow the film exactly, so he was given free rein to frame the general story using the novel and an earlier version of the screenplay. HAL’s dialogue was more colloquial, and the main characters were more emotional. Then, despite Kirby’s reluctance to keep working on the project, he continued with a regular series that he designed, wrote, and pencilled. The premise was to search for the origins of the Monolith. The story continues in the Kirby fashion until Issue #8, when a character named Mister Machine, or X-51, becomes a major part of it. A doctor named Abel Stack saves X-51 from furious androids who have gained sentience and are attempting a revolt. Stack is later killed trying to remove an auto-destruct mechanism from X-51, and the android soon encounters the Monolith, allowing him to transcend his robot programming and begin to assimilate with humanity. He takes the name Aaron Stack and is known as Mister Machine until getting his own series, Machine Man, in 1978. (The name change was necessary because there was a toy called Mister Machine.) Kirby’s Machine Man series only lasted nine issues, but it was revived less than a year later by Marv Wolfman and Steve Ditko and ran for another 10 installments. The series has a cult following and served to integrate the character into the mainstream Marvel Universe, but Machine Man himself really bloomed several years later with a four-issue miniseries. The 1984 Machine Man featured a story by Tom DeFalco, rough layouts Herb Trimpe, and spectacular finishes and coloring by Barry Windsor-Smith. DeFalco tells a simple (and, yes, perhaps cliched) story of a collection of scavengers fighting to survive in a brutal, future robotic landscape ruled by one of Machine Man’s old villains. Trimpe was a workhorse whose best-known character was the Hulk. In the case of Machine Man, he seemed so busy with other titles and covers that he only provided the breakdowns for this four-issue series. Enter Windsor-Smith, best known for his epic run on Conan the Barbarian from 1970 to 1973 and one of the most...

Jan25

(Not Exactly) BURIED TREASURE: Waid and Hitch’s THE LAST DAYS OF LEX LUTHOR

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Jan 25, 2026

(Not Exactly) BURIED TREASURE: Waid and Hitch’s THE LAST DAYS OF LEX LUTHOR

A project that has not received the credit it’s due — and a few comments about working with Neal Adams… By PETER STONE Working with and for Neal Adams for over 30 years had a definite impact on how I viewed comic books. Neal, being one of the best and most influential artists in the history of the medium, had very intense beliefs about what made a good comic. Based on the structure of Continuity, Neal and I ended up working in the same room, where I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. Neal taught me to appreciate well-drawn adventure comic strips, the stories behind some of them, and the history of how and why they came to a grim ending. He taught me about Alex Raymond, Stan Drake, Alex Kotsky, Milton Caniff, Will Eisner and his studio, Wally Wood and HIS studio, Carl Barks and his world of ducks, Al Williamson, and Jack Kirby. Neal taught me that comics were a visual medium. The art was more important than anything else. The writing was the “icing on the cake” he said. I, however, grew up in the 1980s with the stories of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, John Byrne, Chris Claremont, and Marv Wolfman. Miracleman, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns, The X-Men, and The New Teen Titans were my superhero fare. The writers were getting better and better. In some cases, the artwork became secondary to the concepts and dialogue being generated by these intelligent young men. There were the artists Neal loved in the ’60s and ’70s, and the ’80s was my time period. Finally, we could talk about the new artists coming up. One of them was Bryan Hitch, a British artist who we noticed drawing Death’s Head from Marvel UK in the late ’80s. Hitch, artistically speaking, moved to the U.S., and drew all sorts of series for Marvel, DC, CrossGen, and even Valiant. Then, despite his tardiness, he became a superstar when he worked with Mark Millar on Marvel’s The Ultimates. Concepts introduced in this alternate version of the Avengers appeared all over the screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bryan Hitch, for example, was the artist who drew Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Hitch and his most common inker, Paul Neary, had altered...

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