My Robot Brain needs beer..

One of my favourite characters is Machine Man, a character from Marvel Comics. A riff on the Pinocchio story, X51 is a cyborg that becomes sentient and carves out a secret identity as Aaron Stack. His earlier exploits were drawn by the big guys at Marvel, Jack (The King) Kirby and Steve (Sturdy) Ditko. Kirby called him “the robot with a soul.” As a kid I used to read Transformers weekly which had MM as a back-up strip.

When the story arc finished, Marvel UK wisely choose to reprint Machine Man 2020. It was such an under rated comic which had artwork by the great Barry Windsor Smith. Smith’s attention-to-detail art was much needed for a 20^th century robot in the future. I bought it as a set for a friend for a birthday present but I wish I’d have kept now. Machine Man has made a comeback in books such as Earth X, Nextwave and Marvel Zombies. In Nextwave, writer Warren Elis played up the comedic aspect of the robot. It’s probably the most offbeat comic I’ve ever read and it had me in stitches!

Marvel Toys or even Hasbro haven’t done a figure of Mr Stack yet, so I decided to get a friend to do a custom figure of how MM used to look back in the day, although he doesn’t have the extending arms that are part of his abilities, instead he’s come with some nifty accessories which I’m quite pleased with.I’ve taken some pictures of Machine Man as he would say, in his “fleshy glory.”