Killdozer: Year One

Star Trek writer Theodore Sturgeon was the author of a short story titled Killdozer for a 1944 sci-fi pulp magazine that got its own cheesy made-for-television movie in 1974. However, the first adaptation was a segment in Ziff-Davis' Amazing Adventures comics by anonymous artists that spin the original idea of prehistoric radiation bringing a construction vehicle to life. An unnamed island in the middle of a lake sees scientist Mark Dane for some reason planning to gift a bulldozer with artificial intelligence. His fiance Wendy and assistant Ralph question Mark's sanity in a big spat which calls of the wedding. The bulldozer mysteriously switches itself on that Mark takes advantage of by coning the machine into bumping off his ex-girlfriend and her new beau. What follows is Wendy and Ralph spending the next four pages in their various attempts to escape the treaded terminator as it trashes a dump truck and wins a duel with a steam shovel. The young lovers make their way to the top of an anchorage over a death-defying drop as Mark hitches on top of the bulldozer as if it were a kiddy ride. Ralph manages to lure the mechanized monster into some power lines where he electrocutes it along with its mad maker. The ex-fiance comments that he loved his bulldozer more than he loved life, which makes you wonder what sick sexual fantasies Mark had in mind for his sentient destroyer. Like a big budget Twilight Zone episode, The Steel Monster was a cryptic addition to an anthology centered mostly on outer space adventures.