The Metal Monster That Never Gets Used

Maple Leaf Publishing was a Canadian publisher of comics in the early 1940s. They mainly sustained themselves in mixed bag anthologies like Rocket Comics which featured the comedic Callahan The Detective, the struggling survivor Poppy, the strange science of Cosmo And His White Magic, professional pilot Mono The Air Cobra, and the mideval Shazam ripoff of The Black Knight. A particularly peculiar installment by the creator known as Velper was The Metal Monster, a giant robot created by a mad scientist, but two good guys managed to end the inventor's scheme and claim the mighty mecha for themselves. After the scientist is done away with, the do-gooder duo of Tom Masters and Sid Stacy used the Metal Monster to go on their own personal crusade against evil. One of their adventures barely had the robot in it at all. The whole story from Volume 2, Issue 5 dealt only with the convicted criminal of Killer Kurtz who is about to be hung for his crimes after Tom and Sid put him away in a prior story with their colossal clockwork. Kurtz miraculously fakes his hanging, busts out of prison, and blows up a building to show his evil intentions. Kurtz then busts into Tom and Sid's place, ties them up at gunpoint, plants a bomb that will go off in half an hour, and leaves them alone not actually witnessing them dying to assume it all went to plan. Kurtz makes his escape in a plane that Tom and Sid happened to have just lying around outside their office, but Tom manages to operate the Metal Monster's controls with his teeth while still being tied up and uses it to crush Kurtz in their expensive plane. Out of the whole 8-page story, the titular character only shows up for an opening splash page, and then two panels right at the end as he just runs headlong into an oncoming aircraft. This is why giant robots like the facetiously named Bozo didn't see much action in the Golden Age. It took Japanese manga creators like Mitsuteru Yokoyama to dream up more iconic mecha like Gigantor during the Silver Age to have them gain any real acceptance.

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