Here's something rather interesting to serve as my graphic novel for the month. On one hand, it's ridiculously pulpy sci-fi schlock, far closer to the rayguns and bug eyed monsters of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon than anything published during the golden age of science fiction which predated it. On the other, it's a shockingly topical look at what happens when we abdicate too much control to artificial intelligence. Magnus may fight robots in the distant future but he's not a luddite. To him, machines are fine and dandy, but when we put robots in charge, Bad Things Happen. And that has an obvious analogue to what's happening right now with AI.

What I'm reading is the first of three hardback volumes from Dark Horse that collate the original run of 'Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.', beginning in 1963. Russ Manning's name appears above the title on the cover and there's an "Art by Russ Manning" credit on the title page, but he isn't the only creative force involved. Sure, he created Magnus and drew everything, but he didn't pen as much of it as I remembered. There are seven stories here and he wrote two of them solo, with a third in collaboration with Robert Schaefer and Eric Freiwald, who wrote the rest. That suggests I should criticise all three for their backward look at the future but praise Manning for his ideas on top of his artwork.

Talking of artwork, he draws simple and effective panels that are so clean that they're reminiscent of newspaper comic strips as much as golden age comic books. Everything's colour, but the colours are always blocked rather than shaded, playing into that simple but effective approach. However, in between individual stories, one per original Gold Key comic book, there are paintings of scenes to come and they're absolutely sumptuous, far more comparable to someone like Don Lawrence of 'Trigan Empire' fame. A couple seem to be blown up from individual panels, but the rest are worth framing and mounting on a wall.

As to content, I love his designs, especially of robots, which are gloriously old school. Those aren't robots from the sixties, they're robots from the thirties with staccato voices that are hyphenated because-I-guess-they-all-sound-like-Daleks. Magnus looks like the all-American male stereotype, distilled down far enough to work as both an object of lust for teenage girls and a man they could bring home to meet the parents, who would admire his masculinity in a thoroughly different way. He's a natural hero for 1963 and he's the only hero 4000 AD has, it seems, given that the senate in nominal charge call on him every time anything bad happens; rather like Batman in Gotham City, even if they never put up a Magnus Signal.

The clothes are fascinating, not least because nobody ever gets changed. These seven stories are all self-contained, with only a general series progression between them, so they don't happen at the same time and there could be serious gaps in time between them, but everyone has precisely one outfit and that's it. Magnus's is a close fitting one piece shirt and shorts combo that gives an impression of being a tunic and kilt because of how generously it's cut around the shoulders. His girlfriend Leeja Clane's dress is an elegant affair, thick opaque black all the way down to where it teasingly turns transparent. Her father, a senator, and his colleagues wear robes that remind of authority figures in 'Judge Dredd'.

One more note before I talk about story and that's that I've read this before and remembered it as being a lot of fun, but very much in that outrageous Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon style. What I completely failed to notice last time through, a decade or two ago, was the thematic connection to Doc Savage.

For one, while Manning apparently pitched Magnus as Tarzan in the future, he became something a little different. Just like Doc, Magnus was trained from birth to be able to dedicate his life to the task at hand, here taking on robots who break Asimov's Laws of Robotics, quoted on the very first page, and go rogue; typically on a grand scale like trying to take over the world or destroy all the humans. Ironically, he's trained by a robot, 1A. Like Doc, he's physically stronger, so able to break metal robots apart with his bare hands, and he clearly loves the thrill of adventure. Also, Doc was a superhero who didn't have any superpowers and Magnus follows suit, his only superpower (if it counts) the ability to hear and understand robot communications. Maybe that's training too.

If that wasn't enough, Magnus can cure villains of the criminal tendencies that drive them, just as Doc does through similar means at his secret upstate New York clinic, as per this speech bubble:

"He mustn't die! The human race needs his genius! With psycho-care we could change his social behavior pattern so he will work for the good of mankind!"

Of course, Doc Savage was confined to the thirties and forties and Magnus is a couple of millennia forward. In 4000 A.D., all of North America is populated, so densely that it's a single city, NorthAm by name. With nowhere left to grow food or raise animals, that happens on the ocean floor in the food processing labs that feed the continent. And mankind, having invented robots, doesn't do a heck of a lot of anything anymore. There is a human senate but it seems pretty ineffective, given how often crises happen with only Magnus able to solve them. Instead we depend on robots to be the police (pol-robs), the armed forces (defense-robs), healthcare (medic-robs) and so on.

For the most part that works, but Manning and his colleagues conjure up reason after reason for it to go horribly wrong, for robots to go bad, either on their own or at the direction of a succession of humans with deadly grudges or megalomaniacal tendencies, even one who wants to become a robot himself. Crucially, rogue robots are always more able than every other robot, so it wouldn't make any sense to have robots fix robot problems. Instead, there's Magnus, which makes his very existence rather fortuitous. If A-1 hadn't trained him for this particular mission, then humanity in 4000 A.D. would fail, if not in this issue then in the next. While Doc Savage always saved the day, as pulp heroes tended to, I rarely got the impression that the world would end if he wasn't in it.

I'd love to read the rest of Magnus's original run, but I don't have the other two collected volumes. While I can roll my eyes at how retro this future is, with gloriously goofy-looking robots (the rogue robots rarely change design to eliminate the flaws he so often exploits) and a complete absence of anything digital, I love how topical this feels right now, because what used to be an idea in science fiction has become our reality. The first story, with pol-rob chief H8 (I kid you not) as the villain of the week, reminds of RoboCop, which wouldn't arrive for a quarter of a century.

Lumped together, a common thread of mistrust runs through everything. Magnus fights the rogue robots but, from the very outset, he doesn't like the fact that "People do nothing for themselves! Robots wait on them... build for them... even think for them! Man doesn't even have to entertain himself! Man is becoming a race of weaklings... able only to play and watch TV!" That's in the very first issue, which dips far deeper into this idea than anything later. Here, other characters resist a robot-dominated world too: kids read a book that a robot tells them is forbidden (albeit for their own good) and Leeja Clane's first action is to speed on a futuristic motorway. Unfortunately, once that story's done, we shift to rogue villain of the week territory and the philosophy bleeds away.

Complaining about couch potatoes was science fiction in 1963, but it's a reality sixty-years on and everything that's happened since the internet revolution only adds to that. Of course, back then, Manning wasn't writing about ChatGPT, unboxing videos and generative AI, but his approach still speaks to them all. I have a feeling that 'Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.' is somehow going to be visually less accurate with every year that passes but thematically more so. That's wild. ~~ Hal C F Astell