OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)
By:
June 20, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
MR. MACHINE | JACK KIRBY | 1977
In 1977, when I was 15, I bought my comics at the local Big V drugstore. This was a fraught enterprise since newsstand distribution of comics then was very spotty. Sometimes new issues just never showed up. This was a blow if you were reading, say SKULL THE SLAYER issue 3 and when next issue finally showed up it was issue 5. There were no comic shop back-issue bins in those dark ages. Still, the Big V was all you had — so you just had to live with it.
It was via this distribution glitch that I first set eyes on one of Jack Kirby’s late creations, Mr. Machine. On my weekly visit I spotted an unknown title on the comics rack: 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also noted, in horror, that this was issue no. 9. Number 9!! Where did the first 8 issues go (clearly not to the Big V)?
I read a lot of comics as a kid— most have vanished from memory. But I’ll never forget the shocking potency of the first panel of issue nine. I didn’t know it when I opened the comic but this was part two of a story. I was coming in right in the middle of the action. And what a middle. Here, in full page, was a grim, skull-faced robot, drawn with almost psychedelic Kirby intensity, staring down the reader. Kirby’s drawings of this era are so strong they feel carved in stone. Monumental shapes. Great swashes of black ink spread across the page. His trademark machine circuitry visually reading like a hieroglyphic language. Powerful stuff. Straight down the optic nerve.
And the robot’s dialogue on that page — just as memorable. I quote: “I’ve been hunted, fired upon, and thrown into this maximum security cell! But — the weapons system in these fingers shall avenge this greatest indignity of all — THE REMOVAL OF MY FACE.”
From here, a non-stop battle as he brutally fights his way through platoons of army men to win back his stolen (human) face. The whole issue is a kind of epic treatise (with fisticuffs and laser beams) on the meaning of personal identity. Who are you without your name or without your face? Our robot, Aaron, has been reduced to a number: X-51. Later he regains his face and later still he takes a new name, a superhero name: Mr. Machine.
Maybe this all sounds trite to you. It certainly didn’t to 15-year-old me. This was deep stuff. In fact, for some time, I’ve used a phrase about Kirby’s work in this era: “teenage profundity”. It’s not a put-down, just the opposite. Kirby had the ability to totally excite your adolescence sense of the bigness of things (Osama Tezuka has this quality too, I think). Kirby was all about wonder.
Years later I finally got those earlier issues of 2001 and read the first part of the story. It was a good issue, all about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Kirby’s sympathies were entirely with the machines (mine too). It was a good set-up for issue 9 but it couldn’t compete with the impact of seeing, so long ago, that searing image of a lost soul (not unlike Munch’s Scream), in righteous anger, demanding the return of his face.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
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